Massively^™

Can't keep up on all of the news from Outland? That's okay, because WoW Insider has your back, keeping up with all the news from World of Warcraft so you don't have to. The biggest game news of the day could be summed up with a single story: Blizzard's new advertising campaign, featuring William Shatner and Mr. T, has all of the forums abuzz. (What can I say? We're an easily amused lot!) But Shatner's class choice isn't the only interesting thing happening! Also on WoW Insider:

• WoW Insider's weekly comic, /silly, asks all the hard questions. For example, "Why are they called Voidwalkers, when don't have any legs?"
• For a week in review without all of that pesky reading required, listen to episode 12 of the WoW Insider Show -- now available for download from WoW Radio and iTunes.
• Chances are you didn't know about the many dangers of Warcraft before reading this comic.
• This week's Build Shop covers a combat/mutilate spec for rogues.
• Have you been wondering why Zul'Aman gear for tanks has such low defense?
• In case you don't get enough drama in your day-to-day existance, GuildWatch is here every week to bring you the latest on all of the guild drama that can fit in a post.

Today, our discussion topic is: When it comes to MMO groups, are you a leader or a follower?

To tell the truth, I kind of prefer being a follower, especially when I'm first starting out in a new MMO. I want to let others lead the way, hang back, and reap the benefits of being part of a group without actually pouring all the work in to keep it going.

But eventually, my personality (yeah, I'm bossy) and my desire to actually do group things usually turns me into a leader, whether I like it or not. When I want to participate in a group activity, and no one else is around to lead it, I kind of fall into the de facto leader position (and sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't, but that's a discussion for another day).

So when you're logging into your favorite MMO for the day, are you stepping into a leader role or a that of a follower? Are you up at the head of the pack or somewhere back near the middle? Are you leading your own guild or just kind of showing up when someone asks you to join a group?

Tuesday was full of unanticipated crashes, bugs and problems across the multiverse well as some anticipated downtime. We certainly hope you didn't skip work to get some play time in, as even the highly anticipated FFXI expansion was delayed. However, it wasn't all bad, as yesterday brought the above video to light -- and the idea of William Shatner playing a Tauren Shaman warms the cockles of our hearts. (Although you'd think Blizzard could have at least given him the donut shoulders to go with the Dungeon Set 1 he's got on.)

Features

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• One Shots: Only you can prevent Guild Wars fires
• Cinemassively: Hat vs. Barnaby
• The Daily Grind: Platform wars

General news

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• Vanguard bonus xp week on now!
• The Guild Wars scribe offers events preview
• DC Online to get Crackdown AI
• Warrior Epic developer sits down for a chat
• The Escapist explains how your guild can avoid a "failure cascade"
• ASU testing Snow Crash for Google?
• CCP launches official Trinity website
• Legends of Norrath TCG Thanksgiving Tournament Marathon Weekend
• Warhammer beta update - part III
• Star Wars Galaxies patched to 7.2, 54 month vet awards added
• Game mechanics: Crafting deities
• Zhengtu Online holds 1 million concurrent users

IAHGames have just announced that they will be going ahead with plans to patch Hellgate: London with Patch 0 and Patch 0.1 in just a few hours, starting at 9AM Thursday, Hong Kong time.

The whole maintenance process (if all goes well) will take 10 hours, and will run until 5PM Hong Kong time. This will be the first time the servers have run post-beta code, and while we've been assured that Flagship Studios have found a way to convert the characters in the Asia-Pacific region to the production system, we're really not certain what the results will be, exactly.

Yesterday in Second Life there was:

• 15,378 new signups bringing the total to 11,003,346 signups. The 11 millionth signup took place at approximately 2:10PM.
• A peak concurrency of 52,654 at 2:20PM, and a minimum concurrency of 20,093 at 5:35PM. Median concurrency for the day was 40,466.
• The Grid Stability Index for the day was 48.04 (lower is better).
• The grid was functionally inoperable for a couple of chunks of the day. Not quite inoperable enough to be called down, but you can push a car down the street with effort when it's broken down. That doesn't make things easy or pleasant.

Since the outage early in the evening, there are signs of increased stability. It's too early to call a trend but it looks promising. We're coming up to what's increasingly becoming known as 'the witching hour' for Linden Lab's servers, so we'll wait and see.

Yesterday in Second Life we:

• Spent US$1,067,000 at an exchange rate of L$269.8 to US$1
• Exchanged US$178,000 at an average of US$7,400.0 per hour.
• Market buys were US$121,000
• Market sales were US$56,000
• Limit-limit buys were US$600
• The busiest time was at 2pm when about US$12,000 was exchanged.
• The quietest time was 7pm when about US$2,000 was exchanged.

[via Second Life datafeeds]

In World of Warcraft average prices [via wowecon.com] for key materials are:

Commodity	Price
Stack of Netherweave	3 g 16 s
Primal Air	25 g 0 s
Primal Earth	3 g 88 s
Primal Fire	22 g 80 s
Primal Life	9 g 50 s
Primal Mana	17 g 0 s
Primal Might	89 g 95 s
Primal Shadow	15 g 0 s
Primal Water	18 g 50 s
Stack of Thick Clefthoof Leather	63 g 40 s

Each week, Robin Torres contributes Gamer Interrupted, a column about balancing real life with MMOs.

I aim to please. So, by popular demand, this week's column is about getting your wife or live-in girlfriend to enjoy playing MMOs with you. This advice will only apply to women who are non-gamers. Turning your WoW-playing wife into an EVE Online player requires a completely different strategy. And getting guys to play video games has historically been an easier task. Also, this is directed toward those who are sharing the same living space and expenses because you may not want to be spending a grand or more on outfitting the girl who turns out to be the one before you meet Ms. Right.

HiPiHi (pronounced High-pee-high, for those of you that are curious) is gearing up towards a launch by pulling in partners. P&G are already on board, and Intel are gearing up to launch the "Intel Experience Center" on 160,000 square metres of HiPiHi land on 22 November (considering that HiPiHi is in China - you can take your pick about which day 22 November actually is).

Chinese-based HiPiHi has been both criticized and praised in the media for it's uncanny resemblance to Second Life - from the feel of their website, to their avatars, stock animations, creation tools and business model.

Destination Games have been talking quite a bit recently about what's to come in Tabula Rasa, but the main focus is on ... giant robots! TenTonHammer have a sneak peek up, talking to Starr Long, discussing the Personal Armor Units -- no screenshots or concept art, unfortunately, but there's decent descriptions.

Personal Armor Units, as they're known, are TR's version of mounts. The names of five are known so far -- Angel, Ghoul, Grendel, Shiva, and Spectre. According to Paul Sage, Lead Designer of TR, you'll get access to your PAU at level 40. All we know so far is that Grendel is Grenadier only, Spectre seems to be Spy only, and that you can fight in them. These ain't no horses!

There's some details about other end-game content in TR, though whether that will come in the same update as PAUs is anyone's guess.

The Lord of the Rings Online forum regular Rainwhisper embarked on an ambitious project to put together a website that would catalog floor plans, decorations, and ambient music for LotRO housing. With the help of fellow players on the forums, Rainwhisper succeeded!

The site is hosted by the Dawnsong Explorers kinship of the Windfola server. It's an excellent resource. There's a spreadsheet-style list of all the housing items that players can make or acquire. There are floor plans for the different types of houses. You can also check out pictures of the decorations. As far as we can tell the site's listings are complete or very close to it.

Rainwhisper and any other contributors will have quite a bit more work on their hands when Book 12 comes out but if their success with the site so far is any indication, that won't be a problem!

Things settled down considerably after this-morning's breakage on the Second Life grid, but apparently it was too good to last.

Statistical data feeds went dark at 4:40PM SLT (US Pacific) today, and at approximately the same time DNS problems screwed up logins, teleports, region crossings, and actually just about everything crossing simulator boundaries. Linden Lab's ops team is trying to get everything fixed, but everything DNS-related has some settling lead-time.

Carn Dûm -- the seat of evil in western Middle-earth. 'Twas in this fortress that the Witch-king of Angmar reigned as an oppressor of men, elves, dwarves, and hobbits alike until he was chased off by two heroes. It's home to evil men, orcs, trolls, and some evils that do not sleep. In other words, it's awesome, and you can read all about it in Turbine's new official Lorebook entry.

Carn Dûm is one of the places that Turbine has expanded beyond what was contained in the books. While Angmar (of which Carn Dûm is a part) was, as the entry says, "only mentioned in passing in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings," Turbine has filled in the gaps with their own bits of gameplay and lore in The Lord of the Rings Online. The entry also utilizes the Google-based map of Middle-earth that Jeffrey Steefel was talking about in the Ten Ton Hammer interview we covered yesterday.

The Warcry Network recently had a chance to ask Pirates of the Burning Sea lead designer Kevin Maginn a round of questions about the upcoming Jack-Sparrow-simulator. The interviewer poses queries about launching with both land and ship aspects already in-game (as opposed to a game like EVE which is only now looking to add land-based play), system requirements for the masses, the beta and stress test processes, population balancing and the user interface.

Of most interest is the question on populations, regarding the different factions in the game. Players can choose to be English, Spanish, French, or the swashbucklin' Pirate. Maginn notes that, during various phases of the beta, the numbers have remained roughly the same -- 35% choose Pirates, nearly as many choose the English, and then the French and Spanish each take 15%. On this he says, "we are working on some population balancing tools, with two goals: make the game more fair if your nation is underpopulated, and make underpopulated nations more appealing, particularly to large PvP guilds".

If the incentives for one race are good enough, it might swing the population the other way entirely. We'll have to wait and see what countermeasures will be employed before the game releases, as the difference in numbers so far sounds fairly staggering.

While we enjoyed speaking with the Final Fantasy XI dev team regarding the MMO and its latest expansion, Wings of the Goddess, that was certainly not all that took place during the Final Fantasy XI Fan Festival 2007 in Anaheim, CA. From seeing planner Kenichi Iwao in a samurai helmet to rubbing elbows with more cosplayers than I care to admit, this past weekend's event was certainly a memorable experience, and we have the pictures here to prove it. Our thanks to event attendee Johnathan Perkins for the above pose, which had us rolling.

Mithra tail-grabbing antics aside, other highlights include a costume contest that saw an attendee dressed as the venerable Cid taking first prize, as well as an eclectic concert featuring both North American video game cover band The Smash Bros. and The Star Onion's own Kumi Tanioka. Click through to feel as if you were there, one frame at a time.

Supporting the theory that the world should know more about the CoX universe, you'll soon be able to configure the game client to display or hide certain information on the web. It is a bit convoluted, however, so please be sure to note the information contained in the official forums.

In the Miscellaneous section under the General tab (Menu > General), you will have the option of hiding your Statistics, Powers, Badges, and Friends list from inclusion on the public web page. If you choose to show them, leave each option disabled; however, if you wish to show them, enable the option. If you're a private person, simply enable the Statistics option, and all other options will automatically be hidden. One other thing: unlike graphic settings, these options are configured on a per-character basis, so if you want everything hidden, you'll need to properly configure each character you have on each server. The only caveat to this is if your character has not been logged in for at least 90 days: at that cut-off point, all options are hidden.

Although a final go-live date for this feature has not been announced, it's planned for a relatively short lead time. There will be more information available in the official forum as the release date approaches; and, as always, if you have any issues, concerns, or comments, NCsoft wants to hear from you in the discussion thread.