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At least a few people will be confused when opening their Age of Conan patcher to see that there is some downtime scheduled for today, after having the now-weekly patch take place yesterday. Today's downtime could be considered an "emergency patch" of sorts, as it is intended to correct an issue that arose from yesterday's update.

The offending bug causes certain socketed items to lose their sockets -- we are assured, however, that any socketed gems are still intact, and will reappear when the problem is fixed. The blanket figure of "5 hours" has been given for the downtime, which will commence at 7AM EDT on US servers, but community manager Famine has stated that it will likely be closer to 1 or 2 hours. The patch has already been deployed to the European servers, and their downtime was roughly 3 and a half hours going by this thread.

EVEMon, EVE Fitting Tool, and other essential programs that benefit from the EVE API platform were offline yesterday while EVE Online's Tranquility server transited over to the new Empyrean Age 1.0.1 build. With more pilots than ever participating in Empyrean Age's factional warfare, CCP has also enhanced the EVE API so players have more functionality to help track and report on the state of the war.

The factional warfare data is only calculated on the Tranquility server once a day during downtime, but will cache every hour to make sure that new data is available in the API. Official API documentation isn't included for the new stat-tracking improvements but the regular documentation is online. CCP is also planning long term development and support for the API including a test server with reduced cache times. The EVE Online developers have given players quite the toolbox to work with, and some tools are already benefiting from these changes like EVEAI.Live.

The full list of API improvements and changes are listed after the click through below.

While it initially seemed like good news that FunCom were patching twice a week, and thus doing their best to nail the wheels back on the Age of Conan wagon as it bumped unsteadily down the trail, it didn't work out quite so well in practice. The frenetic pace of updates has meant that new bugs got added even as old ones got found and fixed, and the recent calamity in which a patch had to be rolled back altogether has possibly convinced FunCom that fewer, more rigorously tested updates are preferable.

The additional testing, as we've mentioned, comes with the opening of the new TestLive server. Patches will also be slowed to the rate of one a week; Wednesdays will be the day to watch out for new updates. These two measures ought to make the unfolding progress of Age of Conan much smoother. Of course, FunCom also need to deliver a balanced, fun game as well as a bug-free one. There's a lot more subjectivity involved in that assessment. We've seen some exciting-looking announcments for the game's future; now we just have to see if they can deliver.

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Funcom showed some symptoms of growing pains yesterday, as the anxiously anticipated patch for Age of Conan, which promised to bring many important bug fixes, failed to get off the ground until around 7pm EST instead of 12pm EST, as originally scheduled. It's not entirely abnormal for players to clamber about receiving compensation for lost time in situations like these, but it is somewhat rare when a company actually follows through on this expectation.

Much to our surprise, Funcom offered an official apology for the delays yesterday, and have granted all active accounts an additional day of play-time to compensate for the outage. We doubt this will quell the steady drumbeat of players who are dissatisfied with the Age of Conan experience, but then, what will?

Since the European version of Age of Conan updates ahead of the US, they have already patched and their servers are back online... well, sort of. It turns out that today's patch has caused some server instability, leading to constant crashing and disconnects. In order to prevent this from being introduced to the US servers, the patch downtime has been postponed. It is unknown at the moment when the downtime will be able to go ahead.

Update: The US servers will come down at 9AM EDT.

Linden Lab is staging a rolling restart of Second Life servers, which started this evening, and will continue tomorrow (Wednesday) between 5AM and 9AM and again between 5AM and 9AM on Thursday to complete the deployment. (All times in US Pacific)

There are no listed changes for this rollout, which experience tells us mean that all the changes are security/exploit fixes. Some users are a mite testy with the lack of advance warning. Prospero Linden says that advance notice of the rolling restart was posted as early as last week, but in practice it actually got only the most minor of mentions from the release team and is easily missed without a careful search.

Weekend warriors of the Hyborean variety may have to look into another extra-curricular this Sunday, as the Age of Conan login servers appear to be experiencing some troubles. Players reported serious lag spikes late this morning, developing into an all-out server downage. This blogger is currently unable to get back through the character login servers. Says Funcom Community Manager Famine, "It looks to be something externally right now but the operations guys are looking at it."

Instead of rickrolling the official forums like many other players seem to be doing, might we recommend taking this as an opportunity to mow the lawn or walk the dog? Or if the outdoors isn't your thing, how about reading through our backlog of Age of Conan coverage?

[Update: It appears the servers are back online. If we had known simply posting about the outage would bring them back up, we'd have done it much sooner!]

The Pirates of the Burning Sea official site has announced that, to help with some ongoing issues, all servers will be subject to a regularly scheduled service downtime. This downtime will occur twice a week, and should only be a server restart, meaning you can log back on and resume looting and plundering within about 20 minutes if all goes well.

So far, we know that the downtimes will take place on Tuesdays and Fridays at 8:30AM GMT for North American and European servers -- times for the Australian server will be listed shortly. It has been said that the restarts can be moved around a bit to accommodate Port Battles, which is a very nice touch and shows quite a level of involvement from Flying Lab Software on a server-specific basis. They hope that the regular restart situation will be temporary, but it's good to see that they will try to soften the blow in the meantime.

Most players are already well accustomed to Age of Conan's scheduled updates, (especially those of us that get them during prime time), but you will still be able to log in today. According to a post on the official European forums, there won't be a patch, and the servers are still up at this time.

The reason given is that the developers wanted to get more fixes done before having a whole new patch pushed to the live servers, so hopefully this means the next update will be packed full of goodness. The next patch will most likely conform to the schedule once more, which means that it would take place this Monday.

Ever since Linage II began allowing server transfers there has been a shift in server populations that was leaving some communities worried. This has prompted NCsoft to announce the merging of a few servers on July 8th to bolster their overall population and ease the growing fears some players were beginning to have about the future of their digital homelands.

Population is of course an important issue for any MMO and server merges can sometimes be seen as a bad thing by onlookers. However, NCsoft is assuring everyone that this choice was made purely to maintain healthy communities, something that is arguably one of the most important aspects to an online game.

We're also happy to see that NCsoft is covering all their bases and has made an official forum post covering all the important topics about the server merges. If your concerns aren't met by the current forum post don't worry too much. NCsoft has vowed to answer any concerns or inquiries regarding the merges over the coming weeks.

[via WarCry]

Curse.com has posted a list of patch notes from Age of Conan's test server, which will likely go live in one of this coming week's scheduled downtime slots. You will notice that stat gains from equipment will finally be functioning correctly, and it's going to be interesting to see just how much of a difference this will make to the strength of each class.

The patch notes also feature another round of class tweaks, notably some buffs for Dark Templars and damage changes for Priests of Mitra. Confusingly, Bear Shamans will be getting improved Wreck Armor combo visuals and sounds -- however, this is a Barbarian combo, so is this change actually for Barbs or did they mean the BS combo Crush Armor? Other really good things: lower level mobs will knock you off your mount a lot less (although higher mobs will do it more) and attackers at your sides will have half the chance of knocking you off -- attackers from the front will never knock you off. Finally, player cities will be able to get their Trader NPC at last. Take a look through the full patch notes for some other changes, including quest and item fixes, and perhaps start speculating on what changes will be left off the list this time.

Continuing with their policy of frequent medium-sized patches instead of intermittent colossal ones, FunCom are bringing a welcome new patch to the AoC servers today. As well as the all-important 'more client and server crashes resolved' and a host of alterations such as a sound effect for levelling up (what's a ding without a ding?) and fixes to quests, there are significant changes to Demonologists that should make the class more balanced.

Many spells have had their damage buffed, their casting time reduced, or their splash damage increased. The hated cooldown for wide-scale Area of Effect damage spells, Inferno of Amher and Shockblast, has even been shaved back down.

Your Tempest of Set has been set down and your Dark Templar's gone dark. You've really gotten into this whole Conan thing but the Age of Conan servers are down for maintenance. Now what are you going to do? Well, you're sitting at your computer so you could check out the wealth of online forums, fansites, wikis, whatever, that are devoted to the game. But if you really want to dig into Conan and his world you're in luck because there has never been a better time to immerse yourself in Hyboria.

Of course, the best way to learn about Conan is to read the stories written by Robert E. Howard. Howard completed 21 Conan stories between 1932 and his suicide in 1936. Although his writing style may sound somewhat stilted and some of the cultural attitudes about women and non-Europeans prevalent when he lived may be offensive to the modern reader, his work holds up remarkably well. Howard was an exceptionally evocative and imaginative writer with a marked ability to bring his extravagant settings to life. There's a reason why the creation of a pulp fiction author living in a small rural Texas town has not only survived for decades but has become so well known that it's the basis for a best-selling MMO from a game company based in Norway. The original Conan stories are well written and exciting. The problem has been finding them.

At present, very little on the Second Life grid is working. At 2:20AM SLT (US Pacific time) with 30,818 users online, a severe network failure at one of Linden Lab's Internet Service Providers (finger points to Level 3), has largely cut access to the San Francisco data-center (one of three such facilities in the USA where Second Life servers reside). The network failure is not complete, so there are moments where everything almost works for short periods.

While an outage or communications problem at any data center or between any pair of them causes significant problems for Linden Lab's virtual world grid, the San Francisco center appears to be far more important to effective grid functions than the other two. As yet there is no estimated time to restoration, but users are advised to do nothing with money or inventory in the meantime, and are unlikely to be able to travel. Instant messages may also experience significant problems.

Update: (5:05AM SLT) Linden Lab reports this as resolved, but warns things will be slow as the systems recover.

Update: (6:50AM SLT) Everything seems to be falling apart again. It appears to be for much the same reason.

Update: (7:05AM SLT) As noted below, logins were closed at 7:05AM.

Update: (9:00AM SLT) Logins still remain closed, and the network provider is still working on restoring function.

Update: (9:30AM SLT) Logins are open, but very slow.

Update: (10:00AM SLT) Linden Lab reports this as resolved. Again.

Jon Wood from MMORPG.com recently interviewed Funcom's Product Director Jorgen Tharaldsen about some of the issues affecting gameplay in Age of Conan. The interview was primarily focused on customer service issues, and hopefully provides a good indicator as to how things are improving in AoC. Some of the key issues that Tharaldsen addressed include:

• Customer support frustrations expressed by players.

• Inability to log in to the game's official forums.

• Funcom's actions taken against exploiters.

• Poor game performance despite meeting required system specs.

• Server downtimes during peak hours.

• Limitations on number of players in certain instances.

• Increasing the number of GM's to handle the petition backlog.

Check out the interview over at MMORPG.com, where's there's quite a string of comments from the readers. Do you think Funcom is handling customer service issues properly (given that AoC had such a recent launch), or are they dropping the ball?