he next free expansion coming to City of Heroes and City of Villains, Issue 12: Midnight Hour, has entered Open Beta Testing. This means any and all subscribers to the game can log into the Training Room and try out the many additions and improvements included in Issue 12 for themselves!

Commandos and officers can stack certain abilities up to 10 levels; some abilities, like Core Bomb, can be stacked up to five.

Rather than displaying each stack of the DoT ability separately, the bottom right of the ability's icon on the opponent's target window displays the current number of stacks applied to the enemy.

The duration is "refreshed" by each increment to the stack. Once a DoT reaches an increment of 5 or 10 (depending on the DoT), each application refreshes the duration of that DoT.

Stacking the DoT only begins during the battle again if the target uses an ability to remove a DoT, if the opponent resists new applications enough during the existing duration to stop a refresh, or if the commando or officer doesn't continue to refresh the stack.

It’s not all about death and destruction in Hyboria, sometimes you will also want to create something yoursel... that others can destroy, of course. Player-made cities will pop up once we open the servers, and now you can pick up a little information on each of the different buildings you will be able to construct in your guild’s city.

Q: You say you're going to go above and beyond the traditional relationships between MMO publishers and their customers, so what will that entail?

Rod Nakamoto: I think you have to understand the philosophy and vision behind what we're trying to create here. I think you're starting to see a trend where companies like MySpace and Facebook are trying to add more entertainment value to their sites and present them to the consumer.

And you're also seeing portals like Pogo trying to add social networking components, but while we all want to be seamless to the consumer, the fact of the matter is that it's a very complex set of things that have to be put together, in order for it to be seamless.

A lot of that comes from our idea of having a theme park which is anchored by a major attraction - and Stargate Worlds is one of those anchors for our virtual theme park.

BT: So what did you learn from the beta? What feedback did you get?

JD: Oh, boy. Well, the first big thing we found out about was about a month in. The first major changes were all about the RvR system – realm versus realm. It’s all about huge armies and kind of similar to what we did in Dark Age of Camelot a few years back. Players really wanted it to feel like there was more combat going on within the cities. They also wanted more instant scenarios, so what we did was go back and reorganise the entire world map.

BT: That must have taken a fair bit o’ time.

JD: Man, you have no idea. Two straight months of nothing other than tinkering with the RvR system to really bring it in line with what players wanted.

Flying out to Blizzard's California headquarters this week to see the second World of Warcraft expansion, we felt neither apprehension nor any great excitement. After the reinvention and reinvigoration that was first expansion The Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King seemed a more workmanlike sequel: ten more levels, a new continent, a new profession, a new class, a new battleground, all as expected, little of it pulse-raising. Fine; Blizzard had earned the trust that it would get it right, and the right to stop driving itself so hard.

We should know better. A lot more detail and a little more time on Lich King remind us that laurels - and Lord knows there must be a mountain of them stored somewhere in this clean white campus - don't get rested on at Blizzard. A stunningly brave revamp of raiding is the big surprise; every raid dungeon in the expansion will be playable with either 10 or 25 players, opening the full sweep of the game to far more people.

The Lord of the Rings Online™ launched a year ago and we want you to help us celebrate! That's why we're giving you free LOTRO access from May 8-12, 2008!

Play your old characters, check out the LOTRO Anniversary celebration events, explore new areas, and tackle new quests. Just log into your LOTRO account from May 8-12, 2008 and we'll take care of the fun and adventure.

"The Temptation" Business

I know by now you think are an expert when it comes to monster insects, such as the Tranchidis, in Antaloor and nothing will surprise you, but "The Temptation" will render you speechless. In "The Temptation", the Trachidis species has continued to evolve and the latest member of the family is a combination of the ant and the fly. Naturally, this one's an awful lot bigger than our tiny insect friends from which it originates. The highly developed wings of the Trachidis give it amazing maneuverability. However, since its eyes are relatively useless, it has to rely almost 100% on its remaining senses. This weakness could be all an opponent needs to take the advantage.

Therdon wiped the blood from his eye, keeping his gaze locked on his opponent. The dwarf's lungs pumped to feed his aching muscles; he no longer felt the axe gripped in his rough, scarred hands. Only the weight of it pulling on his exhausted arms assured him it had not fallen to the ground. A knot was forming in his right thigh from a blow that had nearly cost him his life. Therdon was in trouble.

DOFUS, Ankama’s tactical MMORPG which has already attracted 7 million players worldwide, is on the way to being completely revamped, and is scheduled for launch in Fall 2008, with a beta version planned for September.



The code has been completely rewritten in Action Script 3 so now the leading Flash MMO will prove even faster and more responsive, while over 2,000 animations and 10,000 maps are being entirely redrawn.



With this complete revision, the game will be much more fluid, attractive and fun while keeping the same minimum system requirements, gameplay and features that have made it a worldwide success through the years.



Communication with the servers has been revised and optimised by the development team to deliver better performance and to allow future expansions to evolve more freely.



‘’This update reflects the experience accumulated by Ankama Games during all those years of programming and continually improving DOFUS’’ says Anthony Roux, Creative Director and co-founder of Ankama.



‘’DOFUS 2.0 is dedicated to our players, whose continued support has driven us to keep the game evolving and challenging throughout the years.’’ says Cedric Gerard, International Marketing Manager.



Ankama is proud to give DOFUS gamers the opportunity to enhance their gaming experience for free, by allowing DOFUS 2.0 to compete with the best looking products available on the online gaming market, while retaining the current minimum hardware requirements.

Ten Ton Hammer: To start, what kind of people live in the Solrain Commonwealth? Are they mainly traders and enterprising citizens, or can they be militaristic as well?

Keith Baker: Following the Shift, the Solrain Commonwealth was rebuilt by corporate powers, and today most of the people in the Commonwealth are employed in some capacity by one of the Six Syndicates. However, despite being a corporate culture, Solrain needs its soldiers and explorers. So as a nation, Solrain is best known for its mercantile might – but as a Solrain player, you can certainly follow a martial path.

Q: What do you do as a programmer on Champions Online?
A: My primary role is to work on the powers and advancement systems for Champions Online. What this means is that I implement all the features and equations for how certain powers affect players, as well as making it possible for the designers to use these features to make our game.

Q: What is your typical workday like?
A: Most of my day is spent coding. In the mornings I usually do things like update my work log and check for any meetings that are coming up throughout the day. I'll leave my desk a couple of times each day to give designers a hand with whatever they're working on. I eat lunch every day with a group of other programmers, and at 3:30 p.m., it's time for foosball in the Cryptic game room with the usual crowd.

Stratics Central: This is your first content update produced since NCsoft purchased CoX. How does it feel? Were there any thoughts that fans might be looking at this update a little more critically?

Matt Miller: Oh yeah, we had the plans for Issue 12 before the acquisition, and we were very nervous about them being the first thing they saw out of the new studio. Fortunately we were able to get some major Quality of Life improvements into the mini-update that was 11.5, and we were able to fast-track Villain Epic Archetypes into 12, and beef up the Issue substantially over our initial plans.

A lot of the cutthroat changes were aimed at skill order and acquisition instead of new skills, since they already have so much functionality. The old skullduggery and evasion chains are gone, although some of the skills still exist. Due to the addition of the Buccaneer, Cutthroats now have the same number of skills as other careers. The two careers are intended to work together with complimentary abilities to compete on even terms against national groups. The removed skills were generally tiered skills and redundant skills. Were trying to move all the important Cutthroat functionality into a more condensed list, thereby providing more options with the same skill selection. This is harder to quantify, but important.

Valerie "Pann" Massey
Former position: Community Manager
Current position: Senior Director of Public Relations and Communication
Best memory of EVE: Wedding crashers
The first in-game wedding took place a little over a month after launch. I created a Minmatar shaman-type character, Xela, to officiate. Since we didn't have anything like flowers to throw or fireworks to set off, MajorGormur brought out a battleship to orbit the ceremonial circle and used area of effect torpedoes as makeshift sparklies.

TomB heard what was going on, and hopped in-game to have a look, using a developer's shortcut to transport himself directly to MajorGormur's position. His little frigate was no match for the powerful torpedoes; it was immediately blown up and his little pod destroyed. The beautiful ceremony I'd written with Clover's help was suddenly interrupted by the words "CONCORD is attacking MajorGormur!" and the wedding stopped for a moment while we watched him trying to outrun the NPCs that had come to avenge poor TomB's unfortunate demise.

Q: There's definitely a skill to predicting what's going to be popular such a long time in advance, and get work underway, it seems.

John Smedley: It is, and I just saw this quote, I think it was from Henry Ford, that Steve Jobs also used: "If I'd asked my customers what they would have wanted, they'd have said 'A faster horse.'"

You have to think a few steps ahead, and I think one of the things that World of Warcraft did really well was take a game like Everquest, which really pioneered the space, and they really polished it up.

Now it's time for us to lead in new directions, and work on games in different genres. With The Agency we're working on the spy genre, with the DC Comics we're working on the heroes genre, we're making sure that we're thinking ahead of where the market it.

MMORPG.com:
A number of players are complaining that they are experiencing poor performance despite meeting the recommended system specs. How do you respond to this?
Funcom:
This is true for a minority of the players, but I feel pretty confident it’s not because of their systems alone but because of stalls and memory leaks, or even simpler things like trying high settings on a low-end machine. I mean, with the graphics we have, no lowest spec machine can even be kicked to perform well on high. I have to point out that a number of players are reporting stellar performance on the very same approach (meeting recommended specs). We cannot knee jerk to forums posts though, we need to ensure that the data we get, and where we subsequently put our best coder brains, is based on logic and correct data. We have now gathered loads of data, and we have learned a lot. It will surely improve for launch.

Newbies will never stand a fighting chance against old players
The best way to prove this sentiment wrong is to point out an alliance called Goonfleet that was mostly formed of players. Coming from another internet community, they decided it would be fun to all start playing EVE Online together, and to attempt to overthrow one of the oldest existing alliances, Band of Brothers. Initially, Goonfleet was not really taken seriously by many of the established alliances, but its sheer numbers and determination made up for the fact its members were new, many having less than 10 million skillpoints. This is merely one example that shows how newcomers do have a fighting chance against long-term players. The key to making it work is to bring your friends.

Any concerns? Well, the combat is the main focus of any fighting game and that's where my main concern is. Is the directional stuff really about making the game action-packed? Or is it more about the difficulties of squeezing an MMO onto the 360? Will using combos in combat slow you down? Also, the chance for a one-hit decapitations might be graphically appealing, but in PvP we can imagine a fair few all-caps complaints from foul-mouthed teenagers who've had their noggin unfairly lopped off.

17.9 Status

So what's up with 17.9? The update was actually pretty much ready to go, although we will use the extra time to do some more polishing and tweaking to the new encounters and items. So what's the reason for wanting to hold it back?

Concealment and Perception is the answer.

Whatever happens in RuneScape, the cats seem to find their feet, and, this month, those feet - and the rest of their bodies - will get graphically improved to become even more adorable. We may be getting a wee bit enthusiastic by sprucing up the Gertrude's Cat quest, but we're sure you'll appreciate what's new (pussycat).

What do you enjoy most about your job on SWG, and why?

Working collaboratively with a group of smart folks both at LEC and SOE. We have a great design team, who has been releasing Chapter after great Chapter -- our QA team is dedicated to testing and improving this game in all ways -- the great new community team has their finger on the pulse of the players more than ever, and our hosts of new artists are doing some really exciting stuff. The opportunity to work with all these people at once, using the Star Wars license, is a fantastic one that I could never pass up.