Events (In-Game)

Calling all high-level Fallen Earth players! GamersFirst is looking for some level 55 wastelanders to help alpha-test the new Dome arena. The Dome is a PvE challenge that was previewed in the March State of the Game, and it's now ready for the next step of development with your help.

If you're interested, send your forum name, typical hours of play, build, and PvE vs. PvP ratio to DeconLead@gamersfirst.com for review. Take note that involvement in this test doesn't mean you're in the elite Decon testing team, as this is more of a one-off event. Check out the Fallen Earth May State of the Game for more details.

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Sci-fi MMO EVE Online has seen phenomenal success recently, from breaking through the 500,000 subscriber boundary to successfully relaunching in China. The game officially turned ten years old today, and CCP celebrated the occasion with events and gifts for all current subcribers. The part-jovian Gnosis battlecruiser was given to every subscribed account at midnight last night and can be claimed before the end of the month, and players logging in yesterday or today will have found a whole slew of bonus gifts.

EVE smashed its previous Peak Concurrent User total during the festivities by a clear margin, replacing 2011's record of 63,170 with a new figure of 65,303 players logged in simultaneously. Part of the reason for the record was the huge number of player-run events taking place that evening, such as the ever-popular Flight of a Thousand Rifters. The event saw almost 2,500 players join together to take down player Marlona Sky's expensive supercarrier. Most of the participants were in small frigates like Rifters and ended up being easy prey when a nullsec sniper Loki fleet turned up. The event was nevertheless a massive success and huge fun for those involved. Continue reading for a gallery of screenshots from the event and video footage from player Scott Manley.

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Tomorrow marks a huge milestone in MMO history as sci-fi sandbox EVE Online officially turns ten years old. Released by a tiny icelandic development studio whose only previous release was a board game featuring Reykjavik's favourite cross-dressing mayor, EVE has slowly grown over the past decade to become one of the industry's biggest and most stable subscription titles. Following 2011's monoclegate scandal that led to around 8% of players quitting and CCP Games shedding 20% of its employees, this year saw EVE Online climb to new heights as it regained the playerbase's confidence and smashed the 500,000 subscriber barrier. As a special side-note, the EVE Evolved column also turned five years old last week; it has now officially been running for over half of EVE's lifetime.

The past year has been remarkably successful for CCP, with both of the year's EVE expansions being extremely well received and console MMOFPS DUST 514 finally starting to take shape. The Inferno and Retribution expansions fixed a staggering number of small issues that were broken in the game while also making big changes to bounty-hunting, piracy, and PvP across the board. We also saw huge emergent events like the Battle of Asakai, a $6,000 ship kill, and the five trillion ISK faction warfare exploit this year. With DUST 514 officially launching in just over a week on May 14th and players fired up about the upcoming Odyssey expansion, the future's looking bright for EVE Online as it heads into its second decade.

In this week's EVE Evolved, I look back at some of year's top EVE stories, stories that touched real life, and what the future holds for EVE's second decade.

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Massively's Richie "bogotter" Procopio is concerned for you. He's concerned that you might not have tried out Guild Wars 2's Molten Weapon Facility dungeon, the latest installment of the game's "Living Story" arc Flame and Frost: Retribution. He's equally concerned that you might have missed the memo about just how temporary this dungeon really is: It's over on May 12th, meaning you don't have long to check it out before it's gone. Forever.

But it's all good because Richie has put together a brand-new video guide to the dungeon, so you can either watch it and get a jump on playing through the zone yourself this weekend or just live vicariously through him, which would certainly involve less death. Enjoy his walkthrough after the break! (Dead goat sold separately.)

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Celebrates what, you might ask? Funcom certainly doesn't need a reason to celebrate as the studio is dubbing this upcoming weekend as a golden weekend in The Secret World, full of prizes and rewards.

First off, for every Ability Point earned this weekend, you get a free bonus point which is stackable with item store Timed Ability Point boosts. You can also earn a free month of membership for every new player you recruit who purchases the game in the next 30 days. And to top it all off, you get 30% extra bonus points every time you purchase Funcom points.

The Secret World's Golden Weekend event runs from this Friday, May 3, at 9am EDT through Sunday, May 5.

Adventurers of Telara, you've kind of got a good news/bad news situation taking place here. The bad news is that RIFT is getting invaded, which was already the case. The worse news is that it's now being invaded by the Hellbugs from Defiance, which usually require a great deal of automatic weapons fire to be put down. The good news is that if you can somehow manage to overcome the distinct lack of any firearms and put down the invasion, you can keep a Hellbug around to ride! Wait, that might still be bad news.

Yes, Trion Worlds is kicking off a cross-promotional event with new fire rifts that give players a chance at Defiance-related rewards, most notably the chance to pick up a Hellbug mount. The event is open to all players, even if you're just trying out the game's Lite version. No word on how long the event will last, but it's probably best to assume that it won't be forever -- which is also sort of a good news/bad news situation, unless you wanted to see the game overrun by Hellbugs.

If you're excited about Guild Wars 2's Flame & Frost: Retribution, ArenaNet is one step ahead of you with a new guide they've provided on the game's site.

This spoiler-free mini-guide covers today's Living Story release (with a spoiler-rific version toward the end) and provides a schedule of events for the Flame & Frost epilogue, starting May 12.

Be sure to also read through today's patch notes for more details on Flame & Frost: Retribution.

The crossover potential of the Defiance MMO and television series has only really been felt with a few main characters so far, but Trion Worlds wants to take that one step further by giving you a chance to be on the show.

How does that work? Simply register yourself at the official contest page and head into the game to earn the most ark salvage per hour during the contest period from 12:00 a.m. PDT April 30 to 11:59 p.m May 12 in the Most Wanted: Competitor and Most Wanted: Rogue's Gallery in-game pursuits. Of course, this is you, not your character's likeness, that we're talking about here, but it won't just be a simple screenshot pushed in the background. Artists from the series will render the winning player into an upcoming episode of the show.

[Update 4:15 p.m. EDT: The press release says that "the winner will have artists from the Defiance series render their character's likeness into a special place in an upcoming episode," but Trion's PR team has separately confirmed to Massively that it will in fact be you, not your character, whose likeness will be imported into the show.]

[Source: Trion Worlds press release]

Another patch day is upon us. Among other things, Guild Wars 2's Flame and Frost: Retribution is bringing in a new living story dungeon and some much-needed structured PvP improvements. Over the weekend, members of the press were invited to preview some of the incoming content. I'd like to talk about it with you, so be warned that there are spoilers for the living story dungeon ahead.

Something that I found particularly interesting about all of this is that the Molten Weapons Facilities dungeon is going to be available for less than two weeks. The dungeon is due to exit on May 12th. I had expected it to be time-limited, of course, but I think I was expecting a little more time than that. Anyway, let's dive right into it.

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The results are in for EVE Online's eighth Council of Stellar Management (CSM8) as announced by Hilmar Veigar Pétursson during EVE Fanfest this weekend in Reykjavik, Iceland.

Since this is the first time the Single Transferrable Vote mechanic has been used, each elected member received the necessary amount of votes (out of a total 49,702 votes) to get onto the CSM. When the council convenes for the first time, a chairman, vice-chairman, secretary, and vice-secretary will be chosen.

Be sure to read the complete election results for the names of all 14 CSM8 members and more on how the votes were calculated this year.

It's pretty impressive that The Lost Titans, a new browser-based MMO by ZQGame, launched in China and was supporting 600 servers within six months, but China is a unique, browser-eating beast. I've talked about the foreign browser market before and often marvel at how so many players in the West scoff at browser games. It's not as though "browser" is a genre; it's a delivery system. But here we are, getting ready to scroll through comments to read about how "browser games" suck. That's like saying, "MP3s are bad music."

Still, I cannot deny that some browser-based games do indeed suck. In fact, the last time I played The Lost Titans live, I found myself so bored I almost could not finish the stream, but I thought I'd try again with a fresh perspective. Despite finding many of the same issues I had before, I was surprised at how much further the game has come. I sat down with ZQGame's Laura Stephens during this latest livestream to talk about the game.

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Scheduled events are a huge part of Age of Wushu. While each player has the option of enjoying the game at his own pace, scheduled events mark the major ways people can have an impact on the world at large. Because these events have to occur at a specific time, their placement will always be convenient for some and inconvenient for others.

Recently -- and without warning -- Snail changed the server time in response to complaints about various events being inconvenient. This time change was influenced by a vote thread on the official forums, but was otherwise invisible; there were no warnings in the game's launcher or via in-game announcements until days afterward. The lack of communication about the time change was bad enough, but unfortunately, listening to the vocal minority had much larger, far-reaching problems for players. [Please see the end of this article for Snail's appended response to these arguments.]

I was going to talk about meridians this time, but addressing this topic was something you requested. You came to the Massively tip jar. You emailed me directly. You messaged me in game. You even came to my house and said, "Hey man, you should write about how messed up the time change is." You asked, and this is my reply.

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