The Lulzsec hackers responsible for a string of 2011 cyber attacks that targeted game companies including Sony, Nintendo, Epic, Bethesda, and Mojang have been sentenced to jail time.

Gamespot reports that Ryan Cleary, Jake Davis, Mustafa al-Bassam, and Ryan Ackroyd pled guilty last month. The BBC says that the men could also face extradition to the United States due to various indictments. Lulzsec targeted a number of high profile corporations during the summer of 2011. The attacks resulted in Sony Online Entertainment MMOs and Sony's PlayStation Network going offline for several weeks.

How's your Chinese? Mine's not very good either, but I imagine that the narrator for the new ArcheAge trailer is just saying the Mandarin word for badass over and over again for the duration of the clip's two-minute-and-29-second running time.

That's because everything in the clip is indeed badass, from the location fly-throughs to the mounts to the boat construction to the combat. The trailer is being released to build excitement for ArcheAge's Chinese beta phase, which is less than a week away. I'd say it's doing a pretty fine job of it, wouldn't you agree? Click past the cut to have a look.

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With early access to Marvel Heroes coming on May 28th and the actual launch a few days later on June 4th, the Gazillion team is on super-high alert. CEO David Brevik talked with us about the final additions that the team is putting in place, saying that most of the features are complete at this point.

Brevik most wanted to talk about Marvel Heroes' endgame. Interestingly enough, the main PvE story will take your character only about halfway to the level 60 cap. After that, Gazillion expects players to fully rely on a robust endgame to finish the journey.

The endgame is made up of three primary PvE activities (in addition to PvP): daily missions, group challenges, and survival challenges. Daily missions, which can be soloed or done in a group, are unlocked in a chain. The five-man group challenges only have a single entry at this point, although there are several variations on that challenge. Then the survival challenges can take groups of 10 to 15 players and pit them against waves of increasingly difficult foes. Difficulty for these wave battles can be lowered by grabbing shards and defeating enemies, and depending on how well your team performs, the boss could be a pushover or insanely tough. Gazillion is placing a premium on randomness and variety to keep things fresh, so don't expect all similar-looking mobs to actually be the same!

Read on for all of the last-minute changes that players will encounter when they take on their superhero personae next month!

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Any RPG player worth his or her salt knows that there are two primary maxims to making it big: explore everywhere and take everything not nailed down. Fortunately, ZeniMax subscribes to this philosophy as well, which is why the team has placed an emphasis on exploration and loot-gobbling in The Elder Scrolls Online.

In a new video, Creative Director Paul Sage shows how players can loot all manner of goods in the world and then use those items for crafting. He also points out how the world will be populated with readable books, fishable areas, hidden chests, and ability-boosting stones. So if you were wondering if it's OK to rob a church in TESO, the following video should assure you that it's more than fine -- it's encouraged.

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When I was a kid, I loved the Red Sox, but I was dying to get a Pittsburgh Pirates baseball cap. It's not that I was a fan of the team; I just loved the unusual look of the hat, with its pillbox shape, gold stripes, and most importantly, rows and rows of gold stars. Those stars were called Stargell stars and were the creative genius of Hall of Famer Willie Stargell.

It might seem strange to be talking baseball in a guild column, but those Stargell stars played a key role in the Pirates' success, and they serve as a great example of successful guild management. Can a little embroidered star really make a difference? Let's take a look in this week's Guild Counsel.

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Instead of just rolling out a wall of text to discuss the changes and updates hitting League of Legends in the 3.7 patch, Riot Games offers players a video preview to get a glimpse of what's to come. And among the goodies is one of the most player-requested features -- Custom Item Sets.

Want to create a specific set of items, tailored to individual champions and/or maps before you get into a match and the fighting begins? Or how about just browse through the entire item shop on PVP.net just to see what's available? Both will be possible with the new Custom Item Sets feature. Initially, these custom builds will be stored on players' local machines only, but the devs plan on adding server-side storage in the future.

The video also discusses some balance changes to the champions Rumble, Twisted Fate, Caitlyn, and Nunu. Check out the specifics after the break.

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I'm always looking for things to teach players in the Summoner's Guidebook. We have, however, covered a lot of the low hanging fruit in one way or another. In League of Legends, and virtually every other asymmetric competitive game, matchup knowledge comprises the huge bulk of information that is truly useful to read about. This week was originally going to be a counter-Ryze guide, but then I decided to cover a broader topic to help reach more people.

I don't really like discussing specific character matchups largely because the character you're using matters almost as much as your opponent's. What does Ryze do against Kassadin in lane, for instance? The answer is not a whole lot if the Kassadin is decent. I could write a counter-Kassadin guide, but a lot of it wouldn't be usable by Ryze. Instead, this week we'll discuss how to think about the opponent's kit and develop a strategy to win on your own (or at least survive).

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Can you remember your first MMO buying experience? What series of events led to your interest in massively multiplayer gaming? What made you finally accept that paying monthly for a game is a thing that's OK? Or did you wade through countless free-to-play games before finding one that suited you?

As the guys and gals you turn to each day for your MMOs news, the team at Massively has a solid history with this genre. So I dug a bit deeper to get those stories from a few members of the team. Feel free to leave your own MMO origins story in the comments below as you enjoy our own after the jump.

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You may be familiar with Wargaming through the development studio's wildly successful game World of Tanks, but did you know that the company has been around for 15 years and has developed almost a dozen other games?

To help celebrate this special 15th anniversary, Wargaming has announced a global World of Tanks tournament that will see winning teams from Europe, North America, Russia, South Korea, Southeast Asia, China, Vietnam, and more represent their regions with an all-expense-paid trip to the World of Tanks studio in Minsk, Belarus.

The tournament will be a traditional 7 v 7 format and will run from May until the end of June. Check out the Wargaming site for more info.

"Dawngate is a new MOBA, built from the ground up to look and feel familiar while offering a whole new way to experience MOBA gameplay." These are the opening words of a new website for Dawngate, developed by Waystone Games and published by EA.

Joystiq notes that the Twitch, Twitter, and YouTube links on the site are either inactive or private, leading us to believe that this game wasn't exactly meant to be public knowledge just yet. There is also speculation that Waystone Games is a dev studio reborn from the ashes of Dead Space 3's Visceral Games, which dissolved last year.

You can register for the upcoming beta through your EA Origin account.

Thus far I've sat out the whole MOBA craze. I don't have a good reason, really, other than all of the rest of the games on my plate coupled with a lack of time to play them. Lately I'm getting more and more intrigued, though, and I've been nosing around websites and forum communities to see which title might make a good starting point.

SMITE looks promising, and I'm a big fan of Hi-Rez thanks mostly to all the fun I had in Global Agenda. Infinite Crisis looks cool, too, though admittedly that's because I'm an incurable fan of the IP. And of course there's League of Legends, HoN, and the other big dogs. What say you, Massively MOBA players? Do you recommend a particular MOBA for newbs?

Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!

MUD May has been a blast so far, but I won't lie to you and say that I hope to even make a dent in the decades-old history of many of these titles. I decided instead to use some examples from my favorite MUDs that I have come across over the last couple of years. It's admittedly been a challenge to think about what to cover. Do I cover the communities? The in-game mechanics? The publishers?

This week I decided to attempt to kill several birds with a handful of stones (and questions) and snagged Simutronics Producer Eric Latham for an video interview. Simutronics has been in the business for 26 years, and the publisher makes my favorite MUD, Gemstone IV. Latham has been with the company for 15 of those years! Technically I am using the interview and video as part of my Rise and Shiny series, but the questions and answers are more relevant to the general topic of MUDs. You might see it now as well as later, but it will hopefully provide some insight into the world of making MUDs.

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I have to begin this week's column with a disclaimer: I am not a fan of Facebook, and I'm even less a fan of Facebook games. The only one I found enjoyable was Ian Bogost's Cow Clicker because it was a giant middle finger to the bottom-feeding practices so commonly found in Facebook Villes.

But when I got a Google alert in my inbox about the world's first family-friendly 3-D MMO for Facebook, I had to head back to the blue-and-white wasteland of Facebook and see it firsthand. Could it be that the era of isometric views and mindless clicking is finally over? Have we finally moved on from agriculturally themed games? I decided to check out World of Trinketz to seek some answers.

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Guilds are pretty much ubiquitous in MMOs -- they serve as a way to bind players together into a group. But the team behind TUG thinks that all too often guilds come about mostly so you can have a name and a chat channel all to yourself. Which is why the latest design post about the game explains that the designers want to remove that sense of artificially created communities. To strengthen that sense of forming player groups, guilds have to go.

As the post explains, too often guilds become things formed for the purpose of having a guild, placing an artificial limitation on what groups players belong to. Instead, the goal is to get players to form societies and groups organically, creating more freedom by removing arbitrary restrictions. It's an idea with a lot of promise, and as the game's Kickstarter continues you can decide if that promise is something you feel like supporting.

French telecom company Vivendi is still looking to sell off gaming giant Activision-Blizzard, according to the Wall Street Journal. Vivendi announced its quarterly results yesterday and also said that Acti-Blizz's board of directors is still weighing multiple sale options for a company that's been up for grabs since the summer of 2012.

GamesIndustry.biz reports that Activision-Blizzard was worth more than $8 billion when it was put on the open market.

Did you miss ArenaNet's Southsun Cove developer livestream? Do you have a spare 27 minutes and 31 seconds? If you answered yes to both of those questions, you can head to the Guild Wars 2 Twitch page and watch the replay. Even if you didn't answer yes to both of those questions, you can still watch the replay, and yes, I am attempting to fill out what is otherwise an extremely cut-and-dried news post.

Let's see, what else? ANet's Scott McGough and Leah Rivera are the developers on record, and there's plenty of gameplay footage and commentary packed into the half-hour block.

Remember A Mystical Land? Well, forget about it, at least under that name. Mad Otter and Neonga have sent out a press release announcing that the title is now called Villagers & Heroes in an effort to "better match the content and focus of the game."

The name change isn't the only change, either, as gameplay has been upgraded by the addition of player-created custom gear, new realms to explore, and new epic bosses.

Animal ranching is a thing now, too, so you can raise sheep, chicken, and pigs alongside those crops in your backyard. Additional improvements are planned for future updates, and Villagers & Heroes is also seeking your approval on Steam's Greenlight service.

[Source: Neonga press release]