The bank we promised in the last newsletter has been added to the city, and is a safe place to store your money. Following a large amount of attacks just outside the bank, the city has paid to put multiple armed guards around the bank area to protect people who have just withdrawn money. The number of guards was further increased last Monday.

Or, given the testosterone-drenched product emanating from these paragons of creativity, you haven't dated at all, since no real life woman can ever have Lara Croft's figure. Really. If they did, they'd topple over. Poor Angelina Jolie has to have support wiring and guide wires just to walk across a room. All because you pinheads can't figure out what a woman in real life actually looks like. Maybe going outside would help. Then again, that would probably result in another news story about sad-assed EQ players encountering the rest of humanity.

This is definately a bug. Sorry guys, we thought it was fixed last patch - turns out it wasn´t. Next patch we´ll take another whack at it. - We´re feeling good about this one... nothing can *possibly* go wrong! :)

(insert impending doom/foreshadowing music here)

Actually, we aren't gearing up for anything just yet. :) Our External Testing Coordinator recently sent out some confirmation emails to those people who participated in the one-month UO Test Center beta promotion (note that bugs submitted after the promotion are always appreciated, but will not guarantee an ORIGIN beta spot). Several people have posted about these emails, leading some to believe that the application process for beta testers has opened, and that alpha must be starting very soon.

This is currently not the case. Approximately 100 people were accepted through this promotion, and those people were recently sent confirmation emails to let them know that their bugs had been recorded, and that they would be included once testing began. There has been no other application process or sign-up yet. We still have plenty of room, though, and there will be tens of thousands of spots available once the application process opens!

RH: I would have to say that the time/distance factor was the biggest nut to crack. You have movement rates that vary from walking speed to driving speed to flying speed. Those relate to distances to combat and time to combat that have to be balanced to keep the game enjoyable and playable. You have to ensure that none of players moving at the aforementioned rates has to travel too long to get into a fight.

Check out the rest of the interview for yourself.

From the perspective of a game designer on PlanetSide, I have to admit that the prospect of full FF damage is pretty scary. There are so many issues that need to be worked out for such a system to be effectively utilized as a game play element. As a design team, we’re looking forward to implementing an FF system that minimizes the negative aspects associated with friendly fire (i.e. grief players). But the challenge is ahead of us to try something different, on a scale never before seen, and that makes it exciting all at the same time. I hope that we’re able to walk away, just like Rainbow Six, with a genre in FPS gaming, this time set against the backdrop of a massively multiplayer game.

You can see the rest of his commentary here.