It’s that time of year when Turbine fans can take knives to pumpkins in search of Turbine points, special titles and a special in game pet if you’re playing Asheron’s Call! From October 18th until November 5th, you can send in photos of game-themed pumpkins to celebrate spooky Halloween. Photos must be original works, no larger than 6mb in size, have a resolution of at least 1024 x 768 and be emailed as an attachment to  community@turbine.com with the subject line Pumpkin Carving Contest. For a complete list of all rules, terms, and conditions, go to Turbine’s official announcement.

For the Best Asheron’s Call Pumpkin:

• 60 Days of Free Game Time
• A Pet Pumpkin Golem (I’d love to see a screenie of this, it sounds adorable!)
• An in-game title: “Jack-o’-all Trades (2011)”
• Custom Forum Title: “Jack-o’-all Trades”

For the Best Dungeons & Dragons Online Pumpkin:

• 3000 Turbine Points
• Custom Forum Title: “Dragonmark of Spooky (2011)”

For the Best Lord of the Rings Online Pumpkin:

• 3000 Turbine Points
• Custom Forum Title: “Master Carver (2011)”

Each game will also have one runner up, who will receive the corresponding custom forum title.

Today CCP announced that they will be laying off 20% of their workforce as part of a reorganization effort to focus more on Eve Online and DUST 514 stating,

Developing EVE expansions, DUST 514 and World of Darkness has stretched our resources too thin.

While for the most part Eve Online and DUST 514 will not be affected by this, World of Darkness development will continue with a significantly reduced team. While CCP stated that World of Darkness is definitely not dead, it is not at the point where they need to dedicated a large amount of resources to it yet.

CCP also mentioned that while Eve Online is in good health, with subscriptions numbers higher than they were this time last year, they did say over the last two months the numbers have slid down from their summer peak. Which can be attributed to the whole Incarna expansion fiasco.

With Blizzcon fast approaching, the team behind Starcraft Universe is giving players a chance to try out their mod starting today and running until Oct 3oth. Starcraft Universe is a fan created mod within Starcraft 2 that incorporates some RPG features and while it’s not massive or doesn’t have a persistent world, the team hopes that fans waiting for a real Starcraft MMORPG will give their mod a shot.

While the game will be available for the next two weeks, it’s important to note that the development team does not consider it yet ready for open beta. The PvP mode will be available and players will start at level 30 with a full set of lev 30 gear.

To celebrate the test phase a new preview video was released today which you can watch below. For more information head over to http://starcraftuniverse.org.

Continued…

Red 5 Studios, the developers behind the upcoming MMO shooter Firefall, has released a new video showing off the previously unannounced fifth battleframe(class), the Dreadnought. The other four classes already announced are Assault, Medic, Recon and Engineer.

The new class is a heavy weapons specialist that runs around with a huge gatling gun dealing out massive damage. The Dreadnought is protected by heavy armor and a few nifty gadgets, one of which creates a “thunder dome” around the unit, protecting him from outside attacks, but can also be used to trap enemy combatants inside to keep them from running away.

The Dreadnought can also turn himself into a turret which increases rate of fire and accuracy, however leaves him vulnerable to attacks. Check out the full Dreadnought trailer after the jump.

Continued…

Its been a while since the last beta test for Warhammer: Wrath of Heroes and today eager fans got what they’ve been waiting for, another round of beta testing.

Staring this Thursday until Saturday, fans will get another chance to test out the latest build of Wrath of Heroes with the latest hero tweaks and the addition of the Dwarf Engineer Durrig with his bombardment turrets. Other changes include an update to the scoreboard and tactics are now available to differentiate players play style.

Below are the beta times for each day. For those of you who didn’t get invited the first time around, be sure to check your email as a “ton” of new testers have been invited.

• Thursday, October 20th – 4pm-8pm EDT (8pm-12am UTC)
• Friday October 21st – 10am-10pm EDT (2pm-2am UTC)
• Saturday October 22nd – 12pm-6pm EDT (4pm-10pm UTC)

Last week during the NYC Comic Con, Trion released a new trailer chronicling the last seven months of updates, new features and patches that have been added to RIFT since the launch. The trailer, called Endless Adventures has now been made available and we have it for you below.

While the trailer is basically just a recap of all of RIFTs features, it’s really quite impressive how much content the game has in just the few months its been launched. It’s going to be exciting to see where RIFT will be in a few year at this pace.

Continued…

In a new developer blog, CCP announced that Eve Online has added player-owened Customs Offices, allowing players to profit through planetary taxation.

Customs Offices in all Low Sec, 0.0 and Wormhole systems will be decommissioned and removed. Customs Offices in High Sec will remain under the authority of CONCORD who will, in turn, charge doubled import and export taxes. Customs Offices are now targetable and destructible.

In order for players to open up their own Customs Office, they will need to construct one in a planets orbit, with each planet only allowing one such structure. The process requires players to haul a Customs Office Gantry into position, anchor it, then upgrade it.

These new offices can only be owned by a player corporation and only players with Station Manager role can edit the settings. Once constructed, the player can control the taxes on the resources that pass through that office, from a 0% to 100% tax rate.

Offices will use the reinforcement system and will trigger once the shields have reached 25%.  This allows the corporation up to 24 hrs to react and aid in the stations defense. Once out of reinforcement, that shields will be at 0% and the Customs Office can re-enter reinforcement if the defending corp can get the shields back to up 25%.

Last week in Japan, Wizardry Online launched into open beta with an overwhelming response from players. More than 100,000 players signed up on the first day requiring Gamepot, the games Japanese publisher, to add multiple new servers to keep up with demand.

Now Gamepot is turning its attending to North America and Europe as it looks for distribution to bring Wizardry Online to the western markets. Currently it is in talks with potential publishing partners in both markets and Gamepot expects to enter the western markets sometime in 2012.

To celebrate the launch, we have a gameplay trailer of Wizardry Online. Wizardry Online is famous for bringing back permanent death to the MMORPG genre.

Continued…

Funcom is kicking off the week by announcing Week of the Dragon, a full weekdevoted to the Dragon society in their upcoming MMORPG The Secret World.

The Dragon is the least known of the three societies, being based in Seoul, Korea, it is perhaps the most mysterious. The Illuminate and Templar are much better known as their secret societies have been the subject of well known movies, books and video games in the past.

To keep off the week long event, Funcom has released 6 new screenshots featuring the Dragon society which you can view after the jump. Senior Producer and Director Ragna Tornquist has this to say about the Dragon,

Revealing new things about the Dragon is exciting for us, as the very nature of the Dragon is to stay hidden and create chaos behind the scenes to reach their ultimate goal. Not only is this a great opportunity to shed some light on the Dragon, but for a huge number of people who have already joined the Dragon through our initiation test, it’s an opportunity to find out more about their chosen secret society.

Later on this week Funcom will release additional artwork, a new video, information and will wrap things up with a Facebook Q&A session on their FB page.

Continued…

The New York city Comic Con took place last week and over the weekend and while it’s not an important convention for MMORPG fans, BioWare was there to talk about Star Wars: The Old Republic and showoff more gameplay.

For the most part, it was a reiteration of what has already been announced, but there were a few new details that were revealed. The biggest being that there will be 15 flashpoints at launch and not all will be story-driven, some will be mainly puzzle or action based and all will be replayable as endgame content at harder difficulty levels.

The second reveal was that there will be two operations (raids) at launch time and while the second has not been shown yet, a single image was displayed showing a Hutt sitting in a room, which is posted above. So feel free to speculate.

The last item worth mentioning are the fleet hubs, which are the central gathering areas for each factions. Here players can find vendors, the auction house, and a special VIP lounge for those who purchased the Collector’s Edition. The fleet hubs will also be the launching points for all flashpoints so players can find groups easier.

You can watch the full SWTOR CC panels here.