This week, we can expect a number of improvements and bug fixes in Turbine's Dungeons And Dragons Online. As far as the game in general is concerned,  loot messages from other players will now be tagged as such, allowing them to be filtered out. A bug that caused players to get stuck while dismounting ladders has been addressed as well.

Specific improvements include the following:

Monsters

• The dragon's spellcasting AI and line of sight recognition had been improved.

Items

• Vorpal weapons will behead monsters as outlined in the original Players Handbook. This means you must roll a natural 20 and confirm a crit in order to vorpal your target.

Spells

• The Fragment of the Silver Flame's Protection from Evil spell no longer protects the wearer from Neutral and Good casters who attempt to affect the wearer with Charm or Enchantment or Compulsion spells.

Future developments include increased bandwidth (about 2%) and improvements in some of the slow-moving areas when a player's client gets flooded with information about objects in his/her local area. Hopefully, players will see a speed increase of 20-50%. There will also be a "showhelmet" command which can be used to hide a player's helmet graphic. Some work is being done to improve the combat/damage feedback mechanism, eliminating "false" hits (where the target would flinch but no attack roll would take place)  and give more accurate feedback as to the strength of the hit.

On the subject of Monsters:

• Widow type spiders will again shoot functional webs.
• Elemental Empathy will work properly on Earth Elementals that have used their Earthgrab ability.
• Arcane Skeletons will no longer "eat collectibles" they should be creating.

Finally,  those of you who wear Kundrak Delving Boots will be able to ward the movement effects of Storm Giant weather control. they will no longer ward the Beholder's petrify eye beam or the Mummy's Despair ability, but the programmers are working on exempting the boots from the movement restrictions of Sleetstorm and IceStorm.

In this week's Dark Age of Camelot Grab Bag, the development team offers answers to some of your questions relating to gameplay and bug fixes. The level of evade has been explained further after it was pointed out that there have been contradicting posts about the issue. To maximize evade under normal, non-RA conditions, keep the following elements in mind:

• First place: Your level of evade. 5% chance per level, cumulative.
• TIED for second place: Your weaponskill, and the styles used.
• Third place (PVE only): Items providing plus to evade.
  

On a related topic, some players have not noticed any difference in damage from mobs and in RVR. To enlighten you on styles, here's what The Big Wheel had to say, "Bonuses and penalties to defense from styles effect how often your defensive abilities (parry, evade, block) go off. If you have a style with a defensive bonus, it makes those defensive skills go off more; if you have one with a defensive penalty, it makes those defensive skills go off less." The Redheaded Stepcoder simplifies it by saying that if you get a 30 defense bonus, it's now 30% harder to hit you.

If you've been in Bri Leith, Hibernia, you had probably noticed that the tower is still sporting its old look, even after most of the towers in the realm have gotten a makeover. Well, that has been fixed on the internal server, so expect the new tower model in the next patch.

If you're curious about the effect of confusion spells in RVR, it just interrupts another player who's in the middle of casting a spell on someone. Still on the topic of spells, if you've been using cleric smite PBAOE damage/heal spell on others, you're probably looking at your own dead Minion of Zo pets. It wasn't the spell's intention. It's a bug.

Of course, if all these stuff aren't too clear to you, you can always find the answer in the next grab bag.

Nevrax, creators of The Saga of Ryzom, announced the following updates and bug fixes this week:

• A  patch to fix the code used to parse guilds; this has been optimized for larger guilds so Aniro no longer slows down when parsing guilds (Aniro contains the largest guilds). This patch also fixes the unification service that made the shards go down on 6 and 11 July.
• Official comments (from Nevrax or CS staff) are now displayed differently than the others, to let you find them more quickly
• A  patch to fix the code used to parse guilds; this has been optimized for larger guilds so Aniro no longer slows down when parsing guilds (Aniro contains the largest guilds). This patch also fixes the unification service that made the shards go down on 6 and 11 July.
• The poster full name (configured in the personal preferences) is now displayed instead of the login name in the comments;
• A new portlet now appears on the right column when you are logged, containing all the draft documents you have created on the website.

In addition, the following bugfixes are in place:

• Missing translations have been added
• An issue with the news RSS feed in which it wasn't displaying the correct language has been corrected
• An issue in which news email alerts were not sent should now be fixed
• Confirmation emails sent when registering to the newsletter or to the email alert are now sent in the the users preferred language (previously, they were all sent in English)
• A security issue with unpublished news allowing people  to see the news before the publication time has been fixed
• W3C validation errors in the XHTML code are now corrected.

Saga of Ryzom is a unique MMORPG that combines elements of science fictions and fantasy on a planet called Atys, where "life is tough."  Atys features five different ecosystems as well as changing seasons which affect the nature of gameplay. The most interesting feature of this game is the "Ryzom Ring," a free expansion which actually allows people to create their own game scenarios and affect the direction of play.  TSoR is free to download and play on a trial basis, although a subscription fee is required in order to access the entire world of Atys.

You've probably been so busy watching the final seasonal playoffs for the Guild Wars Factions Championship that you've missed some interesting updates in gameplay. While you prepare for the championship in Leipzig, Germany (or Berlin, if you're more into the World Cup), read up on what Guild Wars has cooked up to improve your gaming experience.

The Hall of Heroes has been updated so that three teams can compete instead of five. Games now take place every six minutes instead of every 12 minutes, which just means more chances of competing with other teams. The winning team will be awarded two Celestial Sigils instead of three. Requirements to earn a Champion title have also been updated. Players now receive a point for defeating any guild with 1200 or more rating points. These points can only be earned when the guild ladder is open.

Lastly, developers have fixed a bug that prevented some players from leaving the Dragon Arena.

Players found themselves knocking at the Dungeons and Dragons Online door when the login server went down. Raids and conquests would have to wait another day, or until the programmers get the server back up.

The DDO team would like to avoid downtime two days in a row, but updates would have to be delayed until final tests on the live servers are done. No need to worry though, with the full Quality Assurance staff working on the issue, fixes will be done in no time. In the meantime, you can re-think your DDO strategies or plan your next raid.

We'll never get tired of getting updates from the developers of Dark Age of Camelot (DAoC). Aside from the pleasant surprise of servers coming back up earlier than expected, these guys where able to trap and fix this nasty bug that's disrupting gameplay when players are unable to zone in and out of certain areas. Those who frequent the Trials of Atlantis regions would know this bug. It also fixed the problems associated with item drops from monsters and the use of djinn stones and other teleporter NPCs. Folks at the New Frontiers region will also see themselves zoning in and out of the area without hitches.

Over at the Cathal Valley, 'Point Blank Area of Effect' and 'Cone Area of Effect' spells will no longer penetrate walls and doors of the milegates located in the said new battleground. Also, Tinderboxes and other items that are supposed to be restricted from use in RvR and BG use will no longer work in the valley.

To make sure you don't get lost, the realm war map for New Frontiers, Hibernia has been updated to reflect the dock move. Moving around should be easy now.

Lastly, Vermin Swarmers lurking in the Demonic Prison have been stripped of epic monster level abilities.

You know full well that every new client patch comes with all too important notes. While some of you likes to know the what's new in World of Warcraft as the  progresses, some would rather read what the developers have gladly laid out on the client patch notes. With the release of World of Warcraft Client Patch 1.11.0, we are bombarded with game enhancements, bug fixes, changes in PvP, and other modifications that may affect your gameplay. The new patch introduces Naxxramas, the new 40-man raid dungeon that will give even the most experienced players a challenge of epic proportion.

General updates:

• The cost to unlearn talents will now decay over time. This cost will be reduced by a rate of 5 gold per month to a minimum of 10 gold.
• Logging back in after a disconnect from the server has been greatly improved, and players should now rarely receive the message "A character with that name already exists."
• Temporary item buffs (e.g. poisons, sharpening stones and shaman weapon buffs) will persist through zoning or logging out.
• Fear: The calculations to determine if Fear effects should break due to receiving damage have been changed. The old calculation used the base damage of the ability. The new calculation uses the final amount of damage dealt, after all modifiers. In addition, the chance for a damage over time spell to break Fear is now significantly lower. Note that Fear continues to be roughly three times as likely to break on player targets as on non-player targets. In addition, Intimidating Shout now follows that player versus non-player distinction, while previously it did not.
• Periodic Healing: Spells which do periodic healing will now have their strength determined at the moment they are cast. Changing the amount of bonus healing you have during the duration of the periodic spell will have no impact on how much it heals for.
• Reflection: Effects which cause reflection will no longer reflect triggered effects separately from their base effects (e.g. Impact, Improved Shadow Bolt, Aftermath, etc.)
• Spell and Item Auras with Charges: These auras will now correctly remember their number of charges when you enter or leave an instance, change continents, or log out.
• All controlled units will now be titled based on the creature type. All beasts will be referred to as Pets, for example (no matter how they are controlled). Previously, there were several inconsistencies.
• Beneficial spells and abilities that target multiple units will no longer consume resources (i.e. mana, rage etc...) if they fail to affect anyone.
• Chain targeted spells and abilities (e.g. Multi-shot, Cleave, Chain Lightning) will no longer land if target cannot be seen by the caster due to stealth or invisibility.
• Character model transparency has been modified to fix an issue where PC's would appear to have a large hole in their model (be on the lookout!).

There's more from where they came from. Druids, hunters, mages, paladins, priests, rogues, warlocks, shaman and warriors -- everyone has gotten some love from WoW developers. Click on 'Read' for the full details.

Mythic Entertainment has just released some notes about class changes and bug fixes for the Dark Age of Camelot Test Version 1.84i.

Here's the changelog for DAOC:

• Full respec has been granted to all existing Valewalkers, Valkyries and Reavers.
• Binding at any location in the new battleground Cathal Valley will no longer be allowed (Pendragon only).
• Re-spawning will take place at portal keeps in the battleground for players who die.
• Cast timers are reduced by 20% for all single target bolts belonging to Runemaster, Shaman, Warlock, Eldritch and Wizard. This means that bolt spells with a cast time of 4.0 will be changed to 3.2 seconds, while those with 2.5 seconds of cast time will be changed to 2.0 seconds.

We'll keep you posted with the latest changes and bug fixes made to the game.

That wasn't a negative statement. I'm really thankful they're investing enough time and effort in making Guild Wars better for players (even though sometimes their bug fixes come in a bit too late).

The latest updates included the following:

• Fixed a bug that occasionally prevented the victory chest located in the Hall of Heroes from dropping items.
  
• Added Priests of Balthazar to all Alliance Battle outposts.
• Added 4 new maps to the Random Arena and the Team Arena.
• Fixed a bug that caused the caravan to stop moving in Gyala Hatchery.
• Fixed bugs and made improvements to the following quest: The Shadow Blade.
• Fixed the descriptions of several Ranger skills, which were displaying incorrect values after the last update.
• Fixed a bug that caused henchmen to drop gold when they died.
• Fixed a bug that caused monsters to drop loot even if your party had no part in killing them.
• Fixed a bug in PvP that caused dead players to receive morale boosts for the deaths of opposing team members.

We'll keep you posted on other Guild Wars client updates.

It's time for another round of Dark Age of Camelot updates. The DAoC team had been busy with the usual bug fixes and changes in gameplay features. To start off, Bolts have been changed to make sure they hit a target in combat, unless the target is being melee attached by an enemy within a range of 200 units. If such cases, there's a 20% chance of failure for each attacker. Also, NPCs are given some due recognition with specialty titles. These titles are reserved for NPCs providing special services: Realm Point Removers, Trifecta Dealers, and Dread Seal Merchants.

Over at the New Frontiers, gatekeepers and guards at the Hibernian portal keep to match the new graphics/layout (for Pendragon). The Ancient Hermit in Cathal Valley has been itemized.  On the Hounds of Arawn front, members who are not on the quest will now be teleported to the correct locations.

That's barely half of what the DAoC team had posted. So,  just click on the  "Read" link to read more of the updates on Trials of Atlantis, class changes and fixes, and co-op server notes.