The lead up to Star Trek Online's Beta has been rife with controversy. This week, Jaime Skelton dives into exactly what happened.

When watching for hot topics in the community, I've noticed Cryptic is going to be a company laced with controversy. While their heels are still cooling from the heat from Champions Online's launch, now they are faced with troubles and worries about Star Trek Online, their newest title set to launch in February next year.

How is it that a game that hasn't even hit open beta has caused up such a stir? The fuss began with Champions Online, on a special offer launched in August for those who were interested in purchasing six month or lifetime subscriptions. The special offer included “guaranteed” closed beta access for Lifetime subscribers to Champions Online, and access (though not specifically stated as “guaranteed”) for six month subscribers. It's safe to assume that a large portion of the subscribers who took advantage of these offers wanted, and expected, to be able to participate in the beta testing of Star Trek Online.

Read it all here.

MMORPG.com's Garrett Fuller recently spoke with Runescape Lead Designer Mark Ogilvie about the game, its success and more.

MMORPG.com: RuneScape remains one of the top free to play MMOs out there. What keeps the game going so strongly?

Mark Ogilvie: Having a classless system within the game means we can offer a player real choices rather than forcing actions on the player based on an arbitrary decision they made some time in the past. Saying "we have a rich variety of gameplay content" is an easy thing to say, but when you look at lots of other products out there, you have to create a multitude of characters to experience it all. That's something we don't do in RuneScape. That means that, so long as you have the skill levels, you can do anything you like.

In terms of technology, we have the same approach to accessibility and have entire departments dedicated to making the experience as high quality as possible, irrelevant of the specs of your computer.

Our release strategy means that players are receiving new content almost every week, ensuring that there is always something new to engage players.

My personal favourite strength of RuneScape is the quest content, which really is the greatest range of epic adventures and fantastic journeys I have seen in an MMO.

Read it all here.

This week, we bring you three themed images from Global Agenda, the upcoming sci-fi MMO shooter. All three images focus in on the Recon class and are accompanied by descriptions right from the Hi-Rez Studios development team.

Check out the full set here.

MMORPG.com World fo Warcraft Correspondent James Wood pens this quickie guide to the achievements from the heroic five man dungeons necessary to snag a Red Proto-Drake mount. Those dungeons are: Utgarde Keep, The Nexus, Azjol-Nerub and Ahn’kahet.

Fat chance that the Red Proto-Drake will be gone any time soon since it's only a 280% flight speed mount. Still, anyone after the Red or Blue Dragonhawk mount (when Blizzard gets off their backsides and increases its speed to 310% instead of a measly 280%) from Mountain O' Mounts should count the Red Proto-Drake among the 100 that they'll need. Or you can just look a lot cooler riding on a big red proto-drake instead of a puny red or blue bird that looks like it would snap in half if a Tauren sat on it.

The achievements from the heroic five-man dungeons aren't as difficult as they used to be pre-Ulduar, but a lot of them are still a pain in the backside. They're all listed here per dungeon, all rated for their difficulty with the appropriate tactics and under the assumption that the groups trying for this are decked out in Naxx 25, Ulduar 10/25, or ToC 10/25 gear.

Read it all here.

MMORPG.com has just been handed 2500 keys for the highly anticipated fantasy MMORPG "Allods Online" from Russian developer Nival Online. This game is published by GalaNet (gPotato) and their are just getting underway with their second closed beta test which will begin Dec 1, 2009. Get your key now!

CLICK HERE TO GET YOUR BETA KEY FOR CLOSED BETA PHASE 2!

The Underfoot Expansion is on the way for the grandfather of MMOs: SOE's EverQuest. Carolyn Koh recently dialed it back and ran around. Find out what she saw.

It had been a while since I had last logged into EverQuest and the first thing I must say is how good it looks for a game that’s 10 years old. The quality of the textures and NPCs are on par with some games launched much later than EverQuest although I can’t say the same for player avatars. The Underfoot – the realm of Brell Serilis has been talked about since the Hole opened way back when in the EverQuest history and it’s a good looking expansion, more dark than light since it is located, lore-wise, under the Hole.

Read it all here.

The Lineage Thanksgiving Event is now live! The event, which runs from November 25th through November 30th is really quite simple. All players will receive double XP and all polymorphs will be unlocked.

Read the original announcement here.

CCP Games has announced that the site for their upcoming Dominion expansion to EVE Online has been launched! Previously, the site was merely a teasing splash page but it now contains a number of new sections, including a feature page that has cataloged all the devblogs on the expansion's numerous new features all in one convenient spot for your perusal.

Speaking of features, below are a number of features you can expect from Dominion, which is set to release on December 1st:

Sovereignty Evolves

The system of territorial control in EVE advances, providing more tactical, capture-based gameplay. Alliances both large and small will find more opportunities within their grasp and an engaging conquest system in place to seize them. Rulers will now have to actively defend space they have claimed.

New Doomsday Devices and Capital Ship Changes

The rebuilt Doomsday Devices lead the pack of several changes to capital ships, bringing the need for new strategies to the wreck-strewn battlefields of capital ship combat.

Exploration and Advanced PVP Tutorials

New introductions to two of EVE’s most popular areas of gameplay: ship combat and discovery. The exploration tutorial teaches how to probe space for anomalies, hostile ships and hidden asteroid belts. In the advanced PvP tutorial, new pilots can learn the basics safely... well, relatively safely.

Pirate Faction Epic Arc Missions

Choose to ally with the underworld of New Eden as the first of many pirate epic arcs arrive. Hidden deep within the most dangerous regions of space, these agents provide significant rewards for the bold and the villainous.

Full Featured In-Game Browser

Fully compliant with current industry browsers, including support for the many ‘EVE-enabled’ sites created by the community.

In addition to the launch of the Dominion website today, a new trailer has also been released, which you can view here.

Scott Jennings takes a lesson from Modern Warfare 2 and looks at how MMOs handle (or don't handle as the case may be) controversy.

The argument over whether an MMORPG is “just a game” or “more than a game” has raged for years – essentially, since they were invented. From a design aspect, this usually hinges on whether a given MMORPG is a theme park, like EverQuest, World of Warcraft, and the many games that play similarly, with a straight line to the “cheese”, or a virtual world, such as Ultima Online, EVE, or to a greater degree Second Life, that give you no goals save that which you make. And from a market perspective, the theme park has won, overwhelmingly. World of Warcraft’s position in the market alone sees to that, if nothing else.

Yet among the players of games, the argument rages, and even in wholly “theme park” games such as World of Warcraft. Players of these games can take them very seriously indeed, and they have every right to given the amount of time that character development can entail. “Guild drama,” after all, can be far more riveting to experience first-hand than any canned quest.

Read it all here.

Square Enix has announced that the Mog Bonanza lottery will return to FFXI on December 24th, 2009! On December 24th, all characters who have been active for at least 45 days will be able to purchase a Mog Marble which is inscribed with a set of five numbers. On January 29th, 2010, the winning numbers will be announced and players will be awarded prizes based on the amount of numbers matched.

Players can purchase multiple Mog Marbles (up to a maximum of 10 per character) at 2000 gil a pop, and will be able to do so between December 24th, 2009 and January 15th, 2010.  Players can select their own Mog Marble numbers or have a randomly generated set be inscribed onto them.

Prize details below:

Rank 1 prize: all five digits matching.
Rank 2 prize: the last four digits matching.
Rank 3 prize: the last three digits matching.
Rank 4 prize: the last two digits matching.
Rank 5 prize: the last digit matching.

For more information including the breakdown of Gil prizes and the rank gated prize list, go here.

SOE has announced that between November 23rd and November 29th at 10PM PST all Station Cash cards redeemed will receive a 25% bonus. Station Cash is used in SOE games such as Free Realms, EverQuest, and EverQuest II.

If you have a Station Cash card, you can redeem it here.

NetDevil has released these three new, exclusive MMORPG.com screenshots from their upcoming space-based MMORPG, Jumpgate Evolution. The first two images show Solarian fighters, while the third image shows a mining establishment in the Bleakstone sector.

Check out all three here.

MMORPG.com's Garrett Fuller recently had the chance to ask a few questions of Jehanzeb Hasan, the Jr. Project Manager for the upcoming Grand Fantasia Item Shop based MMO.

MMORPG.com: Talk about the free to play model and how it applies to Grand Fantasia.

Jehanzeb Hasan: I know there's a segment of the MMO fan base that has a certain aversion to free-to-play games, and some out there who are simply unwilling to give them a try. Often, this stems from an assumption that free-to-play games limit content--that you have to pay to unlock the really worthwhile and valuable stuff. Of course, this feeling isn't always unfounded, but in the case of Grand Fantasia--and really, many of Aeria Games' other titles--this simply isn't the case.

Grand Fantasia is a strong, robust, complete standalone title. There's a wealth of content available to players that are game enough to give it a chance--branching class trees, pets, guilds, instanced dungeons, PvP, team based battlefields, mounts, a player-based economy--it's all there and it's all free. For those players who are willing to pay, what we'll offer in terms of microtransactions are items of convenience and vanity. Nothing will that dramatically affect mechanics or unbalance the game.

Read it all here.

MMORPG.com Aion Correspondent Josh Price writes this look at the the lower and upper decks of the Steel Rake instance that takes place on the upper and lower decks of a ship flying through the air.

So, you've killed Golden Eye Mantutu at the end of the middle deck and all you can think to yourself is, "Could this place be ANY longer?!" The answer to that riddle is yes, yes it is quite longer. Enter: The Middle and Lower Levels. The entrance to these last two levels is located in the first room of the instance at an elevator switch. Because you can't access Steel Rake until 40 and because middle deck is around level 41, you will definitely spend more time farming the end of Steel Rake than you do the beginning. Though it may not be by choice since the advanced stigma quest will keep you coming back for a while to complete it-an issue that isn't as bad as it sounds, since the pacing of this part of the instance helps keep it from dragging on.

Read it all here.

Beginning Thursday, November 26th at 10AM PST, Cryptic Studios will be offering a free Thanksgiving weekend for Champions Online. The free play event will run for a full four days, coming to a close on November 30th, 2009 at 10AM PST.

To get started, sign up here!

For this week's Question of the Week, Community Manager Moll answers the question, "What are the multiple types of quest systems and how do they work?"

Moll explains that that each faction (such as Noir and Continoma) will have their own quests and storylines, but players will also have the ability to defect to the other faction and experience the opposing side's story as well. Of course, they want players to have to weigh such a decision and so there will be prohibitive consequences that players will have to consider when doing so. Players will also earn contribution scores with their faction, which will allow them to claim special rewards from faction NPC's.

Aside from the main story quests, Earthrise will also offer exploration quests, smaller one off or repeatable (daily, weekly, etc) side quests, though all quests will tie into the game's reputation system. You will earn favor points doing these quests and they, unlike your contribution score, are the actual currency that is spent on rewards. Favor points are specific to their respective organizations, so gaining favor points for one faction may result in a loss of favor with an opposing faction.

Read the full QOTW here.

Two formerly hugely popular servers will soon be added to the list of merged servers, as free transfers will be offered for both the Phoenix Throne and Dark Crag servers beginning  December 2nd.

Source and Destination details below:

Phoenix Throne will be able to transfer to either Iron Rock OR Badlands

Dark Crag will be able to transfer to either Gorfang OR Volkmar

Players will also see a bonus of 20% XP/Renown on the aforementioned destination servers during the weeks following the server transfers.

For more details read the official announcement here.

NetDevil has announced today that Lance Robertson will be joining their team as Executive Producer on Jumpgate: Evolution. Lance Robertson's previous work includes a long stint on Dark Age of Camelot, and he also served as senior producer on Warhammer Online.

Read the official announcement here.

Coming in at a full nine minutes in length, this latest trailer for NCsoft's Aion gives us an expansive look into the future of Aion.

Aion's future will bring a major graphics upgrade, housing, underwater cities, real time seasonal changes, mounts (and mounted combat!), and more!

The seasonal changes are quite impressive, with snow gathering on the ground as well as on objects over time, and slowly melting away with the seasons change. The housing component appears quite robust with the ability to be fully decorated, so everyone out there can look forward to letting their inner Martha Stewart out.

Mounts (including flying mounts!) are also shown in the trailer, with the player being able to seemingly tame various creatures into mounts, and it also appears there is support for multi-person mounts as a second rider gets on one of the creatures later in the trailer. Mounted combat is also shown, with the creature itself biting and swiping at enemies with its tail.

Aion  will also be receiving a major facelift, which comes to a surprise to us as it looks quite beautiful as it is, but it is impressive nonetheless with what appears to be vastly improved lighting and shadows, among other things.

We also contacted NCsoft for comment on this new development, and they had this to say:

The trailer shown at this year’s G-star event is a glimpse at the future of Aion. As you can tell from the movie, the development team is hard at work on evolving and growing the Aion experience in some very unique and innovative ways.

When we learn more, we'll be sure to keep you all in the loop. Until then, watch the new trailer here!

What do you think of NCsoft's vision for Aion's future? Have you left Aion, and would you come back when these changes are implemented? If not, why not? Let us know in the comments below!