Turbine announced that the annual Yule festival will be returning to Lord of the Rings Online.

The Yule festival is coming with all new quests, races, and items! As the days shorten and the nights grow colder all the peoples of Middle-earth turn their thoughts to the annual Yule festival. Yulemath is celebrated by all the free peoples during the last month of the year. With traditional decorations, warm cider, rich feasts and other, more mischievous, pursuits; Yule is a time of hope across Middle-earth even as the Shadow of the enemy continues to grow.

Bringing the Age of Reckoning experience to Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau Gamers in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau who want to experience Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning have been brought one step closer to doing so with the launch of the game's localized Chinese language website. The site will provide background on the armies, history, characters and classes of WAR, including the upcoming introduction of The Black Guard and Knight of the Blazing Sun classes. Updated community news and account management functions will also be provided. "The launch of this site is a big step toward our goal of delivering WAR to a truly worldwide audience," said co-founder and GM of Mythic Entertainment (the game's developer). "We want any and all players to be able to join the ranks of Order and Destruction, regardless of location or language."

From: http://www.warcry.com/news/view/87940-EVE-Online-Client-Improvements-on-the-Way EVE Online developers have faced a tough task lately. When Quantum Rise was introduced, the client became a mess of bugs and problems. Subsequent patches have improved the client but the 'awesomeness' is set to return with patch v1.0.3 coming online on December 9th. See the patch notes:

CRITICAL

* We are changing the way the patcher behaves. Previously, if the patcher encountered locked files while patching it would suggest that you reboot to complete the patching (but allow you to cancel the reboot, in case you wanted to do something else before rebooting). Now it insists on a reboot before you continue. People will still have the option to close other programs before pressing the OK button to start the reboot. There were problems with locked files, reboot requests and Vista. That has now been fixed and should work normally on both XP and Vista. * The client will now check files and folders before starting the patching process. Previously, if it found extra files it would automatically move them to a temporary folder before continuing. Now it will suggest rebooting to complete patching (because these might be patch files for a pending reboot) or suggest that you should manually remove the extra files.

CHANGES

Need for Speed

* In our continuing efforts to improve fleet fights, we have made various improvements that have resulted in a much better overall performance. * We have made various performance improvements to UI rendering in the graphics engine. * Turrets and turret effects now work in the same way for both the Classic and Premium clients. A turret is no longer loaded into a scene unless it is either fired at you or you are "looking at" the owner's ship. Now, iff you disable turret effects you will only see the turret models of your own ship or any ship that you are explicitly look at. This reduces the loading time of scenes with a large number of turret ships substantially and increases the framerate per second on such scenes dramatically in Premium but has no effect on the Classic client. If you disable turrets, any turret model that is already in the scene will continue to be there. However, warping away and back again will clean out turret models. * Sentry gun turrets will also behave in the same manner as ship turrets. They will not appear unless you are looking at them or unless they are firing on you. * Drone models can now be disabled. Disabling the models has an incredible impact in loading up heavy scenes on both the Classic and Premium clients. The impact on the framerate per second once the scene is loaded will only be measurable if your camera is zoomed in far enough for the drones to resolve into models. When drone models are set to disabled then the turrets are automatically also set to disabled. * You can now disable camera shaking which both disables camera shake when missiles hit and when you're in warp. * You can now disable ship explosions. Ship explosions had the ability to add heavy load in major fleet engagements and can now be completely turned off. * Tactical notifications can now be disabled. Warp scrambling messages and self destruct are two examples of these notifications. Please note that these notifications will still display if it is your ship which is being affected. * We have added a new option called "Hide all brackets" which is the inverse of the existing "Show all brackets" and will function in the same way. The two options are mutually exclusive so activating one will disable the other. This is a new and easier way to disable brackets.

Graphics General

* We discovered that certain memory re-allocation behavior gave bad performance on Windows XP. We switched from regular memory heaps to low fragmentation heaps, which gave a tremendous boost to model loading on Windows XP. This change had no effect on Windows Vista, but the behavior on Vista both before and after is much better than on XP. * Bracket loading in heavy scenes has been substantially improved.

FIXES

Graphics General

* A memory leak has been identified and fixed resulting in a much smoother performance overall. * Under certain conditions the graphics engine would find objects that did not exist in the scene anymore. This has now been fixed and will no longer result in performance degradation. * Found and fixed an issue where the graphics engine DLL could not be loaded on certain older hardware

Miscellaneous

* An error will no longer be generated when jumping between two clones which both have implants.

Exploit Fixes

* Several exploits have been fixed making New Eden a better place for everyone.

World of Warcraft might have a larger install base, but Warhammer Online always has the coolest ideas for in-game content. To wit, the game's upcoming statuary. Far from simple aesthetic enhancements, each statue will represent one of the game's best players. As players are deemed worthy of being immortalized in stone, their likeness will appear within one of the game's key cities cast in virtual granite. Since space is limited for these stone likenesses, expect them to change frequently as players jockey for a space among the top-ranked WAR gamers.

We hope you've all gotten the chance to check out the new World of Warcraft Miniatures game, which was released last month. But if you haven't, you'll have the perfect reason tomorrow when Upper Deck launches the Deluxe Edition of the game. We've received a press release with all the details:

The World of Warcraft Miniatures Game Deluxe Edition starter comes with everything two people need to play, including six randomized figures, three each from two of the three factions (Horde, Alliance and Monster), including Upper Deck’s pioneering detachable miniatures bases (dubbed the UBase™), deluxe Beginner’s Guide, one of three high-quality Deluxe Edition game boards, and custom dice.

You'll also get a World of Warcraft Trading Card Game sample pack, including a loot card from the Drums of War expansion that gives you a cosmetic in-game upgrade. Keep reading below for the full press release, or check out the announcement on the WoW Minis page.

Whether you're for the horde or the alliance, your side doesn't matter as much because video game giant Blizzard's release of its latest multi-massive online role playing game sold over 2.8 million copies in 24 hours. World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King includes the much anticipated hero class death knight, along with a new profession, a cap level to 80, a new continent bigger than the outlands, and much more. Tim Barnett, an avid gamer said, "The turnout for Lich King was greater than Burning Crusade. I heard that people dressed up like Warcraft characters while in line for the purchase of the game."