Massively Week in Review: December 11 - 17, 2007

It's been quite busy in the MMO world if you haven't been keeping up. Auran let their entire staff go after Fury bombed; Electric Sheep only let 1/3 of their people go; Linden Lab did something seemingly dodgy with their Chief Technical Officer. Meanwhile, Sony Online Entertainment transfered characters from test to live servers (and knew it); CCP accidentally deleted some file named Boot.ini when folks upgraded to Trinity; Perpetual is living under the spectre of a lawsuit claiming fraud. If that weren't enough, some guy in Florida is still tilting at the IGE gold-seller windmill in court and Square-Enix is doing a marvelous job of refusing to help any players whose accounts were compromised by hackers (read: gil-sellers) over the weekend. If that doesn't make you want to jump up and start singing carols (or drinking heavily spiked egg-nog) we don't know what will. Perhaps free stuff? We've got that too. Check it out!

Contests

• Massively's holiday giveaways!

• Massively's holiday postcard contest

News

• Massively exclusive: Age of Conan Product Developer interview, with gameplay video

• Perpetual plot thickens: lawsuit filed

• Auran goes into voluntary administration, entire staff let go

• Final Fantasy XI hacked; Square-Enix hides behind policy

• A legal, in-game "Wal-Mart" of virtual goods coming to an MMO near you

• Rumor: Entire guild Unhallowed Triad moved from EQ2 Test Server to live

• SOE caught red-handed: EQ2 Player / Dev relationship breached ethical boundaries

• Tabula Rasa three day free trial opened to everybody

• Mounted combat in Age of Conan (and Warhammer, too?)

• EVE Trinity: CCP's take on the boot.ini debacle

• Herndandez vs IGE - IGE withdraws motion to stay/dismiss

• Massively's exclusive insider scoop: Was Cory Linden fired, or did he quit?

Discussion

• Are MMOGs escapism or a refuge?

• Top 10 MIA MMOs of 2007 - part 2

• The Digital Continuum: Activision Blizzard vs Electronic Arts, battle of the MMO titans

• The Daily Grind: It's better to burnout than to fade away

• MMO subscriptions report -- who is beating whom

• Peering inside - What does Cory Ondrejka's departure mean?

• As the Worlds Turn: Land of the Free

• Are MMOGs escapism or a refuge?

• MMOGology: Fat sacks 'o crap!

• Exactly when did you get hooked

• Behind the Curtain: Moral & Ethical choices

• Under The Hood: Going Live