MMO Roundup: Last week on Massively

Editorial: What could Apple's new iPad mean for MMOs?
If you consider yourself any type of technophile at all, you're probably well aware of Apple's announcement yesterday regarding their new iPad. This is basically the love child of an iPod Touch and a tablet PC, allowing users to take a fairly powerful slab of computing power with them wherever they go. While it might not be as beefy as your desktop machine or even a mid-range laptop, it has caused a giant wave of interest from consumers. So how does this affect us, as MMO gamers? We're glad you asked!

LotRO announces Volume III, Book 1: Oath of the Rangers
Lord of the Rings Online fans have been speculating for a while, wondering what the name of Volume III, Book 1 was going to be. Turbine's Sapience has been giving increasingly specific hints in a hangman-style game in the forums. Now the game's over, he's had his fun, and we have a title.
Volume 3:Allies of the King, Book 1: Oath of the Rangers is on the way, bringing with it plenty of new additions to the game.

Leadership tips from a former roleplaying raid officer
"Roleplaying" and "raid" both in the same sentence? Blasphemy! Yet, that was my position back in World of Warcraft, and I certainly roleplayed while participating in PvP and massive PvE (almost akin to raids) in The Matrix Online before its demise. Before all of that, I was a roleplaying guild leader in Final Fantasy XI and Phantasy Star Online, so I've been around guilds for a long, long time.

The 'Next Big Thing' in MMOs
Is All Points Bulletin the "Next Big Thing" in MMOs? While I'm fully aware that Realtime Worlds doesn't specifically prefer to associate the game with this genre, it's very much a part of it -- but it also orbits the fringes of what we commonly refer to as a massively multiplayer online game.

Massively's Black Prophecy Q&A: Mission Systems
Massively has been following the development of the sci-fi MMO Black Prophecy very closely, and was pleased that the title's developer Reakktor Media wanted to do a series of focused Q&As with us on several aspects of the game. Our last such Q&A started at the beginning with character creation, but in our second installment of the Black Prophecy interview series we discussed the game's mission design. To that end, we posed some questions to Lorenz Dames, the Lead Game Designer on Black Prophecy.

The Virtual Whirl: The meaning of life
"Get a life", "Get a first life", and so on, and so forth. If you're involved in virtual environments, you've probably heard this phrase a lot. Wagner James Au of New World Notes suggests that people who use those phrases are among the least likely to 'have a life' themselves.

The worrying future of Final Fantasy XI
There's a growing unease in the Final Fantasy XI community. It's one of those subtle things that no one is willing to outright talk about, but it's still there, just beneath the surface of a surprising number of discussions. And it's a bit unusual for an MMO, because it's not fear or anxiousness about something being broken from the last update or an upcoming update.

Wasteland Diaries: Community guide to Fallen Earth
With community being as important as it is in any MMO, accessibility to that community might sometimes be daunting. You want to learn more, but maybe you don't want to look like a noob by asking in-game. Maybe you want to start crafting, but you don't even know where to start. In keeping with our influx of community guides that have kicked off our new game-specific columns, we bring you Wasteland Diaries for all fans of Fallen Earth.

The Road to Mordor: Community guide to Lord of the Rings Online
We here at Massively have been avidly covering Turbine's Lord of the Rings Onlinesince we launched back in late 2007. And now, we're dedicating a new weekly column, The Road to Mordor, to cover the many facets of the game including the just announced Volume 3, Book 1 content update. Every Friday, we will be exploring topics and writing guides for both leveling players and end game raiders, crafters and role-players, info-hounds and casual browsers.

Massively and G4TV's The MMO Report
If you're a fan of G4TV's The MMO Report, you may have noticed a mention of a certain favorite MMO news site on the last two episodes. Why is that? We've teamed up with G4TV to provide the best MMO news to a wider audience.

Massively's tour through DDO Update 3
Recently, we posted information about the current release notes for Dungeons and Dragons Online Update 3, the latest in a series of updates from Turbine since Dungeons and Dragons Online went free-to-play last summer. The update is scheduled to go live on February 3rd, and is only the tip of the iceberg for Turbine's plans, including six content updates for 2010, with a new one added every two months.

Star Trek Online's State of the Game: The first patch
According to the latest State of the Game from Cryptic, Star Trek Online's first update will be surprisingly hefty. "The first update is going to have more PvP, Klingon exploration content, more ground fleet actions, more ship costume pieces, more playable species, and then some," says the executive producer Craig Zinkievich. Of course, that's only a small piece of the rather titillating article outlining the current plan for the first few months of updates.