Greetings!

In honor of Patch 1.4.5 and in lieu of a Weekend Warfront, we launched a bonus weekend:

• 50% bonus to all Renown gained
• 50% bonus to all Experience gained

Bonuses are now active on all live servers and will continue until Monday, February 6th.

Thanks for your continued support and enjoy the bonuses!

New Comic: Transposition

Tycho: Readers are lashing out at William C. Deitz’ addition to the Mass Effect ouvre, with his new novel “Deception.”  Indeed, they feel deceived!  And they are cataloguing this beast-man’s transgressions in an endlessly elaborated upon codex with such terrible granularity that I’ve begun to feel sympathy for the man.  I was under the impression that I liked Mass Effect, maybe even liked it a lot, liked it more than most people.  But, no.  I’m not entirely certain I want to like Mass Effect this much. Tie-In Fiction seems like a tough racket, all told.  It has a mercenary quality

We used the maintenance to apply the following correctives:

• Fixed an issue that was causing players to be sent to the wrong location when attempting to engage in the Hunter’s Vale Dungeon in Tier 1.

• Fixed an issue that was allowing players with the relic to be summoned, queue, or the like.  Players should not be able to move with the relic via these methods now.

• Added missing messaging and localization files.

As part of the introduction of Fortresses, we introduced a mechanic to allow City Queuing via the scenario UI element.  Unfortunately, this has led to some issues with the City invasion instances within the Live environment that were not discovered previously.  Because of this, we need to remove this functionality, at least for the moment to ensure that players can queue and enjoy the City Instances properly. 

This will mean players will need to enter the city via the doors to the city as they did previously.

Update - 10:40am EST: All servers are back online.

 

Greetings!

We will be bringing all North American and European servers offline tomorrow, Thursday, 02/02 at 8:00 am EST/14:00 CET for maintenance.
At this time we anticipate that all servers will be back online no later than 12:30 PM EST/18:30 CET.

As always, please be sure to check the Herald for updates regarding this downtime.

Thank you for your continued support.

We have applied the following hot fixes to all servers:

Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue where the new queue for city scenario function was allowing people to enter after the contested state.  Players will now only be able to queue if the city is in a contested state and not during the rebuilding or transition states.


• Fixed an issue where relics didn't broadcast when they moved across zones.
  

Tycho: Douglas Adams suggested in his opus that mice were not simply mice but rather the unassuming projections of a pan-dimensional race into our universe.  I’ve met Daniel Cook before, wiry and lean, compact, an organism apparently designed for fold-up travel, and I wonder if there isn’t something similar going on with him. If you’ve played Panda Poet or Triple Town, you’ve played his games.  There is a very interesting (though perhaps “inside baseball”) account of his dealings with publisher 6waves that we have taken great care to summarize in today’s strip. Gabriel wanted to know if I had

New Comic: The Creative Spark

Due to an EA-wide maintenance that will affect our game and others, we will be bringing down our account center at 11:45pm EST (4:45am GMT).
During the maintenance you will not be able to change subscription, redeem game codes or transfer characters.

At this time we expect the service to be back up no later than 8am EST (1pm GMT).


See you on the battlefields!

Update - 2:50 pm EST: All servers are back online with game update 1.4.5.

 

Greetings!
 
We will be bringing all North American and European servers offline tomorrow, January 31st 2012, at 8:00 AM EST (14:00 CET) for the deployment of Game Update 1.4.5. At this time we anticipate that all servers will be back online no later than 3:00 PM EST (21:00 CET).

As always, please be sure to check the Herald for updates regarding this downtime.

Tycho: Gabriel the Younger expressed intense delight at the prospect of Minecraft Lego, a state of affairs his father could not entirely understand.  A member of the forums awaits with great anticipation the inevitable Lego Minecraft videogame.  This is the Circle of Life; one can very nearly hear Elton John. I didn’t even know about any extra quests or whatever in Kingdoms of Amalur with new copies, but learning that such a thing exists isn’t as startling to me as it is to other sentients.  The version of Kingdoms of Amalur we have contains no DLC code, it was just

New Comic: Plurality

This weekend’s warfront is open for battle. The scenario ‘Talabec Dam’ is available for all tiers.
Grab the Powder Keg and obliterate the enemies!

'Talabec Massacre' is now live and will continue until Monday, 01/30.

Gabe: We have just finalized the concert line up for PAX East. Check this shit out! Friday: VGO Protomen Metroid Metal Minibosses Saturday: Supercommuter Paul & Storm Jonathan Coulton MC Frontalot Also a reminder that PAX East 3 day badges are sold out. You can still get single day badges though.  One last thing: We need Enforcers! You can download the application here and then mail the completed form to: klindsay@penny-arcade.com -Gabe out

Gabe: Once again I was able to beg an early copy of a game. This time I scored Kingdoms of Amalur. I’ve been playing it now for a few days and I am in love. I’m probably not supposed to talk about the game yet but I figured it would be much easier to ask for forgiveness rather than permission as the old saying goes. I’m not incredibly far in the game and I don’t want to spoil anything but I do want to give my impressions. Yesterday on Twitter I said I thought it was better than Skyrim and I

Tycho: There are many games where box breaking is core to the experience, a cultural practice, a folkway, and this happens in Kingdoms of Amalur as well.  Games are developing more robust approaches to assessing your moral coordinate with precision, but they’re still several long miles from basic etiquette. I’m sure they’ve already printed the cases for it, which is too bad, because it would be fun to have the cover say something like AMALUR? MORE LIKE AM-ALURRING hoooooo - TYCHO BRAHE, PENNY ARCADE You guys can have that, if you want.  That’s a freebie.  I think Gabriel wants to talk about

New Comic: Boxinalia

Greetings,

We will going through the Grovod Caverns scenario, tonight from 8 to 10pm EST.

We will run a massive run through of Forts, Relics, and Grovod on Friday, January 27th from 6 to 10pm EST.

We have a few codes to give away, and will be randomly selecting a few players from among the PTS participants present for each testing block.

Hope to see you out there!

Gabe: After playing so much SW:TOR and really enjoying it I decided to try a Star Wars book. I had given up them a while back after a series of extremely bad books. I ended up grabbing Darth Plagueis. If it had just been incredibly boring I might have stuck it out but it was also stupid. I was listening to an especially lame chapter when the narrator started talking about ancient Sith lords and their lost techniques. One such lord was a sort of ancient necromancer and his name was Darth Andeddu. I don’t care what stupid space way you