In another assertive move by Blizzard Entertainment to crack down on World of Warcraft gold and items vendors, PayPal has agreed to prohibit the use of its accounts for buying and selling these virtual goods. Blizzard complained to PayPal using an "Intellectual Properties violation" which PayPal has chosen to honor. According to Curse, "PayPal has honored these complaints, and has sent notices to all affected parties stating that they must stop providing these "services" on their website(s). If they refuse, they can no longer use PayPal as a payment option."

ou were reported to PayPal as an Intellectual Properties violation by Blizzard Entertainment Inc. for the sale of World of Warcraft Merchandise.

If you feel your sales do not infringe upon the intellectual property rights of the Reporting Party, please complette the attached Objection to Infringement Report by January 21, 2011.

The completed form should be faxed to the attention of the Acceptable Use Policy Department at [number removed] or emailed to [email removed].

Should you choose not to object to the report, you will be required to remove all World of Warcraft Merchandise from the website [url removed] in order to comply with the Acceptable Use Policy.

Source: Curse.

In a surprising announcement, the January issue of the Warhammer Online Producer's Letter has revealed that Carrie Gouskas has moved on to "another aspect" of WAR's development and that James Casey is taking over her duties. What Gouskas is working on will be detailed at a later date. In the meantime, Casey discusses plans for the upcoming year including patch scheduling, the restructuring of Scenarios, live events, account entitlements, and announces that server mergers may be forthcoming.

Finally, I’d like to address a topic that I’m sure is close to everyone’s hearts; server population. We’ve been monitoring the situations on each of our servers in every market. Our current situation on most of the servers shows us numbers that fall within traditionally acceptable parameters, notably our peak population values. Peak population is where we see the most activity on the server; during what is considered prime-time for the server or ‘peak’ hours. However, we understand that population is a key component to enjoying the game. As part of an effort to ensure off-peak hours are as enjoyable as peak hours can be, we are actively discussing our plans for lower population servers. If you haven’t heard anything to this effect by the time this letter sees print, you should see something very soon. We are committed to ensuring that we do what is needed to make sure players enjoy their experience in WAR.

Read more here.

CCP Omen has posted a new developer blog on the official EVE site about changes in the planetary interaction since the advent of the full Incursion expansion. CCP Omen spends time discussion the Extractor Control Unit (ECU) and how exactly it works. Omen provides players with a great user guide complete with images and instructions on making the best use of the ECU.

Another new aspect of the extractor heads is the concept of an "uptake area". The uptake area is the area under the extractor head from which resources are being extracted. The uptake area is directly linked to the duration of the ECU's program. A longer program equals a larger uptake area. If the uptake area of an extractor head overlaps another uptake area, this overlap creates an interference zone. Interference is indicated as noise around the extractor head and a negative percentage in the ECU's extractor head list.

• Networks belonging to different players does not affect each other directly
• The only way two players affect each other is indirectly via the depletion layer
• There is no extractor head overlap between heads from different players ECU's

Read more here.

Pendulo Studios has taken the wraps off "The Next Big Thing", the adventure title for Mac currently in development. The Next Big Thing sends players through a cinematic adventure. The story introduces the charismatic duo Dan Murray and Liz Allaire, who get wrapped up in a crazy adventure full of twists and packed with hilarious encounters. The game is slated to launch in April 2011.

The Next Big Thing is Pendulo Studios' biggest production to date. The game takes players on a grand adventure through the world of cinema, where they will solve an unbelievable case! It truly shines with HD graphics in a gorgeous hand-drawn style. With funny dialogue and a dynamic duo at the helm, adventure fans will want to play The Next Big Thing when it releases in April 2011 for PC and Mac.

Find out more at the official web site.

With the recent addition of Sansha 'incursions' to EVE Online, activity in certain sectors of the game has increased dramatically. As a result, devs have been tracking issues reported by players and have deployed a patch to address several important concerns.

• Based on your feedback, we’ve cut the system control regain in half. That means Sanshas will regain control much slower than before. This is a first tweak of this value, and we’ll be monitoring the Incursions over the weekend to see if this was too much/too little.
• The journal, specifically the global report, was not updating properly. We’ve put in a fix that should make it update accurately.
• One of the things we found out initially was that sites were being kept “alive” for a long time after they were completed. The number of players in each system meant that you’d always have traffic going into sites, which means they didn’t de-spawn. Hopefully we’ve dealt with that problem by removing the beacon from overview when a site is completed. This should decrease the traffic going into completed sites. This, combined with optimization of the sites should mean the re-spawning of content is quicker and more graceful.

In addition, developers have started a feedback thread with several targeted questions with regard to future tweaks and improvements to incursion play.

Read more here.

Incursion, the EVE Online expansion, recently launched in its full glory with the final content deployment. The Sansha and some major game play improvements have finally arrived. Our sister site, MMORPG.com, has an interview conducted by Garrett Fuller. He recently had the opportunity to chat with several members of the CCP team to talk all things Incursion. Check it out and then leave us your thoughts in the comments below.

For Incursion, what was the biggest challenge for the design team?

CCP Soundwave: Rewards. Definitely rewards. Designing open world PVE across different security bands and rulesets is incredibly difficult. Imagine one of those boxes you had as a kid; It has x number of holes in different shapes, and x number of shapes that fit those holes. Designing the reward system for Incursions was pretty much like having to fit a square through all the different holes. On the positive side, it gave us a unique opportunity to experiment with a reward system that no one else has tried before. A close second was designing PVE content on a massive scale compared to anything we’ve done before. A lot of firsts for the design team in this expansion!

Read more of Garrett Fuller's EVE Online: Incursion Interview.

Paragon Studios has announced that the annual Spring Fling event will begin on February 10th and run through March 6th. Players can group together to complete several event-specific quests that will yield costume pieces, badges, and temporary powers. Also, don't forget this weekend's double XP event to gain a few levels prior to the Spring Fling.

That's right, with winter wrapping up it's time for our annual Spring Fling celebration! This is the season of love, and that means heroes and villains will need to embrace those fuzzy feelings and work together. Co-op teams missions will have players venturing to the Well of the Furies, retrieve Aphrodite's girdle, and stopping a dimension-hopping goblin. And as a reward for your deeds, there are various costume pieces to unlock, badges to earn, and temporary powers to be bestowed!

Read more here.

If you’re a fan of the old Sierra adventure games, today’s a happy day! AGD Interactive, the fan group who remade the first two King’s Quest games and Quest for Glory II with VGA graphics and a point and click interface, has revealed the imminent release of King’s Quest III Redux for Mac.

All of AGDI’s King’s Quest remakes feature enhanced game visuals including hand painted backgrounds and character portraits, full voice acting (with former Sierra employee Josh Mandel reprising his role as King Graham!), lip sync, and digital soundtracks. Plus they’re free to download, and run on today’s computers without fiddling. The games were created using the Adventure Game Studio engine.

The King’s Quest games were some of the first adventures I ever played, so this announcement makes me ridiculously excited - I hope you are, too! Please send me a note if you want a review copy or if you end up covering the any of these remakes. We’d love to see what you have to say about them.

While the release date hasn't been announced yet, you can find out more about King's Quest Redux here.

The latest EVE Online blog post by CCP Stillman discusses team efforts to keep user data safe and the underlying HTTP protocol used by the API feature. As a result of new and aggressive hacker attempts, the team is changing the protocol from HTTP to HTTPS to ensure that user data remains secure.

If you're anything like me, you religiously check the status of your character training and market orders on your smartphone. It's the greatest invention ever, especially if you can't log into EVE Online or EVE Gate. It's also nice to be able to pull out your smartphone at Fanfest and show off your nice skills and large wallet.

As we've added more information to the API, there's more incentive to try and acquire these keys by nefarious people. Due to the underlying use of HTTP when querying the API, it's possible to sniff the data stream of an API user and acquire their API key if they're using an unsecure Internet connection. This is not a good idea. And we don't want it to be that way. So we went ahead and enabled HTTPS on our API servers, which makes too much sense.

Read more here.