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Welcome to the 820th Edition of Loading...

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Daily Column

Loading... the reason the Mars rover mission was such a success.

First, the Ten Ton Pulse, your finger on the beating heart of the MMOG industry.

If the Top 10 isn't enough, we now show the Top 20 and Top 50 lists as well, available to everyone on our homepage. (What is Pulse?)

Age of Conan - 200 BPM
World of Warcraft - 51 BPM
Lord of the Rings Online - 32 BPM
EverQuest 2 - 16 BPM
Lineage 2 - 15 BPM
Warhammer Online - 13 BPM
EVE Online - 12 BPM
Dungeons and Dragons Online - 12 BPM
Guild Wars - 10 BPM
Vanguard - 9 BPM

The Age of Conan Non-disclosure Agreement (NDA) has been lifted and that means that our AoC team can open up the gates to the largest Age of Conan information portal on the planet. That's right, the embargo is over. The guards have been pulled from their posts and you are free to openly gaze upon the Age of Conan information that until this point has been for testers only.

The idea of having a TenTonHammer.com guild in Age of Conan has been thrown around a few times. The original response was less than expected (about 40 people) and given that new guilds tend to lose many players who don't find the game to their liking I put the formation of a Ten Ton guild on hold, but the last few days have seen dozens of emails wing their way to my inbox asking if we were having a guild or not. The answer is, yes.

To better gauge the response and see who is serious about taking part Karen has opened up a message forum for the guild. If you would like to be part of the Ten Ton Hammer AoC Guild then this is your chance. Put your name in the hat (it's a huge black top-hat that rabbits jump out of) and we'll see how many people are going to get this party started. If everyone who reads Loading... signs up then we'll need 400 guilds. How cool would that be? We could name them stuff like, Ten Ton Hammer 1st Legion, Ten Ton Hammer 2nd Army, Ten Ton Bag of Hammers, etc.

If decapitation and nudity aren't your thing then not only is the Ten Ton AoC guild not for you, but you don't want to be around for one of our office parties. Instead, I suggest that you enter our Wonderland $1100 Giveaway.

Ten Ton Hammer recently teamed with Skyunion Co, Ltd to bring you Closed Beta keys for Wonderland Online. Now the Wonderland Team wants to thank you for helping test their game. They're offering a chance for Ten Ton Hammer faithful who tested the game to win $1100 in prizes.

Turbine, who coincidentally were the first company that I ever wrote a MMOG article about (Ah, Asheron's Call. I'm dating myself) put on a great show at the New York Comic Con. We have the video evidence of Kate Paiz and Craig Alexander giving presentations and answering fan questions about Dungeons and Dragons Online and Lord of the Rings Online. It became public yesterday that Turbine had obtained another USD $40 million in venture capital. More money for the company is a good thing, however venture capital money usually comes with a requirement that the VC company have a say in company decisions. The installation of Hani Nada of Granite Global (a VC company) on the board seems to justify that this is indeed the case with Turbine.

If you are part of the Age of Conan open beta I would love to read your impressions of the games. The Loading Forums await you. Do you feel the need to contact me personally with naughty pictures or derogatory comments? Here's my E-mail.

14 new MMOG hand-crafted articles today! 14 in May! 1033 in 2008!

New MMOG Articles At Ten Ton Hammer Today

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