Turbine announced that their games will be down on Monday: "All Turbine games and services will be undergoing maintenance on Monday, December 1 from 4:00AM - 12:00PM Eastern (-5 GMT). All game servers will be offline. The websites, forums, wikis, and myaccount.turbine.com will be intermittently available."

Plenty of time to finish off the turkey leftovers!

Crafting remains one of the most tedious aspects of MMOs. For most players, trade skills are a nice addition to the gaming experience but we'd rather not quit our adventuring "day job" for long hours at a time to keep up on crafting. Trade skills are generally time consuming, tedious, and devoid of player skill when they should be enjoyable, not just for the rewards they offer at the end of the hard work, but because the hard work is fun in and of itself.

When Tolkien, the father of modern fantasy, wrote "The road goes ever ever on," MMOs took him at his word. A large part of online gaming consists of traveling from one point to another, but when it takes so much time to get anywhere, frustration mounts. If I'm picking up a book or alt-tabbing to web surf or check e-mail instead of playing the game, there is something wrong with the dynamics.

November marks the ninth year that Turbine has been operating the game Asheron's Call. Having help set the foundation for all games that came after, Turbine is offering its players the chance collect anniversary t-shirts, visit the 'disco', and perhaps enjoy some live events. Head over to the official forums to join in the fun!

In this week's RoleCraft, Jim Moreno looks at how the new WoW Achievement system could affect roleplaying.