The community managers, just as promised allowed us another small sneak peak at something new being introduced this Thursday on Patch Day. Today, it's the new Launcher and while I think the design itself is great I'm not still not sure whether to like it or not. Let me tell you why.

It got a little rough on the forums in the last couple of days, the secrecy of the CMs was criticised and people where asking what they're currently working on but got no response whatsoever. This changed today as the first Content Patch got announced. Bringing of course a couple of bug fixes, new content and what the deuce? New Hoods!

People already noticed that the Arena, located in the Arena District of Quarterstone is currently closed with NPCs telling us something about PeP-related doping. A pseudo lore explanation, but well  I guess it's okay. Anyway you can simply go past those NPCs and walk into the door, and you'll be zoning into the Arena itself.

Just as other games out there, The Chronicles of Spellborn has will encounter players trying to exploit any, even the slightest bugs to gain an unfair advantage. Right now, there is the first instance of people abusing a just recently discovered bug to get fame and PeP without risk. Something has to be done!

You probably already noticed that the awaited fame fix went live yesterday. This means that it's finally save to proceed with the game in terms of questing.  I therefore travelled to the shard of Ringfell to the region called Heart. And I must say, it's the to this point prettiest region I've visited in the game. Well, after the Athaneum of course, but that doesn't count.

A Bittorrent powered download for the game client was added recently, the game client can be downloaded for free and is the one used by the F2P-trial users for instance. Box users benefit because an installation from your hard drive is usually significantly faster than using you DVD plus you get to preserve the disc and decrease the risk of it being damaged in the process.

Last week the community managers promised the fame trap will be gotten rid of early next week, and now the moment has come at least for me to see if they can keep up to what they promised, which is way important to me than a bug free game in general. I bought the game, and followed its development in the understanding it would not be another grind fest and that XP, or fame how it's called in TCoS will be something you'd have to do quests for.

I've mentioned the bad skill tool tips and descriptions in my post about stats and values. Today I stumbled over another good example for this which caused some major annoyances in battle which bothered me for the last couple of days. The description of the third body slot skill for the Wrathguard "Hawk's Wall Crown" is simply wrong or at least badly worded. I first though of it as a rather decent ability despite its ridiculously meaningless name.

Eurogamer, known for its harsh and critical reviews gave The Chronicles of Spellborn 8 out of 10 points. I sincerely hope this, and the yesterday introduced F2P client will increase the player base. The Eurogamer Network is one if not the largest independent gaming news network in Europe based in the UK

One week after the German speaking world saw the release of the retail version of The Chronicles of Spellborn, today it's time for our friends in France and Benelux to get their copies. The F2P/Trial version got released as well and I hope it will draw some more new players to the game and increase server population. Don't get me wrong I don't want a server full of freebies but I expect that a lot of them will get an subsciption because they game is just awesome.