Long-time Final Fantasy XI player, Corinth, who has worked with me on JP Button, and now writes for Final Fantasy XIV fan site, Eorzeapedia, has just completed an interview at PAX with Global Online Producer Sage Sundi and North American Online Producer Yasu Kurosawa.  Without the developers on hand, the discussion focused around the player community, both inside and outside the world of Eorzea.

• Players can expect to see seasonal events -- though they are still in the planning stages.
• Sundi believes FFXIV and FFXI should be combined into the same VanaFest-type event.
• As for VanaFest, the team is mulling over how to best serve Japan, North America AND Europe -- don't forget Europe! -- as they plan more offline events.
• The upcoming launch party in Japan (350 Japanese beta testers will receive an invite via lottery selection) will be fairly low key, with no live streaming for overseas players.  Some Japanese media will attend.
• The Premiere Site system will return, but cover many more sites, including those run by individuals.  The idea is to promote the work of true fans and further alienate RMT.
• The team is ready to support player-run events in game.  Currently, you need to send an e-mail to apply, but they will have a form set up in the future.
• PVP may be included as part of a specific event in the game, but there will be no open PVP.

With the worlds of Final Fantasy XIV's Open Beta filling up quickly, Square Enix announced today the addition of a new world for players to choose: Saronia.

This brings the list of available worlds to 16. If you'd like to check the status of your world, be sure to use our Server Status page, which updates every 2 minutes.

All past and present players of LotRO, and all beta participants, were notified via email Friday that they are welcome to login to the new content on Sept. 8 (or as soon as the maintenance downtime on the 7th concludes, we assume). Any interested in starting a new account for the newly Free-to-play game will have to wait two more days until Sept. 10th.

The new content includes:

• Volume III Book 2: The Ride of the Grey Company
• Enedwaith region
• LotRO Store
• Skirmishes now available at level 20 (was 30)
• Mounts available at level 5 (was 20)
• Maximum Shared Bank size increased to 50

Over the last few weeks, we've been giving you, the future citizens of Eorzea, sneak peeks of FFXIV, from our fishing guide to our tips on Japanese sayings that will help out in-game. But now, with the Open Beta phase pounding on our doors, it falls on all of us to make the FFXIV database as robust as we can by utilizing the FFXIV database. Here's what you can find:

• Abilities
• Guildleves
• Items
• Local Leves
• Mobs
• Recipes
• Zones

As you explore the realms of Eorzea, make sure you check back to ZAM FFXIV for extra information on the items that you’re looking for, whether that’s the Ocean Cloud, the Missing Teeth guildleve, Ursulie the NPC, the Hempen Cowl recipe, or a map of the Black Shroud zone – just simply type in the name of the item that you find and all of the details will come your way. Additionally, don't be afraid to simply tell us about the things you find in FFXIV by shooting us an email.

And remember those tooltips we promoted a few weeks ago? We hope that you can utilize them in your posts on our forums and around the Internet as well. So have at it folks – start exploring the world of Eorzea and tell us everything that you find!

Be sure to log-in and enjoy the XP and BP bonuses this weekend:

In celebration of the (U.S.) Labor Day Holiday Weekend, we've enabled the following bonuses across the Realms:

Normal Ruleset Servers:

• 200% bonus to XP in all Classic zones and dungeons.
• 200% bonus to BP gained in all New Frontiers zones.

Mordred:

• 200% bonus to BP in all Classic zones and dungeons and New Frontiers zones.

Gaheris

• 200% bonus to XP in all Classic zones and dungeons.
• 200% Bonus to BP in Capital Cities.

These bonuses are now active and run until 9/7/2010.

Another friday, another dev post from the team over at BioWare! This week, BioWare decided to focus on their interesting addition of Space Combat to their highly anticipated Star Wars MMO: The Old Republic. You can follow the link to their uploaded video, which showcases some impressive cinematics and game play of ships blowing up other ships, although for fans who are craving some free-wheeling exploration, it does seem like these are more "guided" missions than just blasting out into the middle of space (and really, that's a lot of work to do!). In the dev post, the team notes that there will be faction-based missions involving "epic space battles," with the core focus on space combat. Those flight scenarios look pretty darn nice!

Great news for Pirate loving League of Legends fans around the world, as Riot's latest champion addition is Miss Fortune, the gun-toting bounty hunter of the seas! Miss Fortune seems to be a gank-oriented champion who focuses on quick movement around the map, combined with her powerful gun-based abilities. Of particular interest is her incredible passive, Strut, which allows Miss Fortune to gain 25 movement speed every second (up to a maximum of 80) after falling out of combat for 7 seconds. This means that Miss Fortune can basically zoom around the map with a pair of Boots of Movement, rivaling the travel power of other scout champions, like Teemo and Nidalee.

Check out Miss Fortune's impressive ensemble of abilities after the jump!