How do you beat the beta leakers and NDA breakers at their own game? According to the folks at Carbine it’s simple – release the patch notes before they do. Timed to coincide with the start of WildStar's Closed Beta Test 2, the team is being incredibly open about what the new wave of testers can look forward to.

In a mammoth WildStar Wednesday update fans can now dig into a stack of tradeskill information, theorycraft over the latest class changes and delve into new dungeon and battleground information. Milestone 31 contains over nineteen pages of patch notes (you can read them in full on the official site) covering every aspect of the game, from the new Mentoring and Rallying systems to the many UI enhancements.

Carbine's had that "Sign up for Beta!" link on the WildStar front page for quite some time now. We've mentioned it in more than a few of these posts and I'm guessing most of you reading this have long since signed up and are wondering, "When can I play?!" Well, this week's WildStar Wednesday is here to give you some good news... sort of.

Movement is the oxygen of a video game. When the controls are perfect the keyboard and mouse become subconscious extensions of our self, translating commands to our avatars at the speed of thought. When they go wrong, playing becomes a frustrating battle that can leave you feeling locked out of the game. 

In an MMO, moving around is the single thing you’ll spend most of your time doing, as our own Bill "Lethality" Leonard discussed following his visit to WildStar's US Arkship event. Whether it’s dodging lasers from a crazed killer robot, chasing after a mining node that’s grown legs and is sprinting away, or just strolling around and enjoying the scenery, you’ll be constantly racking up the miles. Which is why, for a game like WildStar, movement is particularly important. So important, in fact, that they’ve devoted an entire DevSpeak video to the subject.

What does it feel like when a developer rolls out the red carpet? WildStar’s European fans were treated to their own Arkship-style fan gathering down in Brighton, UK recently, and I was incredibly lucky to snag an invite of my own. With the promise of plenty of hands-on playtime, some in-depth Q&A panels and a first look at both PvP arenas and instanced dungeons, I was drooling with anticipation from the moment it hit my inbox.

Carbine's teased us with mentions of it in other weekly posts and posts on their Twitter account, but for this week's WildStar Wednesday, those of us who weren't at ArkShip EU will finally get a peek at Stormtalon's Lair, the first instance/dungeon announced for WildStar.

Carbine's got some good news today for future Cassians/Mechari/Draken. Despite Exile forces conspiring to keep this info away from you (that or Carbine's ISP was just down for the day, but what are the chances of that?), for this week's WildStar Wednesday Thursday, we've got a preview of another early Dominion zone, Crimson Isle.

For some, MMOs are all about exploring the world and everything in it. They’re on an adventure, questing through every corner of the land, or battling through the toughest dungeons. If it involves saving the city for an epic reward, they’re in.

Others choose to take a different path; one littered with the corpses of those who challenged them. They’re out to prove themselves on the killing fields, either in tight arena combat or open battlegrounds. With the bloodlust in the air, the opponents they seek aren’t dungeon dwelling monsters, but other players.

After battling through the first ever WildStar Arena PvP tournament at Arkship EU (you can read her Dev Diary on arenas or responses to PvP concerns), I asked Carbine’s Lead PvP Designer Jen Gordy about her plans for the upcoming MMO. During the interview we touched on her general approach, skill balance between PvE and PvP, itemization and much more. 

The game engine is often an unsung hero of modern MMOs. When it works brilliantly we hardly even notice it, focusing instead on the dramatic art style, sublime musical score or excellent narrative. It’s only when problems emerge that we sit up and take notice how our favorite games are presented to us.

But what about the technology that brings it all together? After seeing the upcoming MMO for myself, I wanted to recognize this unsung hero of gaming greatness, and so I asked the folks behind WildStar if they’d shed some light on how their engine works. Whether it’s processing game rules or delivering pixels to our screens, WildStar’s MMO engine is a complex machine that acts as a window into the world of Nexus.

With Carbine’s upcoming MMO entering closed beta, we were eager to take a closer look at this mystical device. Luckily, Lead Software Engineer Steve Moret agreed to give us a rare peek inside the box and explain some of how WildStar’s engine works. From those first lines of code to more recent features, Moret explained what goes into the software that will be sitting on our desktops.

Ask any WildStar fan for his or her top three questions about Carbine’s upcoming MMO, and it’s very likely that payment models will be among them. It’s a huge source of speculation, with players trying to second-guess what the developer is planning.

The debate also demonstrates just how far the MMO marketplace has changed. Eight years ago, players expected to buy a box and then pay a monthly subscription. NCSoft and ArenaNet has since driven the subscription-free model, with Guild Wars 2 using a mix of monetization quirks that fans have really responded to. Sony Online Entertainment has led the way on free-to-play, dropping upfront entry fees and mandatory monthly subscriptions from almost all its games.