Every Monday the Planetside community team has its players participate in a conversation about the best strategies. This week the focus is on the best strategies on effectively using the Medic skills. Check out the blurb from Planetside Players and feel free to participate in the forum thread!

Strategies and tactics are commonly discussed in the Art of War forum. This time around we're looking for your thoughts and ideas on how a soldier can utilize medical abilities on the battlefields of Auraxis in Medic Strategies.

This in from SOE: On Tuesday January 13, we will be performing maintenance on the PlanetSide character database. At that time, characters on accounts that have been inactive for more than 90 days will be deleted. This means a number of names will be freed up for our player base to use. Characters on active accounts will not be affected, regardless of the last login, whether to that account or that character.

This from Miir of Malvision:

I'm permanently retiring my old game movies.

--Illia

GameaGossip.com has posted an Interview with Dallas Dickinson, producer of PlanetSide, in which he discusses the additions coming in the Core Combat expansion, including new items, new areas and urban combat. You can read the interview at this link.

Miir of Malvision has released a new movie entitled Captain Carnage II, The Return of Captain Carnage. --Illia

Square Enix is providing us with a significant number of beta accounts for our premium members to try out their new MMORPG Final Fantasy XI.  I've been playing it a while now and I think you are going to enjoy getting into this beta.  The giveaway is only open to residents of the US and Canada and you need to meet the system requirements, and of course you need to be an Allakhazam Premium Member to enter.  Use this link if you are interested in signing up.  Signups for the giveaway will close on Monday, so be sure to enter now.

Malvision has done it again, a new movie is available - LIBERATION.

The following patch was released: July 20, 2003 We will be releasing a client-side patch July 20, 2003 at 3 AM Pacific. The patch will contain the following: Bug fixes: 1. Spawn tube doors are fixed, this also fixes numerous issues where hacked doors would not open. 2. Players who have more than 100 health due to empire balance adjustments will have full health bars. 3. Players with 1 health point will no longer appear dead on your client. 4. Your UI settings will now persist between logins. 5. You will no longer have a strange chat message appear when you are revived. 6. Liberator and Skyguard certifications appear on myPlanetside. 7. You can no longer get stuck in offline training mission 1 if you clear your inventory. 8. /who teams results are now formatted correctl. 9. /ignore player results are now formatted correctly. Additions: 1. Medic/Engineer/Hacker icons will appear over friendly heads if they are holding the associated tool, i.e. Medical Applicator, BANK, Nano-dispenser, REK. 2. Advanced medics are able see dead people who have not yet released their corpses on the proximity radar when they have a Medical Applicator equipped. Likewise, dead players who have not yet release their corpse can see the position of Advanced Medics who are holding the Medical Applicator. Changes: 1. Faster clean up of objects based on object density. In other words, if there are many objects appearing, such as backpacks and destroyed vehicles, they will decay faster. This is intended to help client and server performance in large battles. 2. Grief Points work on a sliding scale, where grief accumulates faster as a player accumulates more points in a brief period of time. The threshold for grief accumulation to begin moving up this sliding scale has been increased. This should reduce the grief generated in extended vehicle collisions. 3. Change to nano-dispenser fire effect. 4. Performance monitor can be toggled pressing Shift and the period key. This will allow you to view your framerate and ping times and packet loss. 5. The Lasher's refire rate was increased, lashes more often and in a slightly larger space. 6. The Thresher's flux cannon damage has been increased 50% against players and its range has been increased 50%. 7. The maximum Cone of Fire on the Mini-Chaingun has been reduced. The Cone of Fire expansion now starts later in the burst and expands more slowly. 8. The Skyguard's flak cannon range has been doubled. 9. Marauder health increased by 1/3. 10. Thresher health increased by 1/3. 11. Empire logos on HART dropships are fixed and look better. 12. The Lightning now sports 360-degree turrets. 13. The Hotspot threshold has been decreased. Six people involved in a battle will generate a Hotspot. Hotspots will also last longer. 14. Updated physics engine to Karma 1.3.

We have another giveaway for you. This time we are giving away six copies of the Macintosh version of Everquest (click here to see the EB Games page for it). As is always the case, the contest is only open to our premium members. If you are a premium member, you can sign up for the contest by going to this page. If you are not yet a premium member, but want to enter the contest and also get all of our other cool premium features, Go to the signup page and sign up and then you can enter the contest. We will draw the names of the winners on August 1st, so signups are open until that date.

Client-Side Patch - July 11, 2003 A client-side patch is being released today that should resolve many of the crash issues related to sound that players were experiencing.