This week's Grab Bag is mostly announcements, including one about the Island - which, unsurprisingly, turned out to be a very popular idea:

Yes, the Island is going into testing. The results were overwhelmingly in favor of testing Agramon and seeing how it played out - 34% liked it, but wanted to see how the testing plays out, and 29% just plain liked the idea. Only 7% did not like the idea. (The rest had no opinion or chose to bypass the poll.)

Of course, the poll had two "like" options and only one "dislike", so who knows what the results would have been like had a "I don't like it so far but might change my mind based on testing and more information" choice been available, though it seems likely the response would still have been overwhelmingly positive.

Also in the Grab Bag is a link to Kallisti's Frontier Maps, for anyone who hasn't learned their way around yet.

In other map-related news, I've added Derida's UI Mod to the links page; in addition to nice in-game maps (though without the mob annotations that Kallisti's have), this thing has a ton of UI options and an easy-to-install exe. If you want a nifty new UI without having to go through a lot of trouble, this is worth a look.

It's been a while since patch 1.74, but at last the style changes from that patch have been finished - namely the new level 2 styles (and the former level 2 styles now moved to level 1), and the new stealth styles. In my defense, despite my slowness, I seem to be the first one to have made those particular updates. Determination is also changed to its new less-than-OF but higher than old NF values.

And we're not talking about the movie, though I've heard good things (namely Scarlett Johansson). Anyway...

Mythic is putting a little Old back into the Frontiers with a new island connected to all three realms' beachhead. It sounds like an option for those who liked the Emain style fighting of yore.

- The island is named "Agramon" and will be tied in to the upcoming Darkness Rising expansion.

- All server types will have this island. Expect to see Agramon hit the live servers sometime in August, depending on beta testing on Pendragon.

- It is roughly triangular-shaped with each point of the triangle pointing towards one of the three Realm's beachhead keeps.

- A wide bridge connects Agramon to the each of these island beachhead keeps via a towerless wide bridge.

- Agramon is accessible by crossing the bridges beginning at each beachhead keep. Mountainous zonewall surrounds the entire island, except for the bridge and a small amount of beachhead access. To alleviate the bridge chokepoints, the bridges can be bypassed by swimming or by boats landing on the beach.

- Once across the bridges, there are fairly large spaces to fight in, before reaching a milewall with two separate gates through the wall.

- The island's terrain is mainly rolling hills of various elevation, with many very wide funnel points, such as in the old Emain Macha zone.

- Many small landmarks and structures are scattered about the island which help to define locations and mark good locations for battles.

- Between six and eight named regions (the final count is not yet determined) are located in Agramon, which help to direct the flow of fighting in a general way by establishing where battles are happening. These names will be easily typed and remembered.

After months and months and then some more months of waiting, Mythic finally has the TL report feedback up - for the reports sent in post-Catacombs. I haven't been pleased about the answers in any of the reports I've read so far, but at least now we know...

You can search the reports here, in a rather familiar looking format.

Actually, Mythic has just postponed Imperator to work on their recently acquired Warhammer game. Some of the staff from Imperator will also be moving (back, in some cases) to DAoC.

Given the extremely low level of anticipation for Imperator, this isn't really surprising; it may mean that Mythic's next game will end up cannibalizing the DAoC playerbase, though, since Warhammer will be a fantasy RvR game. For the near future, however, this is a great thing for DAoC - more developers presumably means more content. Maybe we'll even get Jewelcrafting, Mythic's last great undelivered 'promise'...

We thought it was just twins, but turns out the new classic servers are triplets, as Ector joins the family. So far Ector is troublingly small compared to his big brothers, though...

The new "classic" servers, Gareth and Lamorak, are up now for those whose accounts were active the first of this month; everyone else will have to wait a couple days. Judging by the population numbers, either a lot of people are planning to call these new servers home or a lot of people just want to try something new for a while...

The patcher is doing pretty well thus far, so if you're able, getting in before the evening crush is a good idea.

There are two recent interviews out. The first is with Walter "Copper" Yarbrough, about Darkness Rising, featuring this noteworthy comment:

Jonric: Will the content in Darkness Rising be appropriate for all levels of characters, and what if anything are you adding related to the Realm vs. Realm aspect?

Walter Yarbrough: Shrouded Isles presented content for all level ranges in the game, and Trials of Atlantis was a high-level expansion. For Catacombs, we went back to an expansion for the lower levels, so with Darkness Rising, we will again be focusing on the high-level game.

The systems in Darkness Rising will allow players to expand their high-end characters with new sub-classing abilities and new Champion weapons. While we won't be directly changing our RvR areas with an expansion, these new abilities and weapons will have an effect on the RvR game.

You can read the rest of that one here. The other is at GameGossip with Camelot's new Executive Produce Jeff Hickman, and doesn't have any over-riding topic... you can read that one here.

Two new links have been added - first, Valmerwolf's DAoC Maps. The site has maps of absolutely *everything*. The other link is DAoC Duskwave, which is sort of like a less class-specific version of the Camelot Gatherer. It works only for the European servers, but has some nifty features like the ability to view top guilds by members and the option to choose a character of yours to show on the front page every time you visit.