Get your scrollin' finger ready: Ultima Online just got a whole bucket of fixes and updates posted to the test server. If you're tired of your fish pies not being stackable, of mushrooms exploding under your house, or of gargoyles activating their stone form mid-flight, this is the patch for you! Lava Lobster fishing has been fixed, hats have stopped twitching, and gargoyle aprons have all been returned to their proper hue.

At long last, golems can no longer be used to exploit combat training, and vendors are seeing some big changes. Rather than increasing their fees once per day, vendors will charge incrementally over time. They'll also give players a grace period before heading out after running out of funds, and all vending penalties have been abolished. Hit up the official patch notes for the lengthy list, if only so you can learn that "Robin's Egg candy will no longer fill the tummy of the eater."

[Thanks to groovy webizen Derrick for the tip!]

A lot of things suck about the closing of a game. There's the obvious things like the people out of work, but there's a bunch of other sucky stuff too, like all the art that went into the game getting thrown out. Some of the folks from Tiny Speck are trying to make sure that Glitch's closing doesn't mean that the game's art is lost forever. They made an Indiegogo campaign to get funds for publishing a book of the art of Glitch.

The campaign is sitting pretty at over $27,000 raised at the time of this writing (the target was $17,000), but there are 45 days left for you to get in on the reward action.

MMO player and writer Ravious over at Kill Ten Rats knows how to ask the hard questions. Questions that other journalists are afraid to ask. Questions like, "If you were omniscient with regard to all corollary Guild Wars 2 data (including player emotion, all chat including voice chat, current snacks eaten, etc.), what crazy thing would you most like to know?"

Happily for the Guild Wars 2 fanbase, he also asks much more practical questions, and he directed some of those questions at ArenaNet's Izzy Cartwright. He even got some answers! Cartwright talked about how ArenaNet's ability to track players led to the implementation of certain dynamic events, meant to split up the player population in a map, which would trigger when there were too many players in an area. Another benefit of the team's data gathering is the ability to see where players are dying most often in order to adjust content difficulty as necessary. The economy is especially dependent on player activity, and Cartwright says that the team keeps a very close eye on item fluctuations to be sure that a relatively healthy stat is maintained.

Read the full interview over at KTR. If data, design, and programming really get your gears turning, consider checking out ArenaNet programmer Cameron Dunn's GDC talk on that subject.