Armada Online brings an indie tear to my eye. A sci-fi themed MMORPG with some of the sickliest-sweet art direction I’ve ever seen, Armada takes the hyper real art style of Eve Online and gives it a coating of playfulness. Don’t be mistaken though, Armada is already a surprisingly solid game, featuring quite an in-depth items, weapons and stats system for the RPG nerds deep down inside all of us and a rapidly growing and enthusiastic community. Currently the world features 1 PvP and 1 PvE instance, though I expect this to grow as more players discover the joy of massive PvP space battles. Hopefully a Mac client is forthcoming, since this would be a nice addition to the paltry options available to us Mac users (who like to keep their PCs permanently shutdown).

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Blizzard has added a feature to their website allowing users to view up to date statistics on some of the many data points contained within the massively massive multiplayer world. The WoW stats allow you to see the most auctioned items (Runecloth), most dangerous NPCs (Drek’Thar), most looted items (Linen Cloth), most created items (Soul Shard), most complete quests (A Threat Within) and the most gathered items (Chopper Ore). Whew. So go forth statistics nerds and bury yourself in gobs and gobs of data related to the game everyone loves to hate.

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Guild Wars has recently entered closed beta in China and has blown away expectations. Even though Guild Wars is being hyped as the most anticipated MMORPGs coming to the Chinese market, NCsoft and China partners The9 impressed many by receiving over 200,000 applicants on the first day of closed beta signups. Hot damn! Closed beta in China begins November 29th, administered by The9 Limited, who also are running WoW China.

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CCP, the makers of the sci-fi MMO EVE Online have announced that they will be merging with White Wolf Publishing, one of the leading creators of traditional RPG franchises in the world. The companies will operate autonomously, but with White Wolf owning some impressively rich worlds such as World of Darkness, it looks as if CCP is positioning themselves to release some interesting new MMOs in the coming future.

Read the full press release after the jump..

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As if the plethora of World of Warcraft community sites, forums, and MySpace pages weren’t enough, a new social networking site has started dedicated to World of Warcraft and it’s players. The site is called Warcraft Social and allows World of Warcraft players to create user profiles, including pictures, create guild groups in order to connect with guild members MySpace-style, among many other Warcraft-specific options. Though this is not an officially supported network, I wonder why more massive multiplayers aren’t offering first party social networks in addition to their other community-building efforts. Forums are so web 1.0 man.

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