Now and again the Prophecy Network likes to support anyone with a simple idea, or a crazy idea. In this case, I'll let you decide which one it is...

I'll hand it to Enomine who has a simple, if maybe mad idea to try and beat the most users online record on the Oifficial forums. It stands at 173, which was set in May 2009.

So come and show your support for Black Prophecy, make sure you are online on Sunday evening on the 11 April 2010 at 18:45-19:00 UK local time, or 19:45-20:00 Local time in most of Europe. Or just check the world clock for elsewhere in the world.

Want to know more, have a chat in this thread (English) or this thread (Deutsch).

P.S. If anyone wants to break the Prophecy Network's all time record at the same time, feel free.

Well the Easter holidays are over, and the date for Black Prophecy Closed Beta to start is early April. So far, no-one has let slip and told us they are in closed beta. (Although to be fair, anyone in closed beta would be under a NDA and probably shouldn't be telling us!)

However the signs are picking up that closed beta is coming soon.

One of the big signs is the hardware exchange for that is currently happening for Neocron, however the upgrade is over running. The upgrade started on 25th of March, and was supposed to be completed on the 27th of March. The upgrades are still taking place, but while Nidhogg was responding to players questions for an ETA, he did reveal these 2 little bits of information.

...We're moving Neocron to new servers in a new facility... (Source)

...(hence the server modernisation rather than closure)... (Source)

Now from my knowledge of Neocron, it runs on old Pentium 4 hardware that's about 6 years old, and Neocron is optimised to run on these old spec servers, but why move an old server cluster to new hardware? Apart from reducing your support costs, there is another use for the new hardware. Yes you guessed it, it's also could be the new hardware required for the Black Prophecy servers.

So when the Neocron game servers come back up, I do expect those emails for closed beta to start arriving in your inbox. (Although to be clear, I don't know how ReaKKtor are going to send out closed beta invites.)

However, that's not all from the speculation department.

Today, it was spotted that Carnage was now listed as a Lead Moderator on the Black Prophecy forums. For those who don't know Carnage, he is one of the Developers for Black Prophecy. He was also the lead QA for the Neocron 2.2 upgrade, he took a big role in talking to the community when the testing and development was taking place. And what does a developer need to help keep the Closed Beta forums in good order... yes some good moderator privs to close treads, sticky important notices and powers to banish spammers to the blood moons.

So the signs are out there, closed beta is edging a lot closer than we think.

Want to comment on closed beta start dates and speculation - head over to our forums and leave your thoughts in this thread.

Like most games, especially MMO ones, Black Prophecy takes place in it's own, unique universe, crafted by the ideas of Micheal Marrack and the necessities of game design. We've previously discussed the factions likley to be involved - this time, I'd like to look at and speculate about the actual physical world and locations and see what might be expected there.

Following on from the previous speculation about the factions players will be interacting with in Black Prophecy, this time I intend to try and provide the best picture possible of what the actual gameplay of Black Prophecy will be like and clear up some common misconceptions.

First off I’d like to clear up some common confusion. Comparisons to EvE are completely worthless, everything seen so far suggests that Black Prophecy will in fact have more common with some of the more heavily instanced fantasy MMOs than EvE, although very few similarities to both. Planetside is probably the closest comparison in MMO space, although comparisons with Reakktor’s previous game, Neocron would not be entirely unreasonable. In terms of gaming as a whole, MechWarrior 2: Mercenaries is probably the closest analogue you can find for BP, for reasons that will become apparent as we move through the article.

As part of our aim to be the best source of Black Prophecy information and resources, we will be putting up some new style articles of site, different to the news posts so far. In these articles we will do our best to collect Black Prophecy facts and material and collate them into what is known and then draw some conclusions or speculate on liklehoods from what we know.

 The Black Prophecy universe, as apparently developed by german author Micheal Marrack has a variety of factions competeing to complete their aims. In this article we'll look into what we know and can expect from those factions identifiable so far.

Read the full thing beyond the jump