Community, each of our games has featured an incapacitation mechanic that kicks in once you take a certain amount of damage. While incapacitated, you can either wait for a friendly Medic to revive you, or join the next respawn wave. What we're interested in today, though, is the subtle differences each Splash Damage game has brought to incapacitation:

• In Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, once you were incapacitated and chose to join the respawn queue, there was no going back from that choice (even if, say, a Medic suddenly appeared nearby).
• Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars allowed you to freely switch back and forth between waiting for a Medic and joining the next respawn wave.
• Finally, Brink added another choice to that mix, allowing you to pick the exact moment of being revived once a Medic had dispensed a revive syringe to you.

With all of these variations on the incapacitation theme, we put it to you, Community:

Which incapacitation mechanic reigns supreme?

Please cast your vote in our latest poll. Furthermore, if there's anything you particularly liked or disliked about the various incarnations of incapacitation throughout the years, or if there's an entirely different mechanic you'd like to see, let us know in the comments.

We're excited to announce that Mark Fascia, Lead Gameplay Programmer on the critically acclaimed Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, is now Splash Damage's Technical Director. Marc will be overseeing our programming teams and guide all of our technology efforts.

This is what Splash Damage's CEO Paul Wedgwood had to say about Marc's appointment:

We're hugely impressed by Marc's combination of insane technical ability and project management skills. In particular its Marc's obsession with fun gameplay and his personable nature that makes him the perfect person to lead our army of awesome programmers.

For more information, including Marc's background in the industry and a bonus quote, check out the official press release.

Finally, if you missed our other big staffing announcement last week, FIFA's ex-development director Griff Jenkins has taken up the role of Director of Production here at Splash Damage. Full details on that over here.

Those of you playing Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory will have noticed that the internet server list currently comes up empty. This is due to an issue with the master server that is being investigated by the fine folks over at id. In the meantime, forum member Paul has put together a back-up master server that you can use to get your multiplayer fix for now.

This workaround is not officially supported and any modifications you make to the game are "at your own risk".

With the disclaimer out of the way, you can find Paul's workaround in this forum thread. Steps are offered for both server admins (to make their servers show up in the new list) and players (to retrieve the new list within their game). On a side note, Paul's solution is set up in such a way that it'll automatically be overridden the instant any official master server comes online.

Hot on the heels of Paul's blog post about what you can expect from us this year, we've got our first announcement to make today. We're delighted to announce that Griff Jenkins has been appointed Splash Damage's Director of Production and will oversee all of our development efforts. Griff previously spent seven years at Electronic Arts where he led big franchises like FIFA and Need for Speed and managed multiple development teams simultaneously.

Here's what our fearless CEO Paul Wedgwood had to say about Griff's appointment:

Following FIFA's incredible success, Griff's new role at Splash Damage will be to improve our games by improving the way we make them. Under Griff's leadership we'll elevate production to a discipline on par with art, design, and programming. These are areas that we've always constantly strived to improve, and production should be no different.

For more details about this appointment and Griff, check out the full press release.

We've enjoyed a fantastic first 10 years at Splash Damage and we're looking forward to an even more exciting future. A huge part of this is due to you - our fans - so in this update, I'd like to give you a quick glimpse of what you can expect from us this year.

There are many different types of FPS multiplayer modes out there - some take just a few minutes for a round to finish, while others can last hours (I'm looking at you, 64 player mp_marketgarden!). What's really interesting to us this week is to know how much time you actually spend playing on average when you sit down for some multiplayer action. Are your sessions 30 minutes? Several hours? We must know!

So, here's this week's question:

When playing a multiplayer title, how long do you usually play for per gaming session?

Please cast your in this week's Community Question poll. As a bonus question, are there any factors that make you play longer or less (such as clanmates being along for the ride or double XP weekends going on)? If so, please let us know in your replies.

One of our artists, Laurens Corijn, enjoys taking ordinary Nerf guns and turning them into something entirely more special. For this latest project, he decided to transform a Stampede ECS18 into the Resistance’s Gerund assault rifle from Brink. The end result is utterly stunning, to say the least. Luckily for us, Laurens has documented the entire creation process, so we can follow it along step by step. There are more photos of the finished article at the end of this post.

Take it away, Laurens:

Every game we've ever made has included some form of melee combat. Be it Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory's knife or Brink's "off-hand" strike with whatever gun you're currently holding, there have been a variety of ways to bring the pain up close. With melee mechanics being quite different, we'd like to find out from you which of them you prefer. With that in mind, here's this week's question:

What is your preferred style of melee attack in first person shooters?

Please vote in our latest Community Question poll and let us know in the comments why your choice works best for you. Our designers look forward to your answers!

And just like that, 2011 is nearly at an end. As we run off into the holidays, we'd like to wish all of you a very happy Christmas period and a fantastic new year. 2012 promises several industrial-sized barrels of concentrated excitement and we can't wait to open them up with you!

Until next year!
-Splash Damage

Competitive play has been part of multiplayer games from the very beginning, with individuals and clans contesting everything from flags and skulls to bomb sites and entire hills. These days, online tournaments and matches of note are often available to be watched live via streams or TV clients, or can be viewed after the fact by way of video-on-demand or demo recordings.

This week's Community Question seeks to find out how many of you have ever actually taken advantage of either form of match coverage, for any game out there (no matter what genre!):

How often do you watch live streams or recordings of multiplayer matches?

To cast your vote, head on over to this week's Community Question poll and tick the appropriate options there. Also, if you can think of any stand-out examples of match coverage, either built directly into a game or provided by a third party, post them up in the comments.