Wizard101

I’ve renamed the Web Log to the Daily Blogroll, just because I like the name better. Also, in the Shameless Self Promotion dept, look for the last Adventures in Monopoly scheduled for later today. There’ll be more adventures with Dire Bear, Scottie and Car, when they have another story to tell. It’s server merge time in EQ2 again. This time, the US PvP servers Nagafen and Venekor (RP) will merge after Fan Faire in June. Most PvP players seem okay with it, but some are taking it really hard. ...

I read on The Friendly Necromancer’s site that little leprechauns had appeared all over Wizard City, ready, willing and hoping to give everyone who talked to them 50,000 gold. So, my excited overspending on the first night of housing on the Test realm, was erased! When I logged in, I found more than that had been erased – all the characters had been reset, and I had all my original money back but had to buy those islands again. ...

Way back in February, I was getting within a few weeks of finishing Dragonspyre and was wondering how many times I would have to complete the final instance before I got Malistaire’s drop, my Life class robe, the best Life robe in the entire game, bar none. After running the numbers, I concluded: “How many times will you, personally, run the last instance? Count on at least seven.” Tonight, with a pickup group, I got my Life robe on my seventh try. ...

Penny Arcade starts off Freeday Friday with a little bit of snark about the Chronicles of Spellborn payment plan. While it’s true that you can now use a credit card like for every other game… I think trying to figure out their Coins-based plan is a fun game all on its own, don’t you? Reported everywhere is Lord of the Rings Online’s second anniversary promotion. Free to try again, 25% experience bonus on kills that stacks with all other bonuses, tokens you can trade in for cool stuff, etc etc. The xp boost is very nice, anyway. I haven’t seen what the tokens trade in for, but I have my suspicions I have a lot of Blueberry Tart recipes in my future. ...

The two characters I set for transfer from Windfola to Landroval a couple of weeks ago, my 36 Captain and my 21 Champion, finally arrived safely in their new server yesterday. I’m still not sure which of the three characters I have on Landroval I want to focus on. I have hope that I can join my Captain with those in Casualties of War who are about her level. Stargrace and Kasul largely adventure during days I work, so aside from boring soloing, there might not be much available for my two lower level characters. ...

Saith the Wizard 101 prophets and prognosticators: “Wizard101 the game will be offline on Friday April 24 from 3:00am to 4:00am Central US Time. During this downtime you will not be able to log in to the game, and players in the game will be prompted to log out. The website will also be unavailable during this downtime. Thank you for your understanding while we continually improve the game and the website for all our players.”

Wednesday? Seriously? All these MMO companies, at the same time, said, we’re gonna have some big news, and it’s gonna come out on a Wednesday? What’d I do to them? Last night, I was going to do a new one panel comic, and then sit down and game for awhile. That little test I linked to yesterday that where they wanted to know how MMOs were destroying your life? I wanted to pencil in, want time to play MORE. ...

Welcome to my island! This was truly LATE breaking news! After midnight my time, checked my email one last time before bed and read this: To our Subscribers and players who have made a Crowns purchase in the last 30 days, we invite you to test out some of our new features on the Wizard101 Test Realm. We will be looking to you to test out the following additions to Wizard101: ...

Day 2 of the Wizard 101 Name the Turtles contest! My site stats show that well over a THOUSAND wizards have come to this site to choose a name for the Marleybone turtle. I think we all know the turtles are going to end up being named Raphael, Michelangelo, Leonardo, Donatello and Master Splinter. Soon-to-be-shuttered, PvP-centric MMO Shadowbane is Wizard 101’s ancestor in spirit. MMO Gamer has the story of how the Wizard 101 devs went from designing a no-holds-barred, kill-or-be-killed MMO to the kid friendly, brightly colored MMO of wands and wizards we play today. ...

As near as I can tell, nearly 900 people came to this blog yesterday just to name the Marleybone builder turtle in Wizard 101. That’s fantastic! There’s still a bunch of time left, and as long as the contest is going, there’s going to be a big button over there on the right leading to the post since, this being a blog, stuff scrolls off the front page almost immediately, and the Name the Turtles contest is already buried under THIS post, and a long, long comic about two hobbits discussing how cool a X Files MMO would totally be. ...