New Feature: Pasting withOUT Air.

In the game update on 4/16 a new tweak mode feature was added. The option to paste with or without air. This post is to help you better understand what that means and how to use it.

There are a few different ways to use this new feature and I'll post some screen shots to show you the differences between pasting with air and without air in a couple situations. First, to access this option either use your selection tool and drag a box around the object you wish to paste and hit Ctrl+C to copy and Ctrl+V to paste, or choose a previously saved template. Move the object near where you'd like to paste it and hold shift and left click. This will place the item in a temporary location with a small pop up window with some tweak options.

Use the directional and rotation options in the tweak panel to place the item exactly where you'd like and click the check mark on the tweak panel to place it.

 So, assume you wanted to put a ring of some kind around an existing pillar like I have in the above photo. I want to put this outline of a square around a pillar. Leaving the "Paste Air?" check box checked this is what happens.

As you can see it cut a piece out of our pillar. The game thinks that the air in the center of the white square is voxels so it replaced our obsidian voxels in the pillar with invisible air voxels. You can go back and replace the voxels that were "removed" and it will look good as new, BUT what if our pillar wasn't just a plain old square pillar and had an intricate design that we spent hours creating. That might not be so easy to fix up. This is where the "no air" feature comes in. If we un-check the "Paste with Air?" box in the tweak mode panel we can place our white square without any damage to the black pillar.

Another use is for creating inlays. Imagine we want to make a butterfly with black circular spots on it. How would we get those spots? One way to start is to make a cube (I'll use a 3x3 for this demo)

Use the smooth tool on the entire cube until it looks like a ball

Use the selection tool to choose the middle 1 voxel section of the ball and copy it or save it as a template.

You now have a small circle you can copy and paste where you'd like. 

So we head over to our butterfly and go to add the spots.
We copy and paste it using the tweak mode to get it just right, and then this happens.

As you can see it pasted the circular spot but also added those pesky air voxels in the corners. The pasting without air will fix this right up. You will instead get nice inlaid spots like the ones below.

I'm totally in love with this new feature because it makes inlays so easy. You can create whatever design you'd like, smooth it, and copy and paste it into a surface without issue. 

Currently there is a bit of a bug with pasting without air when used with objects that have been smoothed down with the smooth tool. As you can see in the below picture the one pasted without air (on the left) has gone jagged in certain areas. Hopefully this will be fixed soon.

I hope this gives people a better understanding of this new tweak mode feature. Happy creating!

Blog Redirection

It's been quite some time since I've posted, in fact almost a year. I have decided to start up again with a new theme. I have become highly addicted to the new voxel based building game from Everquest called Landmark which is currently in closed beta. I will be focusing the blog on my creations through the beta and release stages of the game with info on updates and changes along the way and how they effect my building and creative process.

Back to Game Hopping

I got a 2 month game card to WoW and the Pandaria expansion for my birthday. I was super excited and headed back to WoW after having spent the last couple months working on my new house and doing other real life stuff as well as playing Everquest2 here and there. I was having a lot of fun with the new content. Pet battles are a huge time sink but for a vanity pet collector like myself it's a fun way to waste time. Then began the Cogentco packet loss issue that causes extreme latency issues for a lot of players. I'm one of the lucky people who has Cox internet and is affected by this so my play time in WoW dropped little by little until I stopped playing altogether.

I headed back to Guild Wars 2 this week. They added a new currency called laurels. You earn them by completing your daily and monthly achievements. The laurels are account bound and can be spent on any of your characters. Unfortunately the achievements to earn them are also account wide so once you've completed your daily on one character you're done for the day. I really wish they would change this as I would like to be able to complete the daily on all of my alts if I choose to. They also added new instances that scale in difficulty called fractals. I'm not a dungeon goer so I was disappointed to see that fractals are a requirement for the monthly. The daily changes it's requirement every day so hopefully monthlies will as well and there will be a month where fractals aren't required for completion. Dailies give you 1 laurel while monthlies give 5. The laurels can be used to by high end gear including ascended gear.

All in all I'm enjoying GW2 again for the moment. Who knows where I'll hop to next.

Guild Wars 2: The first 2 weeks.

It's been about 2 weeks since the release of the greatest game ever. My guild is doing great. We have a little over 30 members now. If you'd like to join you can visit our website http://tyrianartistry.shivtr.com/ and apply.

There has been some shakiness in the launch of Guild Wars 2. I'd have to say it's probably the sloppiest launch I've ever been a part of. Other games had queues at launch where you couldn't even play though so I guess I'd take the bugs over not getting to play. GW2's overflow servers were great since I seemed to have picked one of the most populated servers. I already stopped getting sent to overflow servers in most zones and in the ones I do it's usually only minutes before I am tossed back to my home server.

One of the issues they had over the past 2 weeks was the Trade Post being offline for the majority of the first week and 1/2 which made it frustrating to make money and prevented any sort of economy from starting. It has been up for the past few days with only brief periods of down time.

The game has been restarted for patches several times but has had very little down time for maintenance. Forums were also down for the first week of the game. The wiki was down the first few days as well which was a hard thing for players because we're all noobs around here.

Guilds and Parties have had some hiccups too. In guilds there has been everything from invites not being able to be sent or accepted, entire guilds or individual guild features being invisible to some members, and guild upgrades and ranks being un-editable by the guild masters and officers. Party features have had some issues too. The feature to join other players in your party wasn't working when people were on different overflow servers.

And of course there were hackers and phishing and all that good stuff. So I'm sure the GW2 employees kept Advil in business over the past couple weeks with all the headaches they've had to deal with.

Most features are fixed now and they're starting to patch some fixes to class abilities, quests, and little things.

They did a great job keeping people informed of issues and fixes via reddit, wiki and the official site. I haven't been too affected by the problems the past couple weeks and have been having an amazing time in game. I hope you all get to try GW2 soon.

My Review of Guild Wars 2

Greatest Game EVER!

that is all.

Final Countdown!

After 5 years of waiting it's almost here. I might pee myself in excitement when the servers go live. 24 hours to go, maybe less if they bring them up early like they warned they might. It's been a long 5 years and it seems like this last week has been moving in slow motion. I did everything I could think of to pass the time and prepare. I have a list of names I'm hoping I'll be able to at least grab a few of to save for my characters, I have my main's appearance settings jotted down, and I am working on my grocery list for the week and hope to get to the store early tomorrow so I'll have to leave my house as little as possible once the game is live.

Some things you may like to know about Headstart and Launch:

You can skip to the end of character creation and quickly save a name you like and then delete that character and that name will be saved to your account for 24 hours. This allows you to quickly save names you like and then go back and delete them and make them all pretty without having to worry about someone taking your name while you create the perfect looking character.

Your Hall of Monument items that you've earned from original Guild Wars will be available to all your characters on the account linked to your GW2 account. More info on linking your accounts http://en.support.guildwars2.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/9028. You will receive a portal stone on your characters that will port you to Eye of the North where you can speak to an NPC who will let you claim any of your earned items on any of your characters you create on that account. Visit https://www.guildwars2.com/en-gb/news/claiming-your-hall-of-monuments-rewards/ for more info.

There are overflow servers in GW2. If you choose a highly populated server don't worry about having to sit in queue and not getting to play. If your server is full you will be sent to an overflow server until you reach the front of the queue where you will then be able to go back over to your server. Any progress you make while on the overflow server will move with you to your home server.

Don't forget to eat, drink more than energy drinks (water is helpful) and get some rest. I know saying "game safely" may be silly to some, but people have died playing games and neglecting the most important thing in life, their health. A lot of us have been waiting a LONG time for this game but it's not going anywhere. Being world first to lvl 80 isn't something to get sick over.

Have fun everyone. I'll see you in Tyria. If you'd like to join me I'll be on Jade Quarry server in my little guild Tyrian Artistry. http://tyrianartistry.shivtr.com/

Guild Wars 2 Guild

I decided to start a Guild Wars 2 branch of the guild I ran in Rift. Here's a little about the guild and where to sign up to join me.

[Tyrian Artistry] is a Guild Wars 2 guild on the Jade Quarry server. TA was started back during the headstart of Rift as Telaran Artistry. It was a very popular guild on the Faeblight server that ran roleplaying events like craft fairs and story telling nights. I left Rift about a year ago and so left TA, but after waiting 5 years for the release of GW2 I wanted to start TA up again and bring the artistry to Tyria. Tyrian Artistry will not necessarily be a role playing guild but after feeling out the community in GW2 we may hold similar events to the ones we held in Rift.
Ages 18+, adult language and topics may be used in guild chat.

This is a very casual guild and we have players of all styles. Some who log in for several hours every day and others who only log in for a few hours each week.

All play styles are welcome. This is a great guild for soloers who just want to take their time, quest, and discover all Tyria has to offer without pressure while meeting new friends.

We are a zero tolerance guild. This means be nice or you are no longer welcome. Derogatory statements towards another player, joking or serious, are not tolerated. We welcome all genders, races and sexual preferences and never discriminate and do not allow any of our guild members to be disrespected or disrespect each other.

I hope you will join our quest in making Tyria a more beautiful place to live, work, and kill bad guys. Please visit http://tyrianartistry.shivtr.com/ to join us.

Contemplating World of Warcraft: Looking For BFF

As much as I've been enjoying TERA I haven't made up my mind if I'm going to stick with it and subscribe after my 30 free days. I'm coming up on the 6 month mark of my break from World of Warcraft and at the 6 month mark I always get the urge to go back. I'm guessing Mists of Pandaria will come out by the end of September. Before the expansion there should be a world event with the destruction of Theramore which starts the all out war between the 2 factions. I definitely want to be back playing WoW by the time this event happens.

I am able to put in a LOT of hours of game time each week but it's while I work and I get interrupted a lot. This makes it hard for me to group unless I have a tight schedule where I know a couple days a week for a set couple of hours I'm raiding or grouping. I can schedule work stuff around that. But doing more than one raid or dungeon a day is pretty much out for me. I'm primarily a soloer. I love leveling characters and working on crafting and achievements.

MoP seems like it will have a lot for the casual player to do, so as a soloer I'm looking very forward to it. There will be pet battles and tons of new daily quests (possible lifting of the daily quest cap), a train your own mount task, and farming which seems like it will be similar to Free Realms farming.

I really want to go back to WoW and have fun again so I'm willing to start over from scratch. Over the years I've server transferred multiple characters (PvP server> a different PvP server> PvE server), faction transferred them all once (Horde>Alliance), and race changed at least 3 of them (pretty much made every one of my characters Worgen).  I've landed on the Alexstrasza PvE server on the Alliance side. I've been here for a couple years with a couple breaks of several months to play other games like Rift for 5 months and my most recent break of 6 months for EQ2 and TERA. I was in a small guild with real life friends who no longer play. We merged our small guild with another small guild of real life friends and all were happy. Unfortunately 99% of the guild hasn't logged in since December. All the other people I knew on my server have done the same.

So here is my "proposal"... I'm placing a sort of looking for guild ad but even more than that it's sort of a personals ad. It will sound cheesy saying "Looking for friends to play WoW with" but that's exactly what I'm doing. I've decided rather then logging on my old server with the same old people and trying to make friends in game I would rather try to make friends out of game and I will go to them. I am willing to start over on a new server. I have no preference of faction or server type though I would probably prefer a PvE server since I'm fail at PvP but I did play on a PvP server for the first year and 1/2 of my wow "career" so I can probably deal with that again.

If you are a current active WoW player who will definitely be playing up to and during MoP and would like to be my new WoW BFF please let me know. Initially I'd make a new character on your server to make sure that all is good but then closer to MoP I would be willing to server and/or faction transfer some of my characters over to the server. If you are able to play a lot and are in a casual guild those are definitely bonuses. I think starting from scratch might give me that little jump start I need to love the game again. Please contact me by leaving a comment here or by messaging me on Twitter @Girlygamersite. Thanks!

My Tumblr

I decided to start up a Tumblr for TERA screenshots. The link is HERE. Feel free to follow me there. While I'm leveling up and learning the game I may not be posting very often to this blog so make sure you follow me on Twitter @Girlygamersite.

Level 30 and Counting

I've been playing TERA pretty much non-stop since Headstart began. It's a blast. The world is beautiful. My character is adorable. There's tons of quests. You get a new spell almost every 2 levels so you're constantly working in new abilities and figuring out what you like best. I wanted to share some new screenies of my little Twinklin. I'm loving Sorcerer but can't wait to get to 60 and start a brand new character.

TERA First Impressions

It took me a while to convince myself to participate in the TERA open beta this weekend. There was so much drama from the beginning about the ex NC Soft employees stealing trade secrets or whatever. I decided to put all that aside and try out the game. I've spent the majority of the past 2 days running around exploring, trying out classes, and crafting. For the most part I like the game, in fact I like it a lot. I'll do a rundown of my current pros and cons. Keep in mind I have only played a couple days and it is still in beta so there are things I may not have figured out and I have only explored a small percentage of the content the game offers.

Character creation is nice. I enjoy the races though I am sad that some of the races only have male OR female and not both. I love the Elin race even though a lot of people have been discussing how they are borderline creepy. I adore them. They remind me a little of Tarutaru from Final Fantasy though I've never played a FF game. There is only a female version of Elin and they look very much like children with big anime eyes and you get to choose a style of animal ears and tail for them. The reason there is discussion on them being creepy is that they have thick curvy woman type legs and wear very short dresses and high heels. I can see where looking at it from a certain perspective they can be a little creepy but I see them as super cute. The character feature choices are pretty good. It's no where near as detailed as Aion but there's enough variety in hairstyles and facial feature adjustments that everyone won't run around looking like carbon copies.

The prologue to the game is very cool. When you start a new character you begin questing as a level 20 version of the class you chose. You are given a handful of spells and are set out to kill some monsters with a group of NPCs. The reason I like this is because normally in order to get a glimpse at a class you need to level to 20 just to get enough spells to see what you can do. This prologue allows you to play around with the lvl 20 spells and see if you are interested in continuing. When you finish the prologue you are dumped in a newbie land just like every other game and you begin from level 1 with minimal spells. From what I saw once you have completed the prologue on a character any other characters you create on that server get the option to skip the prologue.

Movement and targeting are interesting to get used to. I don't even know how to even describe it but movement is similar to DC Universe Online and combat is sort of like a 3rd person shooter with crosshairs to target mobs. You still get hotbars for spells but like in DCUO you don't have the ability to click with your mouse in normal gameplay mode. You do get a mouse cursor when you are in UI mode like when you open your bags or any other menu. It took me a bit of practice until I was comfortable with it but I'm already a pro. It's a new play style for me and I'm loving it. After 8 years of tab targeting and spamming hotkeys it's refreshing to say the least.

Armor is awesome. It's a sort of cross between Rift and Aion styles. Armor seems to vary in appearance depending on what race you are. The little Elin girls wouldn't be caught dead in some of the skimpy stuff the other female races wear. When I say skimpy I am NOT joking. I am all for sexy armor but some of these get ups might take it a little too far. The game IS rated M for mature.

You get a quest for a free mount at level 11. I LOVE that. From what I can see the world is HUGE and not having a mount from early on would take it's toll for sure. A feature I like about the mounts is that the "grown up lady races" (not the Elin) ride side saddle. One thing I dislike about mounts is that you need to dismount before you can enter combat or gather. Setting your mount to a hotkey makes this faster but it's still kinda annoying.

I spent a little bit of time crafting. It's a very simple minimal combine system and seems to go pretty quickly. I wish it was more detailed personally but it has it's nice features like that fact that you can choose to level up every craft if you want to and are not forced to specialize like most other games. I won't go into too much detail but the enchanting system is fun too. Many items you craft have special bonuses, in order to activate these bonuses you need to enchant the item. The more you enchant the item the higher the base stats go and you unlock the special bonuses.

When you kill a monster if it has loot for you it drops it on the ground. If the loot is coin it's a little pile of coins, if it's a potion it drops a little bottle, they also drop scrolls and little boxes for armor and weapons. It's a nice feature to see actual loot on the ground and not just a sparkling corpse. It's been a while but I believe Guild Wars is similar and actually went as far as to drop the actual weapons on the ground. I like little things like that.

There are PvP and PvE servers which I am very grateful for. Playing Aion I get frustrated because there's only PvP servers. I dislike PvP but I read up on it a little and found out that since there is no factions in the game (Horde/Alliance Good/Evil) the world PvP on the PvP servers is free for all.

One thing I am iffy about is the political system in the game. From what I've read and watched in videos there will be a sort of ruler of the world who is a player. In order to become this ruler you need to be a guild leader and have a guild who is willing to help you along the way. You can choose to fight your way to the top through arena type battles or by asking people to vote for you. The ruler person will get to change things like available merchants and portals and I think even taxes. The journey to the top won't be for everyone but this popularity contest doesn't seem like a very good idea to me. We'll see after release if it effects the general public of the game very much or if you can pretty much ignore the whole process and the "leader".

There's a lot of other little things that please me about the game and because of my participation in this beta I think I'll be jumping on the TERA bandwagon on May 1st or sooner if I preorder. I'm not sure why some game reviewers have such bad opinions of the game but I really enjoy it and my opinion is to try it for yourself. Even if you have to wait for a recruit a friend trial or whatever En Masse will offer to recruit new people after release. Don't let the negative people make up your mind for you. I almost did and I would have missed out on all the fun I've been having.

EQ2 Chronoportal Event, Moonlight Enchantments, and more

There's a few things going on in Everquest 2 this week. One is the annual Chronoportal Event which starts today and runs until the 28th. This event comes around during original Everquest's birthday. EQ is celebrating 13 years this year. During the event you can hop through portals in 8 different zones which take you to an instance that might bring back some memories of your EQ days. The instances are intended for groups but as an Illusionist I found all but the Lavastorm portals soloable when using a tank mercenary like the Shadowknight. Each instance is a different level and you are automatically mentored down to an appropriate level. You will not however have your level raised should you want to do an instance much higher than your actual adventure level. The instances have an 18 hour lock out after you kill a named. The final boss of each will drop a chest containing 2 platinum coins, an adornment and some gear that is appropriate to the level of the instance. From what I can tell all items are tradeable or heirloom so you can give the items from the lower level instances to your alts. You can spend the platinum coins at merchants in Antonica and Commonlands. They sell replicas of the bosses for your home, books, paintings and a harp. HERE is all the details over at ZAM.

Also today and tomorrow is Moonlight Enchantments. This is the monthly event where mushroom rings pop up in certain zones and you complete quests for tokens to buy house and vanity items. HERE's the post I have written about them in the past.

There will be a new backpack on the Marketplace soon. The devs couldn't keep the news to themselves so they gave us a preview. The backpack called the Heraldry Flag Backpack holds a flag which will display your guild's logo on it. No word on the price yet.

I also missed posting about the latest Marketplace items so here they are...

Shadowforged Cinder Gi- 1200SC

Guilded Vanity Set- 400SC

Dragon Fang- 500SC

WoW Mists of Pandaria News.

There was a World of Warcraft Mists of Pandaria press event and the Non disclosure agreement was lifted so we were flooded with news about MoP this morning. We had already heard about some features of the expansion like the pokemon style vanity pet fighting ring and scenarios.

One major point was that MoP is being set up to be the new vanilla WoW. If you're not familiar with the term, vanilla refers to the basic World of Warcraft game pre expansions. During this time there was no major bad guys that gave a goal to the overall game. You didn't know what was going to happen. In the last 3 expansions you pretty much knew what you were in for. There was a goal, Kill Kil'Jaeden, Kill Arthas, Kill Deathwing. Blizzard is making MoP like vanilla, there is no announced final encounter. This allows them to drop whatever they want on us at any time. There will just be general badness in the world that we have to fight until they say "time to kill a BIG baddie". I didn't have a chance to play vanilla WoW in it's most vanilla form. I wasn't introduced to the game until Burning Crusade had just come out so this will be an interesting change to the game for me and may even get me interested in raiding again.

Another thing being talked about today across the interwebs is that they once again have left the old character models...old. We didn't get upgraded character models for the original races like many of us hoped for. Kind of on this topic is reveal of the female Pandaren. She's super cute.

Some other things announced were changes to reputation grinding. From what it seems like you'll no longer be able to throw on a tabard and grind dungeons until you have the rep level you want. You will have to gain the trust of the factions in Pandaria. You'll probably have to grind out quests for them to prove yourself worthy. With this comes a new way to obtain a mount from the Pandaren factions. They will have serpent mounts you can purchase with a certain amount of faction. You will purchase an egg and have to do a series of daily quests revolved around your egg and it's hatchling until it grows into a mount. Starting as a baby which becomes a pet that will fight beside you and then into a ground mount (If you're familar with Everquest 2 think of the griffon quest line in Velious where you have to take your griffon to do certain dailies until it's grown.) To get your Pandaria serpent to fly you need to then obtain more faction. They also announced Challenge modes to dungeons in Pandaria. Similar to the old Zul'Aman timed run for the bear mount. As you run dungeons you will receive medals of bronze, silver or gold depending on how fast you complete the zone. You can receive achievement titles by obtaining medals. There's a ton of other news being thrown around so please go ahead and visit some of my favorite sites so I don't have to retype all of it.

• GamebreakerTV
• MMORPG.com 
• MMO-Champion.com
• WoWhead
• PC Gamer
• WoW Insider

Everquest goes Free to Play Today

About 6 years ago I did that Coke rewards points thing. I turned in my bottle caps all the time and eventually had enough points to get something cool. I decided to get an Everquest game. They had both original EQ and EQ2. I asked a friend for their opinion and they said since EQ2 was newer it had better graphics etc. so I should go with that. Because of this decision to skip the original and go right to the sequel I have no freakin' clue what is going on in EQ2. For 6 years I've done my best to enjoy the game ignoring lore for the most part. But today original EQ went F2P. I now have a chance to play the original game and maybe understand what the heck is going on in the world around me when I hop back over to EQ2. I have been playing Aion and just got Minecraft so not sure when I'll do it, but it's nice to know the option to play for free is there. http://www.everquest.com/free

Aion NA F2P and 3.0 April 11th

Aion's North American Free to Play model will launch on April 11th along with the release of Game Update 3.0. The game update will increase level cap, introduce mounts and player housing along with a ton of other stuff.

The F2P model for North America will be different than the current Euro F2P model. Instead of having different tiers of subscription level the game introduces C.U.B.E. Customizable User Bundling Experience. You will be able to purchase a C.U.B.E. from the Aion store. You fill your C.U.B.E. with the game features YOU want. You want more goodies? You buy a bigger more expensive C.U.B.E.. As of now I haven't found a list of the features that will be accessed through C.U.B.E. but I'll post more info when I do. C.U.B.E.s will be on the Aion store April 4th and available for use on the 11th. Purchasing a C.U.B.E. will get you bonus items as well, you get bigger and better bonuses with bigger cubes. I was personally hoping for the Euro Free to Play model. Hopefully we aren't forced to purchase too many features in this NA model like character slots or bag space.


Also announced is a new Atreian Atlas system. A sort of guide that will help you through the game. It will offer a customized gaming plan for your play style. It will offer maps, video guides, and extended quest information like difficulty. I'm really curious and excited to see how this works. Hopefully I can tell mine to avoid all group instances and PvP. *snicker*


You can read the full Massively article detailing these new features HERE. 

EQ2 Game Update 63 Skyshrine. New Level cap and content. April 17th

A lot of people were upset when they found out the latest Everquest 2 expansion, Age of Discovery had no new content. It implemented a lot of new features instead. The folks over at SOE explained that it was because new instances, zones and other playable content were now going to be added in game updates instead. So with the expansion came mercenaries, design your own dungeon, beastlords, and tradeskill apprentices and coming April 17th the next major game update will add all the content people have been waiting for.

If you have Destiny of Velious you will get...

• a new level cap of 92 (up from 90). 
• A new zone with over 100 quests. 
• Multi mode instances, so now if you can't find a group, heck, do the solo version. 
• Heroic group and raid instances. 
• Prestige class talents and all new tradeskill quests. 
• New drake mount

If you have the Age of Discovery expansion you will get...

• a new dungeon map and items with a Poet's Palace theme. 
• New dungeon maker adventurers. 
• Tradeskill apprentices with new recipes including one ELITE recipe. 
• Elite Mercenary
• New warders for beastlords to tame.

Here's the whole scoop on Everquest2.com

Guild Wars 2 Pre Order Announced. SWTOR Free Trial Weekend.

Guild Wars 2 has announced that Pre-Orders will begin on April 10th. The standard game is $60, Delux Digital is $80, and Collectors is $150. All pre-orders will get access to the weekend beta events and a 3 day headstart. You can see all the other goodies that come with the pre-order packages HERE.

In other news Bioware is offering a free trial weekend for Star Wars: The Old Republic. The trial weekend begins Thursday, March 15th at 11am PST and ends Monday, March 19th at 1am PST. It does not apply to players who have a previously active account. The new players who sign up for this free weekend will have access to all 8 classes, the starting zones, the capital cities and PvP warzones and Flashpoints (instanced dungeons). Find out more info HERE.

World of Warcraft news. New resurrection scroll and Padaren female reveal date.

The moment I've been waiting for in Mists of Pandaria news is almost here. The reveal of the Pandaren female model is coming on March 19th. WoW posted a little teaser on their facebook page.

Also there is a new Scroll of Resurrection available. This one gives a flying mount to the person issuing the scroll if the friend you send it to resubscribes. Just for sending the scroll to a friend they will get 7 free days of play time, a free character transfer to the recruiters server, and an upgrade to cataclysm for free. For a limited time they also get the ability to jump a character straight to level 80. Here's all the details.

Rift offers FREE reactivation until March 14th

I haven't played Rift in some time but today I saw a Twitter post from them announcing that if you own the game you can play it for free from March 8th-14th. There seems to be some sort of in game carnival going on as well so it might be fun to pop in and see what's changed. I do have a lot going on in other games though so I might not make it back for this reactivation event. But if you are interested HERE's the link for more information.

EQ2 players pull together to cheer a terminally ill child.

A few days ago an Everquest 2 player posted on the Decorators forum on the EQ2 website, the Norrathian Homeshow, asking for some help. Here is her post...

This is a depressing post but I need some help.  My 6 yr old son has cancer and was recently given 6 - 12 weeks to live.

He has a frog that he likes to run around Tenebrous Tangle Island on; however, it is sparse and he has requested to add trees, fences, stairs, animals and all kinds of  other  items to make his  island fun and exciting.

Are there any decorators out there that would be willing to assist in adding these items (and any others their imagination poses) to help me make the island even more fun for him.  I don't know how much I'll be able to accomplish on my own while still providing him quality time to enjoy it.

The boy's in game name is Ribbitribbitt.

This post was not only read by people on her home server of Guk but also by players of other servers who wanted to help. Many of the Guk players donated items and their time. Players from other servers copied layout files of fun items they had built in their homes and made temporary characters on the Guk server to load those layouts onto the island home that belongs to the young boy. Within two days a whole playground has been erected complete with a tree house, carousel, games, forts, aquarium, rollercoaster and more.

Not only did tons of crafters and decorators help but Adventurers came to help as well. A guild was created for the boy and since yesterday Players of all types have been raiding, grinding writs and whatever else they can do to gain status to help level up the guild in hopes that on Saturday they'll have a Tier 3 guild hall to give to him.

On Saturday the guild hall as well as the island will be presented to him by his parents. They have promised to take pictures and video of his reaction to his incredible play island. At 4pm EST/1pm PST an event will be held on Ribbitribbitt's Tenebrous Island home. There will be donations and duel bets taken to help buy even more stuff for the island and guild hall.

I was happy to put in a few hours today building a rollercoaster on the island and I hope to make the event on Saturday. Please come out and show your support for Ribbitribbitt and his family. HERE is more info on Saturdays event.  If you'd like to read and/or get involved in the decorating aspect of the event please read  THIS thread to find out what's been going on and what items are still needed.