Make sure you head to Gorowyn this week (through the 7th) to participate in the city festival. You can spend City Tokens for special goodies and collect purple shinies to earn a Gorowyn-style mailbox for your home. Don’t miss it!

To reach Gorowyn, you can take 2 routes:

1) Port to the Kylong Plains druid ring, then take the griffin from Teren’s Grasp down to Dreg’s Landing.

2) Hop on board the boat that stops at the docks in Antonica and the Commonlands. It will drop you off at the dock in Kylong Plains.

Once you’re at the KP dock, you can ring the mariners’ bell (loc 836.05, 2.43, 371.31) to be transported to Gorowyn. The quest-giver will be awaiting you at the dock, and the merchants are just inside the cave between the dock and the city.

Make sure you head over to the Green Knoll in Greater Faydark (just inside the Butcherblock Mountains zone line) to participate in EQ2’s first city festival! Each city will have its turn hosting a festival from the first to the seventh of each month, and some great city-specific quests and rewards will be offered. Make sure you head over to check it out! For a peek at some of the goodies, check out EQ2 Traders’ City Festivals guide.

I’m going to get the old posts imported tonight, and in anticipation of that, the forums are once again available. :) Go nuts!

The forums have been updated! Because a reliable way to synchronize WordPress and SMF doesn’t currently exist, I’m giving Simple:Press a go. Please bear with me as I make sure the permissions are set properly. I’m going to attempt to import the old bbPress posts very soon, so the forums are temporarily locked until then to prevent any data collisions when the import is in progress. Thanks for your patience!

I’ve found that the installation of bbPress that we’re currently using just isn’t as polished as I’d like, so I’ll be working on switching us over to SMF this evening.

I’ll be synchronizing SMF with WordPress, so your login will still be the same, although the existing forum posts may be nuked. Since there aren’t that many, I may be able to convert them manually, but please don’t be upset if they’re lost.

I’ll post another update when everything’s good to go!

The EQ2 team has finally revealed the contents of the 6-year Veteran Reward pack!! Head on over to EQ2Players.com to check out these shiny goodies!

I know I, for one, will be using the heck out of the tradeskill vitality trinket on all my leveling crafters. I’ve been waiting for that little beauty since they implemented the combat vitality trinket with the last Veteran Reward pack! There’s also a zap-to-a-groupmate trinket and a couple appearance armor items — a cloak and hood.

I’ve just finished updating our Guild Hall Guide to include a few recent additions and renovations. :) Enjoy!

Ysharros has deferred the bonus prizes she won for Kalliste and Fairuza, so I’ve had to dig in the event logs to find the next runners-up. :)

They are DENAT (first writ of the day) and PRATT (most writs on the day), respectively. I’ll be shooting them a letter in-game shortly!

Edit 11/29: Maxum (one of Pratt’s alts) has also deferred his prize…it will instead go to CATARYA.

Here we go…the winners of the Push to 60 guild contest!!

First, the 5 bonus prizes:

The character who actually dinged the guild level 60 was… LYRIANA!

The character who completed the most writs the day we dinged 60 was… FAIRUZA!

The first character to complete a writ on the day we dinged 60 was… KALLISTE!

The first character to earn an AA point on the day we dinged 60 was… SHAU!

The first character to earn a level on the day we dinged 60 was… MAXUM!

As promised, these 5 lucky characters will receive one mastercrafted item of their choice. I will be contacting them in-game to take their requests, so guys, keep an eye on the mailbox!

And now, the two grand prizes:

The character with the overall highest contributed status increase was… FAIRUZA! She went from 254,937 status to 349,496 status — an increase of 94,559 points!

The character with the highest percentage increase was… PRATT! He went from ZERO status to 71,204 status — in increase of 7,120,400%. Seriously!!

HUGE congratulations are in order for these two! They really worked their backsides off during the competition. As a bonus, they will both be promoted to the rank of Champion because of their incredible contributions to the guild. Well done!!

Thank you again to everyone who contributed. You guys rock. :)

NOTE: In the event that the winning character deferred, the prize was awarded to the first eligible runner-up. In the event that one character qualified for more than one prize in the same category, the additional prizes were awarded to the respective runners-up. In the event that one character qualified for two prizes and the runners-up were two different characters, the winner of the second prize was determined by 1d8. :)

First, I have to say thank you to all the members who helped get us this far. Whether you did one writ or a hundred, you made a real difference. Everyone’s selfless contributions to the guild and to each other are what make Halasian Empire so wonderful.

With level 60 come a number of great perks:

• A new row in each of our guild bank vaults, which you can access by right-clicking any banker
• The ability to add a pattern to our guild heraldry, which is modeled by Kharri, to the right
• New mounts available for purchase from stablemasters
• New items & titles available for purchase from city merchants
• Three new guild hall amenities, which were chosen by a poll here on the website:
  • Gatherer Hireling: After 2 hours, gives you 200 random common harvests from root, shrub, & lumber nodes in the tier you specify
  • Miner Hireling: After 2 hours, gives you 200 random common harvests from stone & ore nodes in the tier you specify
  • Tradeskill Recipe Salesman: Carries all Essential recipe books for all tradeskill classes

Hopefully the 60s will be much easier going than the 50s were — seems like those 10 levels took us forever! We still have bigger and better things waiting for us down the line, though, and our next goal is to reach level 62. We will get one new amenity slot at 62; you can vote on what you think it should be in the poll to the right.

Once again, thank you all, and congratulations! :)