Dueling the Devs?

So a message came across the twitter wire today:

"This morning, J. Todd Coleman, creator of the game, accepted a duel from a long time fan. Read more!"

Wow!

Yeah, you definitely need to go check out this link!

And as always the best place to catch the community response, is over at Wizard 101 Central.

I can't wait to see what Angel Dragongem has to say about the duel! That's gotta be awesome to duel the executive director of the game, right? yup.

Happy Dueling!

Housing Item of the Day--Sundial

This item comes from the tower conquest side quest with Oskar Crowfriend in Dragonspyre in The Tower Archives zone.



After you finish his quest, he dumps this amazing sun dial on you.



Such a nice lawn item there. They definitely have built a very menacing looking sundial there. haha. "Hmm, let me check the time on my sundial . . . I'm going to stand back though because it looks like it might get mad and eat me."

Happy Dueling!

NEW WIZARD 101 COMMERCIAL!

Yup, they are really pushing the housing in this ad. AND, I have to say it's about time. :-) I was kind of getting sick of watching the old commercial on Cartoon Network. For some reason the advertisement looked dingy and old to me . . . I don't know what it was, but it looked like it lacked sharpness. /shrug

Anyway, here's the new ad:




Impressions . . . feel free to share yours.

- Does Gamma look odd in this commercial to you?
- Anyone know how I can score the dragon head on the wall?
- Should they have shown a clip of Dragonspyre when they said explore new realms?

Happy Dueling!

Housing Item of the Day--Airship Photograph

Today our attention turns to Amber Deathsong, who, like Kyle, had a couple lingering Marleybone side quests in her quest log. The Purse Curse 2 had me running all over Marleybone and back, but eventually, Cathrine Dalton was satisfied that the purse curse had been lifted.



She was so overjoyed that she reached under her hoop skirt and provided me with a painting. I always wondered what she was hiding under there in a very G-rated way.





And now I think I know who Cathrine's heart really beats for . . . maybe, Mr. personality?



maybe?

Happy Dueling!

Housing Item of the Day--Grampa Froggy Painting

You know those little side quests you do in Scotland Yard to help clear the names of a couple NPCs? Well one of them is titled "Liberty!" and is from the sweeper named Wade Wadsworth. This was another one of those side quests that I had hanging out in Kyle's quest journal in hopes of some good furniture.



Who knew that what a innocent frog takes with him to cell block C would be a picture of his grandpa . . . and that he'd give it to me!



Of course, he may not be much to look at now, but it's the memory behind the painting, right? Um, yeah.



Yeah, I'm going to keep telling myself that. (you can click on those pictures to get a better view of them if you want in case you didn't know that; although, use caution . . . shiver . . . he's not that pretty)

Happy Dueling!

Housing Items of the day--Gaurdhouse and Maple Bookcase

Kyle Skystaff had an old quest hanging out in his quest journal that I had been holding on to just to see what the furniture reward to be.



Reading into the past is the name, and I'm pretty darn sure it's the Marleybone books quest. It's been so long that it's hard to remember. Come to find out, it rewards TWO furniture items for completion. Yeah, that reward is fitting for a books quest.



You should have seen the smile that went across my face when I saw "guardhouse" pop up. Hahaha! I love it.



Awesome. The Bookcase is huge too! Now if only I could get some books to put in that bookshelf. It looks so barren.



Happy Dueling!

I AM IRONMAN . . . I mean, STINGITE

So I've been getting some questions as to where the handle "Stingite" comes from. No, it doesn't come from some strange adoration of the singer Sting. Although, good on him for trying to take on the ballads of John Dowland. And, no, it is not some equally strange worship of Bilbo Baggin's knife named "Sting."

So, sit back and relax while I tell you of the origins of my handle Stingite.

Stingite originally is this fella.



That's Stingite standing tall in a place known as the Plane of Time in the game Everquest. Though there were a couple MMO's before Everquest (or EQ), EQ is the father of a lot of these MMO games, or sometimes called a first generation MMORPG.

Around the time Amber Deathsong was born (in real life) there was a fantastic expansion to the game of Everquest called, The Shadows of Luclin. I had played a cleric class up to that point, but I knew that I really wanted to play a new class that was released with the Luclin expansion called "The Beastlord."

Oh man, they were awesome. Everyone in my guild (that's a big group of people that hang together under a name and get a private channel between friends) was pretty irked that I had switched classes from a cleric to a beastlord, but they hadn't had to suffer the indignation of staring at their spellbook for a year while they all ran around hitting stuff. (you used to have to sit and stare at a really dumb spellbook graphic to regain your mana faster.)

I also knew that I wanted to be an iksar. I mean, who doesn't want to be a scaley lizardman character at least once in their life? Not only that, my favorite starting area of any Everquest land (and believe me, there were tons of starting areas) was the field of bone, which was dominated by iksars. The field of bone was overrun by tons of these guys, scorpions.



So, knowing that the land my character was birthed in had a lot of those scorpions, I called myself STING-ite . . . or "of the sting." And it just kind of stuck from there. The following four or five years that I played Everquest just kind of solidified that name for me. I mean, when every time you log in and say hello in guild chat and everyone says, "STINGER!" or "STINGI!" or "STING!" it just kind of becomes a big part of your online persona. I AM STINGITE!

Of course I took the name on to other games like World of Warcraft (hunter character with a spider pet named "rimshot").



or Guild Wars (ranger beastmaster build with a lizard pet named "shoes") . . .



Or Lord of the Rings (champion, dual wielder major aoe dps man)



And pretty much any save file I do on any console game . . .

It just kind of became my handle online, which reminds me . . . I need to go reserve that name in free realms. If only Wizard 101 would find a way to approve that name for me somehow. That would be awesome. I'd drop "Thomas Lionblood" in an instant.

So that, my friends, is where the name Stingite comes from . . . a lizard man character in the game of Everquest who grew up in a land of scorpions.

Happy Dueling!