Massively^™

If you follow Tabula Rasa news, you may have seen a recent announcement concerning the Server vs. Server war coming up this Saturday, October 11th, 2008. This war is the third one of its kind, and aims to be the largest and most popular to date.

If you're new to the Server vs. Server war, you may be interested in a brief explanation as told to us by PlanetTR's Adele Machka. The war works by combining clans from Pegasus-Centaurus and Orion-Cassiopeia to join two "super" clans which then declare war upon each other. Each of these wars last 4 hours. The victor is the clan which has the least amount of deaths at the end. It's an extremely well-organized event, and the organizers want to make sure that everyone just has fun, first and foremost. If you'd like more details or information on signing up for this event, check out this thread. Let's all do our part to make this the largest SvS event ever!

[Thanks Adele and Andriss!]

It's that time once again for players and fans of ArenaNet's Guild Wars to break out the creativity for the Guild Wars Halloween Art Contest 2008. Last year's contest conjured some amazing images of costumes, sculptures, paintings and more from the dedicated GW community. This year, the concept is the same: Dream up your own way to bring a Halloween twist to Guild Wars.

The prizes this year include a Guild Wars-themed Razer Death Adder Mouse, a VisionTek Radeon HD3650 video card, signed copies of the Nightfall Collector's Edition, GW Series 2 skill pins, skill and character slot unlock keys and much more! Get your entry in by 12:00 Noon PST on Monday, October 27th, 2008. From there, the winners will be announced on or before November 3rd, 2008 and will be posted on the Guild Wars main site. Check out the complete rules for more details. Good luck!

If you've found yourself excited by the tin, silver, gold and platinum token drops from Lord of the Rings Online this last weekend, you'll be happy to hear that these token drops have been extended until November 4th. These tokens were brought back as part of the Welcome Back Weekend, encouraging previous players to come check out LotRO for free before Mines of Moria releases, later this fall.

What use are these tokens? Free stuff! What other reason do you need? Ok, to be more specific, you can get some amazing items by trading these tokens in to the trader NPCs. There's crit consumables, special cosmetic outfits, Beryl shards and much more! So if you missed what you thought would be an event that only lasted through the weekend, this four week extension gives you no more excuses. Get out there and grab some tokens!

We know how long you play these things. MMOs aren't sprints, they're marathons. When you sit down to play one of these things ... sure, you could just be doing a quick quest or a 15-minute scenario, but more likely you're going to try to get in a couple of hours of gaming. That means you want to be comfortable, right? You want to have an easy a time as possible physically moving around your desktop. Well, we've got just the thing to help you out. Massively and the PC peripherals juggernaut Razer are banding together to do a series of giveaways, and first up is a nice simple one that (we hope) will make you more comfortable moment-to-moment.

We've got two Destructor Mousing Surfaces here (each worth $39.99), high end pads that make the simple act of sliding around your mouse all the more comfortable. Couldn't be easier to enter this little contest. All you have to do is leave a comment on this post telling us how long you usually play in your standard MMO play session. You'll need to comment before 7:00 AM EST Thursday, October 9th. You can only enter once per person, and when the contest closes we'll ship out these fantastic prizes to two randomly-selected winners. To win you must be age 18 or up and a resident of the US or Canada (excluding Quebec). For full eligibility details, we suggest you read our official rules. Good luck!

The Lord of the Rings Online Fall Harvest festivities are now in full swing, and as promised, we at Massively have created an in-depth guide to help you make the most of your holiday time. This year's event sees the return of many of last year's goodies, plus some new and exciting favorites! Each racial zone has its own version of these Fall Harvest festivities, with different names, events and prizes. Yet each one is fundamentally the same. With the addition of the Troves and Trickery quests in Bree, Duillond, Thorin's Hall and Hobbiton, players can get their hands on some exciting new cosmetic masks just in time for All Hallow's Eve.

This event runs from now until October 12th, so you have plenty of time to gather festival tokens, complete special quests and compete in the horse races! Follow along on our complete guide by clicking the link below, and be sure to also check out our enormous 33-image gallery of Fall Harvest Festival screenshots and maps below to get you where you need to go.

MMO fansites are an integral part of the community for online games and virtual worlds. This really is what sets them apart from normal single-player or offline games that may only have informational fansites without an organic community that can interact from within their favorite game. So what better way to celebrate the best of these fansites and their owners who work so hard for their community than to vote for your favorites?

MMOFury.com is now accepting submissions for their Top Fansite awards, where fansite owners can enter their site to compete against other fansites in the genre. The winners will be broken down into 3 main categories; the top fansites that feature 5 or less game titles, top multi-game (5 or more games) fansites, and top new fansite. From the 45 top traditional fansites listed, they select 5 as the Overall Top 5. The winners will be announced during the first week of November, so head on over to the site to read the complete rules, and nominate your favorite fansite today!

The Harvest Festival is coming! The Harvest Festival is coming! Starting later today, September 26th, and running until October 13th, Lord of the Rings Online will play host to the second annual Middle-earth Harvest Festival. According to the announcement, there will be a return of player favorites like bobbing for apples, picking pumpkins, horse races and the Geode Surprise.

Plus, there will be new Trick or Treat quests for players to enjoy. Does this mean we'll see some new Halloween-type masks and candy for the lil 'uns?? Stick with Massively as we present a complete guide to the Harvest Festival coming soon!

With today's retail launch of Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, what could possibly make your game experience any better? How about if you played it absolutely free for 60 days? The good folks at gamerDNA have announced a contest that will give you the chance to do just that. From Friday, September 19th through Sunday, September 28th, you can enter to win one of five 60 day Warhammer Online prepaid time cards.

To play, you simply need to create a profile on the gamerDNA site and add any WAR-related information to your profile, post a WAR experience or play WAR. Then on Wednesday, October 1st, they'll announce the lucky winners drawn randomly. Be sure to check out the complete rules on the site, and good luck!

Since we first told you about Tabula Rasa's Operation Immortality, it has grown quite a bit. All sorts of top athletes, artists and musicians have signed onto the project to have their DNA digitized and sent into space through the Immortality Drive. This special hard drive will travel with Richard Garriott to the International Space Station on October 12th and stay there in the event that humanity needs a restart.

Originally, this project was to end on August 31st, for anyone interested in participating. However, we're happy to report that this deadline has now been extended until September 29th, 2008. This gives you even more time to vote on mankind's greatest achievements, send a personal message from the website or win a chance to have your digitized DNA included on the Immortality Drive. So if you still haven't taken part in this historical event, you might want to head on over to the project's website and give it a shot.

This Friday marks the kickoff of the Penny Arcade Expo 2008 in Seattle, Washington. If you're going, you may already have your schedule planned out with which panels you'll attend, which booths you're stopping by and which contests you're going to enter.

However, you may be overlooking the most important part of this entire weekend: the parties! That's right, a few of your favorite developers are throwing their own afterparties where players can mingle with the game developers, community teams and other fans of the game. Leave it to us to compile a comprehensive list of these parties for you all to enjoy. Check after the cut for a detailed list of these top MMO developer parties.

The record-setting Games Convention in Leipzig just ended and over 200,000 people are beginning the recovery process as we speak. Not only was this convention a roaring success, it has already been announced for a return to Leipzig next year as well. In addition to this, the awards have been given out for the best games of the show, and Warhammer Online nabbed the Best Online Game award.

According to their press release: "The creators of the online RPG legend Dark Age of Camelot, still so successful today, are back with Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. GOA squares up to the alpha male World of Warcraft with spectacular visuals, innovative play modi, neat control and an enormous, appealing fantasy world." Our congratulations goes out to the folks at EA Mythic as we (im)patiently wait for September 18th to arrive!

That's right, after the recent uproar on the forums, Lord of the Rings Online's Summer Festival is back until September 1st, 2008. So if you never finished gaining all of your dance emotes, gathering quests or winning that festival horse, you still have a chance through next weekend.

The main reason for this extension is the fact that many of the bugs and problems with the festival, such as the broken music box and gaudy horse saddle colors, were fixed in a patch after the festival had finished. As expected, many players weren't happy with this, so Turbine decided to go for the extension. So now is your chance to read up on our Summer Festival guide and enjoy yourself for another week of festivities!

With gaming expo season also comes live tournament season to most of these events. During the Penny Arcade Expo's event later this month, ArenaNet plans on continuing their trend of hosting competitive Guild Wars tournaments with some great contests held at the ArenaNet/NCsoft booth, and also at their VIP after-party. As we previously reported, this party will be held at the Gameworks across the street from the Washington State Convention & Trade Center in Seattle.

These contests include a 2v2 tournament and a Rollerbeetle racing tournament. The prizes range from ATI graphics cards, laser mice, gaming keyboards, character slots, bonus unlock packs and more! Head on over to the main GW website for more info on each of these prizes.

The first week of the newest Codemasters European contest has come to a close, and we're already set for more. Last week's winners have been announced and now it's time for you to enter for your own chance to be the next week's winner.

How do you enter? Simply log in to Lord of the Rings Online at any time during the week and answer the questions on the competition web page, and from there you'll automatically be entered into a drawing for a chance to win some great prizes including iPod Nanos, NVidia graphics cards, lifetime LotRO subscriptions and more. Even if you're not a current LotRO subscriber, you can play the 14-day trial for eligibility. Keep in mind though that this contest is only open to those players in Europe and South Africa. Sorry Americans!

Now that the Penny Arcade Expo is right around the corner, we're hearing more and more about these after parties held by game developers. First there was the news of ArenaNet's party at Gameworks Seattle, right across the street from the Washington Convention Center, and now we get news of Turbine holding a party at the same location, the night before.

The Turbine party will be from 7pm - 9pm local time on Friday, August 29th, 2008. Those in attendance will include Asheron's Call Producer Crowley, LotRO Executive Producer Nigellian, LotRO: Mines of Moria Producer Eldrad, the enigmatic Marketroid, Community Team members Patience and Frelorn, and more!