I’m a big fan of supporting the small guy. Local business? You bet. Farmers markets instead of superstores? I’m there. When it comes to video games there are LOTS of player run web sites and services offered and I love each and every one of them. One of the oldest from my own personal experiences has been Magelo. For those who are not familiar, Magelo was THE service to use when you were playing Eq1 and wanted to link your characters achievements. It came before the gaming companies started to offer profiles, and it was incredibly fun. You could (and still can) design your own themes, as well as link music to your profile.
When I was playing EQ1, I subscribed to their premium service to keep my characters updated on a regular basis. I think that it’s incredibly important to support ‘the small guy’ like this especially if you enjoy their service. Low and behold, after having not been to their site in a number of years I received a newsletter from them talking about all of the new features that they’ve added. A service now 9 years in the making.
More than 9 years of service to the Everquest community… For sure, it has been quite a long road getting to where we are and we couldn?t have made it without your support. Thank you!
We are pleased to announce that we recently expanded our Premium offer with a new Inventory tool, Media hosting service and the introduction of new subscription plans.
New Inventory Tool
The Inventory tool is a new feature that helps you locate items from all your characters bags and bank. It summarizes the inventory of all your characters without the hassle of logging into the game or requiring you to open several different profile pages.
Browse through all the bags and bank space for every character on each server and quickly locate specific items by keywords with the search tool.
You can also find the storage location and amount carried on each character for every item and view plat and various alternate currencies for every character.
New Media Manager
Store up to 50 mb of images and music to customize easily your Magelo profiles, avatars and signatures! No need any more to go looking for image and music hosts elsewhere. You get now all the media storage space you’ll ever need to make your character identity unique!
New Premium subscription plans and 10-day free trial
The Premium subscription has just become more flexible. In addition to the 1 year plan, the option to subscribe for 3 or 6-month period is now available.
Adding game slots has also been made much simpler! Whenever you purchase 5 extra game slots for your account, the cost will be based on the remaining active subscription period.
By becoming a Premium member you will enjoy the best of Magelo and will contribute to maintain the many features you love and the new ones we will develop. Check out the Premium offer and give it a try now with the new 10-day free trial! Show your support to Magelo by getting Premium!
For each character you add on Magelo, you will get an avatar and a signature in 2 different sizes:
The regular Signature we currently use remains the best way to highlight any character you want.
The new Mini-sig, half as tall as the regular sig, is really convenient to display your many alternate characters in a single post without taking up too much space.
The new Avatar helps others recognize your posts anywhere!
The avatar and signatures will give others a quick preview of your characters, a link to your profiles and you can fully customize them with all the options available. Go to My characters and have fun!
Find the map of all zones from the game with the emplacement of vendors. You can zoom-in and out the map to see a specific location more closely. We use also the same coordinate system than in the game! Take a look at the Plane of Knowledge for example.
All NPC pages will also feature a new map with the NPC locations highlighted. Check a Broodlands basilisk for example! Don?t forget to run Magelo Sync while playing – it stays the only way to define accurately the location of the NPCs.
Finally you can visit the new Hot zones page available from the Tools section to view where you can quickly level up. The zones are sorted by level to let you decide easily where to go at any level range.
30 new background images have been added to our gallery, showing various interesting sights around Norrath. We also add 3 new backgrounds and a new decorator on the Premium theme!
With this latest addition, more than 100 background images are available to give you plenty of choice to decorate your profiles and signatures! So let’s have a look and find the one that fit the best your character!
Go to My characters now and customize your profiles, signatures, and mini-sigs!
Of course, now I’m going to have to subscribe for another month and see what all of the new changes are.. I do still play EQ, even if I don’t get to play nearly as often as I’d like. I’m incredibly happy to see services like these still being offered to players. Happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!
stargrace 
Remember that episode of Friends where Chandler wants to quit the gym so Ross goes with him as moral support, and in the end neither of them quits? Well, that reminds me a lot of video games. We constantly (as gamers) hear from our friends, blogs, and other web sites all of the nitty gritty aspects to games that makes them unappealing. Yet we keep playing them. We complain about mechanics, developers, decisions, and everything under the sun – and yet we keep at it. Of course there are reasons for continuing, it’s not all doom and gloom, but I think one of the major ones is that it’s simply habit. If you’ve been playing a particular game for five plus years it’s REALLY hard to just stop. Suddenly you’re left with ‘free time’ where that video game used to be. So you fill the gap with another game. A few months down the road and you’re back to your old game wondering why it was you ever left in the first place. Or perhaps you’re one of the stronger type who don’t ever return, finding that the grass really IS greener on the other side.
It’s almost that time again, National Novel Writing Month. This will be my third year participating and I’m pretty excited about it. This year I’ve decided to do something a little different, since I’m a gamer, and most of my readers here are also gamers (I would think) I am going to give you guys the power to decide what I’m writing about. The first year I wrote, I did a fantasy book. It wasn’t that great. In fact, it sucked. Last year I wrote non-fiction and really enjoyed it. This year – it’s up to YOU.