Let the Friendship Festival Begin!

Hello my friends, I'm Valentine Heartsong, and I've come to the Spiral for a very special event - the annual Friendship Festival! From the first to the fifteenth of February, I'll be in the Spiral selling special items and pets! You can find me at the fountain in the Wizard City Shopping District!

In addition to my in game items, you can also download, print and give out your very own Wizard101 Friendship Invitations! Just put your Invite-a-Friend code on these special valentine invitations and give them out to all your friends!

Not only will you have more fun playing Wizard101 with your friends, but you can also earn Crowns! Click here to learn more!

This is the February 2011 installment of my Book of the Month Club. These books have been suggested by a fellow Librarian from Earth, her name is Kit Ward-Crixell and she is a librarian in New Braunfels, Texas, USA.

This month we begin looking at books that remind us of the world of Grizzleheim. Inspired by Norse mythology, Grizzleheim is an airy, outdoor landscape of snowy mountains, glacial ridges and towering trees that is home to three new Wizard101 tribes - Bears, Wolves and Ravens.

The Sea of Trolls by Nancy Farmer is the story of a Saxon boy named Jack who has to save his little sister from an evil troll queen. There’s an ice mountain, giant bears, and a crow named Bold Heart in this book that’s set in a place a little like Grizzleheim. The next two books in the series are The Land of the Silver Apples and The Islands of the Blessed.

Look for this book in your school or local library and enjoy reading, young Wizards!

Attention all East Coast Wizards!
In March, KingsIsle Entertainment is teaming up with Beckett’s Massive Online Gamer Magazine at PAX East, a huge three-day festival for tabletop, videogame and PC gamers held annually in Boston. If you are already planning to attend, or if you will be in the area and can make it to the show, we’d love to see you and hear about your experiences with Wizard101! We have lots of fun things planned, including:

1. A “Biggest Wizard101 Fan” contest with AMAZING prizes (more details coming soon).
2. The chance to be the first Wizards to receive a new Wizard101 mount, the Moonlight Pony, by signing up for a Beckett subscription at the event. We’ll let you know about some other ways to get the mount as the show approaches!
3. Lots of fun prizes and surprises!

This year PAX East will be held from March 11 through 13 at the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center. For more information, directions and tickets, visit www.paxsite.com and see you there!

Just one Click can Change a Child's Life
As you know, Wizard101 is a fully voiced over game, meaning players can have the text read to them. But imagine if you couldn't read at all? The ability to read, write, and understand allows a level of communication that can make a huge difference in every life and The Literacy Site makes it possible for you to give the gift of reading with just a click.

At The Literacy Site, we believe that educating children around the world to be literate is vital to making the world a better place, for them and for everyone else. The dissemination of knowledge and understanding is stymied for those who see the written word as an unsolvable puzzle. With a click a day, you can help fight the spread of illiteracy, and make a tangible difference in your world.

Reminder to Keep Up to Date!
When young Wizards register to become a member of Ravenwood School of Magical Arts, they are asked for an email address. If you don't give us a valid email address, or don't check the email address regularly, you could be missing out on important information such as password resets or sanction notifications! This is just a reminder to make sure that the email address you have registered with Wizard101 is up to date!

To change your email, just follow these steps:
1. Log into your account at www.wizard101.com
2. Click "My Accounts"
3. If you have Parental Controls enabled, enter your Parental Controls password to log in, otherwise proceed to the next step
4. Scroll down to the "Basic Information" section
5. Enter your new email address in the Email field, then click "Save"
6. Viola! Your new email is now in the system!

Learn more about this and other commonly asked questions in our Knowledge Base

KIFreeGames comes to Facebook
  Looking for all the latest news and announcements about KIFreeGames?

Look no further than our Facebook page!

We will regularly post contests, updates and other news so 'Like' us to learn about what's happening at KIFreeGames.com!

Our free online games are family friendly, but are also fun for gamers of all skill levels. Play fun free online games at KIFreeGames.com and win free game codes for use in Wizard101.

Choose a Reviewer's Adventure!  
Some of our young Wizards may just be old enough to remember the "Choose your own Adventure" books. Reviewer Beau Hindman has taken this idea and applied it to game reviews.

Over the next several weeks, Beau will play Wizard101. Help guide him or just follow his adventure through the Spiral at Choose Beau's Adventure.

Giving Tree Gives Big!
In 2010 we offered our players a chance to give a little Magic to someone else.

When you purchased a Giving Tree Seed from the Crowns Shop at the price of 2500 Crowns (approximately $5), KingsIsle Entertainment kept tally of all the purchases made before January 3rd 2011. You raised $55,182 and we have donated the entire value of the sales of the item to two charities in Texas. Click here to learn more about giving magic.

  Have your say!
If you haven't participated yet, we invite you to be a part of Dalia Falmea's Feedback Friday. Each Friday she posts a new question to our players in The Dorms section of our Wizard101 message boards. We ask that you only address the question at hand, as off-topic answers will not be approved.

Look for this week's Feedback Friday here, and watch the Dorms for more requests for your input!

Letter from Merle Ambrose Regarding 18+ Chat

Recently we made a change to our chat system that left a number of people in our community frustrated -- or some cases, even angry. The feedback has been significant, and I wanted to write you a quick note to let you know that, as always, we are listening.

First off, a quick apology. We did a very poor job of notifying you, our customer community, that this change was coming. To make matters worse, we completely failed to explain the reasons behind this decision. Please accept our apology for that, and allow me the opportunity to provide that explanation now.

A large portion of our effort here at KingsIsle is spent polishing our game, and all the related subsystems. It may not be apparent on the outside, but maintaining a virtual world with 15 million players can be pretty challenging. Operational systems, customer support, registration and billing, the website -- there are hundreds of individual pieces that have to fit together perfectly to keep Wizard101 running all day, every day. Our team is constantly changing these systems, improving them, polishing them, trying to make them better for you.

Sometimes when we make changes, we also make mistakes. A few weeks ago, we found that we had made an error: the explanation for how our 18+ Chat feature worked, as described on the website, didn't match the rules set that turned this Chat Filter off. The result was that a number of players -- all of them over 18 years of age, mind you -- were able to keep Open Chat working, even when their subscription expired.

Oops. Our original intention was to restrict this type of chat to active members only. We thought requiring a current, active credit card would be the safest, easiest way to ensure that 18+ chat remained exactly that -- a restricted feature meant only for our more mature players.

When we found that error, we put it on the schedule, and a short time later it was "fixed." The issue, of course, is that a number of our customers -- like those who have migrated from a subscription account to buying zones with crowns -- found themselves suddenly unable to use a feature they had grown accustomed to. This wasn't a problem before; in fact, when we added 18+ Chat, game cards were a pretty small part of our business. Now we sell them in almost fifty thousand retail locations.

Our intention was to fix an issue with our chat system -- not to alienate a portion of our community! We value our pay-as-you-go customers just as much as our monthly subscribers -- but by making this change, it certainly didn't look that way.

So the question now is: how do we resolve this going forward?

After much discussion, we have decided to move the system back to the way it was before -- and fix the messaging to accurately reflect this. As before, we will still require the use of a credit card to verify that an account holder is 18 or older -- this is not just the right thing to do, it is actually a legal requirement. This is not open to debate. But we can drop the restriction that you must have an active subscription. Once an account is verified as being over 18 years old, that account will remain verified, whether they continue to pay us or not.

We're going to make this change immediately, and I sincerely hope that this will address the situation to everyone's satisfaction. That said, player safety is (and must be) our first priority, and we will continue to review and revise our policies and rules to keep Wizard101 both safe and appropriate for all ages. We reserve the right to change things as we deem necessary, even if those changes are unpopular.

Please understand that we consider our player community to be our most important asset... We are listening, and we do care about your opinions. Thank you again for playing, and I hope to see you in Ravenwood.

Regards,

J Todd Coleman
"Headmaster Ambrose"
Director, Wizard101

P.S. one final note about feedback. We promise to continue listening... but only to opinions that are stated in a courteous, respectful manner. Profanity, insults or threats towards our customer support team absolutely will not be tolerated. Those who have acted in a discourteous or disrespectful manner -- in game, on our forums, or via email -- can expect their accounts to be immediately sanctioned or banned.