Day three started a little late for me. Well, 9am. Despite being up far too late, I just couldn't sleep in. I stayed in my room and worked a bit, then headed down to the conference area.

I checked out the vendors and Station Store, which I hadn't had a chance to do yet. I think the vendors were much better this year, we had a role play costumer, a new MMO magazine that Brasse is involved in, a caricaturist, and a game-oriented dating service to name a few.  Oh, that picture on the right is Mrs. Grimwell!

I intended to grab some lunch and work on my panel write ups in the three or so hours I had before the 2pm expansion panel, but was waylaid on the way by lots of people interested in the ZAM.com announcement Friday. Eventually I grabbed a sandwich and made it to the EQII Expansion panel, the writeup will be Coming Soon(tm). You can see the press release for the expansion here .

  The next panel I hit was Domino's EQII Tradeskill panel, writeup also Coming Soon(tm). Domino as usual is an immensely popular developer because of her high level of interaction with players. We got more detail about Tradeskill Missions, an increase in faction reward for Tradeskill Writs, and got a sneak peak at the leather and cloth appearance revamp. Oh, and the delayed crafted item revamp is ready for the next game update.

We had a little downtime betwe en panels and the final Banquet. The banquet is one of my favorite parts of Fan Faire. As we ate from a lovely buffet that included chops, kabobs, and a good vegetarian selection, we watched on the main screens pictures from Fan Faire. Then Brenlo got up and proceeded to give away tons of prizes including speaker sets that will have to be checked as luggage, VISA gift cards, keyboards and headsets.

The costume contest was a blast as usual. Brasse retired from it last year, but I think most of the entrants could have gone up against her hand-crafted female dwarf costumes. In the end it came down to a froglok who had been in costume the entire weekend and an EQ dark elf corpse. I apologize for the sucky phone pictures, I was tired of lugging my equipment bag around!

After the banquet I was invited to a little EQII developer wind-down at Quarks, where we invaded and accosted a WoW player and his friend. They were great, and it turns out his girlfriend plays EQII. We made sure he had a picture for her and Domino autographed a business cardr. Alas, Quarks closes early, so the bartender transferred our Warp Core Breeches to to-go cups (geez, I love Vegas) and we parted ways. I met with some of the ZAM Network team for goodbyes and called it a night.

Today I fly out late; I'm working on my notes and recordings from panels, I'll get them up as soon as I'm able.  I know I keep saying that, but I'm trying to get every little nugget of info out of my recordings and it's meticulous work.

This was an awesome Fan Faire. Unofficial attendance counts are running about 1800 people. I just can't wait until next year!