If you love Legends of Norrath™ you wont want to miss this: buy select booster packs for only 200 Station Cash each for a limited time! This sale begins January 27, 2012 at 10:00 AM PST and ends February 2, 2012 at 11:59 PM PST (here's our Time Zone Conversion Tool). This sale is only for purchases within either EverQuest or EverQuest II.  

Find the complete list of sale-priced booster packs after the jump.

Sony Online Entertainment will be performing maintenance beginning at 7:00 AM Pacific on January 25, 2012. This will impact the following services:

• Account management will be unavailable starting at 7:00 AM to approximately 8:00 AM Pacific.
• Commerce transactions, including purchases on SOE websites and in-game marketplaces will be unavailable between 7:00 AM to approximately 8:00 AM Pacific.
• Forums will remain open during the downtime however you may lose permissions and experience occasional disconnects between 7:00 AM to approximately 8:00 AM Pacific.
• Logins for PoxNora®, Star Wars®: Clone Wars Adventures™ and Free Realms® will be affected from 7:00 AM to approximately 8:00 AM Pacific.

Here's our handy Time Zone Conversion tool to help you plan! 

Source:  Station forums

All U.S. servers will come down on Tuesday, January 24, 2012 at 7am PST for a hotfix. The expected downtime is one hour. EU servers will have their update at 5am London Time on Wednesday, January 25, 2012. Estimated downtime is two hours.

Continue after the jump for the full patch notes.

Qho Augren has made a permanent impression upon many of being the brattiest child that Norrath has ever seen. Hailing from the Village of Shin, he nagged us time and time again to bring him back a multitude of harvests whenever we returned to him. The most recent Gathering Obsession quest had a unique twist however: Qho became a pet that follows us around!

I'm sure many people had fun jumping off of cliffs or battling the nastiest of beasts with him in tow, but I saw the opportunity to teach Qho more about harvesting... and the world beyond. Qho has now visited a wide variety of places with me, posed for many pictures and even provided a point of amusement as unsuspecting players on my server have hailed my Qho pet over and over, likely wondering why he didn't give them a quest.

I've had Qho as a pet since March 2011 and have taken him out for several unique adventures in that time. In the months that have passed since then Qho has stood steadfastly by my side throughout it all. Continue reading for more tales of Qho's exciting adventures!

Change has been rumbling through the online gaming industry for some time now, and no company better represents this shift than Sony Online Entertainment. In the past year alone, two flagship SOE titles have made the transition from the traditional subscription-based revenue model to the more flexible microtransaction-based free-to-play model: DC Universe Online and EverQuest II. Of course, these two weren't the first to make the big shift for SOE, as their popular children's MMORPG, Free Realms, has already been pushing its popular microtransaction goodies for close to three years now.

Regardless, it seems like change is here to stay, and with SOE experiencing some phenomenal success with their free-to-play transitions, I decided to sit down with SOE's Senior Vice President of Global Sales and Marketing, Laura Naviaux, to talk about the future of online gaming microtransaction models, SOE's vision for 2012, and much more. If you're at all interested in what's going on with the online gaming industry and the revenue models that govern it, take a read!

This weekend only, enjoy double Station Cash exclusively with Free Realms cards purchased at CVS/pharmacy!  Offer only valid with CVS Free Realms cards redeemed between 12:01am PST January 20 and 11:59pm PST January 22.  Click here for CVS/pharmacy locations. Redeem your Station Cash cards here.

Thanks to astute ZAM user Arzym for bringing this to our attention!

The monthly live event Moonlight Enchantments starts tonight! It will turn on January 20th at 12:01am PST and run until 11:59pm PST on January 21st. The time applies directly with no time conversion to all servers. Check out our Moonlight Enchantments guide and peek at the rewards!