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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!

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!

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!

Social networking and virtual worlds are related technologies; they're both digital spaces where people can form and maintain relationships with one another. Social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook are commonly used to market products and services. MMOs are both products and services, so putting them on Facebook makes sense.

Realtime Worlds thinks so, anyway, as it has opened an official APB Facebook page where it can hold contests, and post news and media, and where fans can converse about the game. While pages are often used as half-hearted attempts to keep brands visible, Realtime Worlds is swinging for the fences by making its APB page an integral part of its public relations strategy.

WarCry talked to Realtime Worlds community manager Chris "Ulric" Dye about that decision, and he described in detail what the company is trying to do and why it's trying to do it. It's an interesting read, and there are a couple more general game-related questions slipped in. Most of them are artfully dodged, though! Nevertheless, Dye announced a fan art contest. Go to the Facebook page and submit your "best APB-themed graffiti/artwork" to win an as-yet-unannounced prize!

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!

We stopped by the NCsoft booth at Comic-Con 2008 and had the chance to chat with City of Heroes Community Manager Alex 'Lighthouse' Von Minden, who noted that a number of community members were disappointed about not being able to attend the Con for a chance to snag the exclusive in-game item from the VIP Pass. We thought it would be fun to give players not in attendance a chance to pick one up, so we're happy to present Massively readers with 10 chances to win a unique in-game CoH Comic-Con item. This contest is open to all ages and locations -- you'll just need an active City of Heroes account to claim it. To enter, just leave a comment in this thread by 5pm EST Wednesday, July 30. We'll choose 10 winners at random to receive a code for the unique in-game item. Good luck!

Update: contest closed! Thanks to everyone who entered -- we'll be announcing winners ASAP!

GameShadow has joined forces with Codemasters to offer you the chance to win one of ten copies of the Lord of the Rings Online Gold Edition. This special edition of the game includes three brand new in-game items, a free unique Bree Horse, 45 days free game time and a steel case.

The contest itself is very easy, as you only need to answer one question regarding the name of the famous wizard with the whispy white beard and huge eyebrows. If you don't know the answer to that one, you should probably just hand in your geek card right now. This contest will continue until the drawing on July 31st, 2008. Check out the GameShadow website for complete terms and conditions.

SOE's Gamers In Real Life (G.I.R.L.) program has found its first scholarship winner. Julia Brasil of San Francisco wins $10,000 scholarship, and a ten week internship at the SOE studio of her choice. The competition, announced last April, was designed to encourage women to enter the games industry. SOE has an interview with Ms. Brasil on the GIRL website, and they must have found it at least a little ironic that her current favorite MMO is not any SOE game, but Age of Conan. Brasil credited online games with teaching her English and helping with her puzzle-solving ability and abstract thinking. Big congrats to Brasil, and we're definitely hoping she goes on to make great games.

[Via Gamesindustry.biz]

With all the flaws we've seen in Tabula Rasa over the last eight months, one thing we'd never criticize the game for is a lack of creativity from the community team. They've consistently done their best to keep their community engaged, despite the fact that said community is disbursed around the internet due to the lack of an official forum. Their support team has pulled in similar praise in the past as well.

Continuing their reign of awesomeness, the Tabula Rasa community team is going to be spear-heading a new event at this year's Comic-Con. Critters and co. will be setting up a booth giving away free Tabula Rasa goodies, an exclusive Lumin pet, and filming fans performing their best real-world emotes. They'll take the footage back to their Austin offices and vote on which one is the best, and actually recreate it in-game. It's a pretty neat contest, and we recommend you check it out (booth #5209) if you're headed to Comic-Con this year.

After a tense week of mounting expectation, in which we waited for the promised big news to hit the City of Heroes multimedia forums, the Toyota Matrix Machinima Contest has just been announced. Contestants are asked to put together a video using City of Heroes and/or City of Villains, in which the theme is to be getting in touch with your dark side. After all, even heroes have a dark side of some sort, right? Videos have to be 2-4 minutes long and no more than 200 mb in size.

The Grand Prize is spectacular: 'A 2009 Model Year Toyota Matrix S model filled with a year subscription to "City of Heroes" and "City of Villains," an XBox 360, a Playstation 3, a Nintendo DS gaming console, and tons of super hero video games!' We know there's an ocean of talent out there, so we're anticipating some stellar entries from the CoX machinima crowd.

Details of the contest, along with full rules and regulations, are available at the official website.

BattleClinic is running an EVE Online contest, as a tie-in to go along with their exclusive Faction Warfare Enlistment Debrief, written by 'Sergeant-Major Illivia of the Federal Defense Union.' But, as BattleClinic notes, "no one seems to really know who the hell Sergeant-Major Illivia is." And that, all of you aspiring fiction writers, is the basis of the contest.

Sergeant-Major Illivia needs a biography, no longer than four paragraphs, completely original, and set within the EVE universe. If your writing makes the cut, the prizes offered include The Art of EVE, a 60-day EVE Time Card, and a 1GB EVE USB FlashDrive. Check out the rest of the rules and conditions over at BattleClinic, but remember the deadline for your bio submissions will be Friday, July 11. And for the love of the Amarrian God, don't begin with "It was a dark and stormy night..."

Via EVE Online