This is a story about a community that came together to give a little boy all they could before they had to say goodbye. 

Before I start the story here are a few things you should know about the game Everquest II. EQ2 has a a player housing system. IMO it’s the best in any game I’ve played. You can purchase houses and guild halls with game coin and also obtain some through real life money and raiding. The game offers furniture through quests, merchants, crafting, and the real money store. Many of these items are chairs and tables and other completed furniture pieces but there are also things like floor tiles, partial walls, and other building block type things. The in game decorating system allows you to place these items into your home and move them up and down, side to side, resize and to rotate them. A few years back they changed the housing layout files to be plain text which made them editable. This allowed you to change the coordinates of items and even change the pitch and roll of them to allow you to tilt and flip items in ways you never could before. A player named Jesdyr created a 3rd party program that made it very easy to change these values and build amazing things. You can now build pretty much anything you can think of. 

There has been a decorating community in EQ2 for years. It’s known as the Norrathian Homeshow. With the new decorating possibilities the community has grown even larger. There is a forum dedicated to the Homeshow on the EQ2 public forums. 

Now back to the story. 

A woman posted on the Homeshow forum back in early March. She addressed the Guk, server which is her home server. She explained that she is the mother of a terminally ill child. His name is John and he has an EQ2 character named Ribbitribbitt, he has cancer. The woman and her husband are EQ2 players and due to their son’s condition he cannot play outside and run around a lot like other children his age. So to entertain him they introduced him to the game and taught him how to do the basic movement abilities. The mother purchased him an in game home through the real money store. It’s a big island in the sky. The only things that come on this island are a small pond and a waterfall. Ribbitribbit loves to jump off the island and run around since he can’t play in many of the games zones where his character risks getting killed. The mother explains that due to Ribbit’s condition she is kept very busy but would like to give her son a few more items on his island. She asks for volunteers to craft and place a few items like fences and trees etc to make it a bit more exciting for him. Here is her original post. 

The community on Guk jumped at the chance to help. As the thread became more popular people from other servers began to read it and wanted to help too. Word spread about the cause and even non decorator/non crafter players wanted a way to help. Soon the project Ribbitribbitt’s Lillipad Jungle was born. 

Some players from the Guk server dropped their current guild to join the Lillipad Jungle guild that was created for Ribbit and his family. People from other servers created level 1 characters and joined as well. The goal… to obtain a guild level of 70 to purchase the largest guild hall in game for them to play in. The players worked night and day to level up the guild by doing crafting and adventuring writs as well as raiding. 

While some players worked on leveling the guild others worked on decorating the island Ribbit’s mother had purchased for him. As I mentioned before she was asking for a few trees and fences but due to the amazing determination and abilities of the decorating community they built a wonderland. It had games, tree houses, a jungle gym, pirate fort, roller coaster, aquarium, climbing wall, and a ton of other stuff. 

This wasn’t enough. People began purchasing other homes and items for Ribbit and worked on decorating even more houses that were linked together with portals.

Then came the party planners. Some of the participants decided it would be fun to throw Ribbit a surprise party to reveal all the new stuff to him. They picked a date and a time and invited EVERYONE. Ribbit’s parents promised to video their son’s reaction for everyone to see. 

The Lillipad Jungle guild reached lvl 70 in only 65 hours and the guild hall was purchased and of course decorated magnificently. It was all completed just in time for the big party. I personally spent my time on the original island building a rollercoaster for him to run around. I wanted to make it as high as possible since I heard he liked to jump off of things. I was unfortunately busy the day the big reveal party was held but Jaedrian over at the PUGTV channel on Twitch TV streamed the event and I was able to catch a few minutes of it on there. 

Hundreds of players came out to greet Ribbit at his party including GMs and Customer Server Reps as well as other EQ2 employees like the ex-executive producer, Domino. 

From what I have seen in the live stream and heard from players it was almost impossible to move due to the number of people at the party. They started on the Isle of Mara and from what I heard GMs added special items to the area just for the event. They then all went to the different houses, islands and the guild hall that were decorated for this special child. Many people took screenshots and videos and posted them all over the web which the folks over at ZAM did a great job of rounding up. Their article on the event can be found HERE. They also have a page of links related to Ribbitribbitt. Even some news people at the Toronto Star got word of the event.

My favorite thing is Ribbit’s reaction posted on his youtube channel.

We learned today that last night John Ribbitribbitt passed away in his sleep at the age of 6. It’s a very sad day for the entire EQ2 community and I can’t even imagine how his family feels. I was happy I could be a very small part of this HUGE event. <3 Ribbitribbitt

-Twinklin