It's patch day (3.3.5) and I have been waiting patiently for Blizzard to do their thing and perform the weekly maintenance on the EU realm servers, this was supposed to have been completed by 12:00 Paris time (BST +1), amazingly they then put this time back to 18:00 Paris time. It is now 17:40 BST as I write this and I still can't log in to any EU realm, more worryingly, the Bronze Dragonflight realm was nowhere to be seen on the realm list but this has now fixed itself and is back on.



Going to try again in a minute, I really should learn that if Blizzard says they're going to do something by a certain time they almost certainly don't, only reason why I'm slightly miffed about this is the fact that I pay to play this game, although recent news in the press suggests Blizzard may be going down the route of free-to-play for World of Warcraft, if so that will be very interesting although given the state of the service of the game at present if this ever does happen I think it will spell the end of WoW.

I shit you not, for the past 6 months I have been doing nothing but playing World of Warcraft. It is truly amazing how much precious time (and money) this game sucks out of you. Anyway, I have managed to get my first character Hellwrath the human rogue to a respectable level 60, he is currently ready to take on the forces of the Burning Legion in Hellfire Peninsula, but is badly undergeared, much to my fault of course as I had a huge phobia of running dungeons after multiple bad experiences, I hope for this situation to change as I acquire heirloom gear for him after collecting enough emblems on my Death Knight, which brings us quite nicely onto Hellwrathius, a level 80 human Death Knight and currently my main.


Hellwrathius has been a great success, after a brief stint in the Eastern Plaguelands I quickly made my way to Outland with the intent of levelling as fast as I could. Like his predecessor however, this levelling was done almost exclusively through questing, not that I regret questing, my DK was much more suited to the strange and dangerous encounters that lay ahead in Outland and was considerably better geared for it than my leather-clad rogue would ever be. It was while I was questing on my Death Knight that I was first recruited by the Knights of England guild where I remain to this day, in fact they're such a nice bunch I now have four additional characters in the same guild! After a long grind in Outland I was eventually ready to hit the icy shores of Northrend, after level 75 I began to aim for level 80 and managed to complete a level per day, truly a heroic effort, especially since I was levelling up purely through questing like my rogue. I eventually made that all-important ding in a mine in the Storm Peaks, level 80 was the goal I had been aiming for since my Death Knight turned agaisnt the Lich King 20-odd levels previous and I had done it. Although once you do hit level 80 you soon realise that the hard work isn't over, oh no... it only just begins! My main priority for Hellwrathius now is to keep collecting emblems of triumph and frost and eventually get him equipped with the (level 245?) basic Death Knight teir 10 gear, that would be cool, but I have to admit that gear has been a side issue for some time as I have been doing nothing but mining and selling anything I could to afford the ultimate status symbol in World of Warcraft - the Mekgineer's chopper.


I can vividly remember back to the days of being a level 15 rogue wandering the streets of Stormwind being in absolute awe as I laid my eyes on the Mek Chopper for the first time, I could not possibly imagine at that time that I'd actually get one, but I had my mind set on becoming a level 80 death knight with a motorcycle. It would not happen for months, but my perseverance would eventually pay off back where it all started in Stormwind City. Nagrand's economy is in deflation and this proved to be much to my advantage in acquiring the chopper, just weeks ago the bike was going for approximately 20,000 gold each (buyout) on the auction house, but now people can't even sell them for 15,000. And so, with a mere 14,500 gold in my possession (almost exclusively acquired through mining thorium and saronite) I politely whispered one of the sellers asking if he'd be willing to settle at 14k. Totally expecting an abusive or negative reply I waited. And then I got a response... Xeomin was willing to sell me his Mekgineer's Chopper for just 14,000 gold, I was very excited, but of course nothing ever is straightforward with me as Xeomin explained he was about to start a run on Icecrown Citadel and would oversee the transaction afterwards. It was the longest wait of my life, pacing up and down the auction house floor - 'what if he just logs off?' I thought to myself 'what if he forgets?', an even worse thought popped into my head - 'what if someone else snags the bike?!'. Much to my relief the posted auction had expired, why was that good? Well it meant no one else could make a bid on the bike, thus securing my claim on it! I've never traded 14,000 gold before, I was half-worried the seller would somehow exploit the trade system and flee with my gold and bike, although this didn't happen and the seller, Xeomin turned out to be a thoroughly nice bloke. He explained to me he hoped to recoup enough gold to buy himself a chopper one day, he also asked if I could give him a ride to Goldshire, I of course obliged, in fact I think it should be a WoW tradition, if you buy a Mek Chopper off somebody, you should give the seller (or builder) a ride to anywhere of their choice!


My third major character is called Hellwrathar and is a human Mage. I once created a Blood Elf Mage called Alderley on my home server of Nagrand, but found it hard going as I had no higher level character to leech money from, I created him because I had not played a caster before. In addition to lack of funds I had trouble getting started with my professions (I first tried inscription and enchanting, then settled on tailoring and enchanting), and so I mothballed him and remains dormant (taking up a valuable slot) in my character list. I did however try again, this time making a human Mage and I have to say, after playing for 22 levels I can honestly say I absolutely love him, yes he can only wear cloth and yield a puny dagger or wooden staff, but that's beside the point, mages can do some awesome damage with their frost, fire and arcane spells including powerful AoE (area of effect) casts and perhaps the most attractive ability of being a mage is being able to cast portals to various cities in Azeroth, providing a possible extra source of income, particularly from the much-requested portals to the floating mage city of Dalaran.


To see a full list of all my World of Warcraft characters (those above level 10 at least), please visit my Wowhead profile page.

I'll admit it. I'm sorry, very very sorry for the remarks I made to an old friend about a certain PC game, I'm ashamed to say it, but the past 4 weeks of my miserable existence have been taken up with this particular game, a game of particular rarity as it's a computer game that I can actually play on my puny PC with other people still actually playing it too... The game? Well, I'll let the screenshots speak for themselves. As always, click the thumbnails for a nice, larger view, thumbnails in no particular chronological order...


I think it was the evening of the 24th of December last year, I had nothing to do and was idly browsing the Xfire website, I had exhausted all my free games on Steam and seemed to be the only person in BF2, even Solitaire was starting to wear thin. I needed something to play. I then noticed the Xfire ranking of the top games played that day, as usual World of Warcraft was in the number 1 position, having been there for the past 4 or 5 years. "What the Hell", I thought, I'd install the free 10-day trial from trywarcraft.com, see how utterly shit this virgin-fest of a game was and then uninstall it in a fit of rage. Simples.


The first thing I had to do after downloading the tiny (although surprisingly efficient) 'streaming' game client was to login and create a new character on my newly assigned realm - Nagrand(EU). Not particularly impressed, I opted for a human rogue simply because the other characters looked unrealistic, I preferred to be a human, and I am quite a rogue after all. My first experience of the World of Warcraft began in the pleasant surroundings of Northshire Abbey, set in the green and fertile forests of Elwynn. The first thing that struck me was the fact that the game was actually in true 3rd (and as I'd discover some time later) 1st person 3D, for some reason I expected an isometric view filled with meaningless icons and lines of confusing statistical data, how wrong I was, in fact I was thinking just how bloody nice everything looked - and sounded; the chattering of a river could be heard over to the east, the tweeting of birds in the trees to the south. I was impressed. But enough gawping I thought, time to actually start my first quest.

Oh yeah. Happy new year.

Been beavering away on HWDN today. I'm currently completely re-working the underlying code, making it much simpler and a lot lighter. I'm also adding support for jQuery and adding Fancybox, so you can view blog images in a nice little popup div (try clicking the image below).

HWDN will also be going social, I'll be adding links to my YouTube, Twitter, Xfire and Facebook accounts and hopefully incorporating social links to quickly post links to blogs, very exciting stuff! I'm also finally getting round to creating page links, in short the new HWDN is going to be awesome.

In BF2 I have finally become an officer and gained my butter bar (2nd Lieutenant), in less than 15,000 points' time I'll be a 1st Lieutenant, but that is some way away yet!


Also, get well soon to RtK who is currently ill, recover soon buddy, the festive season and new year are fast approaching!