What a Long Strange Trip Its Been

This weekend my 10 man raid guild decided that the summer was too good to miss and with Cataclysm just around the corner a break was needed for us all to charge our batteries and be fresh for the next wave of challenged.

I must admit I wasn't ready for this myself and the announcement came out of nowhere, but as enough of the group had asked for the break to our raid leader he did exactly as I would have so /salute to Posie for doing that. At the end of the day most of the guys and gals of All about Beer are not hard core progression raider types, their attitude to raiding is very casual and focused on having fun although their drive is first class and that is what made raiding with them worthwhile.

It all started in June 2009 when I got dragged kicking and screaming on an alt into Naxx, I was focusing on my mage as the primary alt at the time and I took my bad DPS into Naxx with a group that was completely unknown to me except for Posie (on his priest), Aphra (who I knew as a mage, Xabinkinniel) and Stabbster (an alt of a guidie, Wollo). The rest where in fresh faced raiders ready to learn their craft in Naxx. It turned out that there were 3 married couples in the team and we had a riot. OK progress was made half the team as we downed Kel'Thuzad and went on to slay Sartharion (with all drakes dead). A top night was had but, I had low expectations about things lasting long. How wrong I was to be!

Azeroth Uncovered

Still suffering from Internet issues (good game TalkTalk) I have been unable to raid now for over 4 weeks. My gold making project is going well enough but nothing that really was worth mentioning here. So I decided to go exploring and discovering a few interesting places people rarely visit in-game because they don't know it exists, has no real purpose or is not really meant to serve as anything more than eye-candy on flight paths.

The list is not really long but over the next few weeks I'll be making a post on each of them. Today the location is  Stormwind. Yeah I know what you're thinking EVERYBODY goes to Stormwind, big place, capital city of the humans. Well I shall reveal a tiny part of Stormwind that took me 5 years to find and I thought I'd share with you as it hidden in plain sight!

RealID: Hero to Zero

I am loving the RealID system. It allows me to to stay in touch with the people I have become friends with online regardless of where they are in WoW. However, the reign of it being the best thing in WoW since the Dungeon Finder  is about to come to a very abrupt end after a very short time.

With the announcement (source) yesterday, that in future forum posts on Blizzard sites will display our full name rather than that of our on screen alter ego, Blizzard seem to have taken the golden egg, covered it in grease and thrown it to Robert Green.

I personally don't want everyone I may encounter to be able to Google me and see what my thoughts on a video game are, sure some people I couldn't careless about them knowing but the guy that in 10 years will want to hire me as a big shot in his multi-million pound enterprise certainly doesn't need access to such ramblings. Therefore, I am now forced into a corner about posting on the forums either I keep quiet and preserve my anonymity or I have my say and risk the whole world finding out my views. Sadly, I'll be choosing the keep quiet option, at least on the Blizzard forums.

Anyways my piece has been said, feel free to post comments below as I'd like to know if I'm being over sensitive or not.