Did you see what I did there with the title?  Did ya? Did ya?  Don't worry I won't be taking my clothes off, I'll keep that for random youtube videos :P

For a little while Runzwithfire.co.uk has had a Steam group going on... um... Steam.  It's mostly been restricted to guildies, close friends and PvP buddies but we decided to throw it open so that friends of the blogsite can join to.  Why?  Because I love you all that's why; running the blog for the past 18 months has been great fun, there's been some great people, I've had the opportunity to speak to other fantastic bloggers and to be honest the people that stop by here are just all kinds of fantastic.  I'd let every single one of you date my sister...

Obviously not concurrently, some kind of rota system might be required...

Guess I best ask her about that too...

And her husband...

But it's the sentiment of adoration and respect for you all that I was actually getting at.

Anyways, if you'd like to join the Runzwithfire Steam Group you can click here (you will of course need a Steam account and you'll need to log in).  A little bit of Team Fortress 2 (I'm terrible at it), Left 4 Dead (I'm terrible at that too), Magic The Gathering (I'm god awful), Magicka (ooo now I'm good at that... the aim is to kill the other players right?), Terraria, Shogun 2, Blood Bowl, Counter Strike and Assassin's Creed; The Whatever (I think it's the 3rd one, the one where you go round and stab each other... thinking about it, that probably doesn't narrow it down much) are all on offer.

Other Plans

People did ask quite some time ago about a forum, I was a bit hesitant about it because the Mage Forums were up at Mana Obscura and I didn't want to duplicate effort.  However, time marches on, things change and I've found a decent forum module for the website.  Once I actually set it up properly I'll put it live and hopefully it will be a place for lively inputs about MMOs, Machinima, gaming in general, (game based) artwork and and general funny stuff.  I say hopefully because I know forums can sometimes die before they're even really born so we'll just see how it goes.

I'm also hoping to stick a chat client up on here.  To begin with, this will be retricted to use by Darkened's RBG team but we'll see how that pans out but hopefully it will expand to a useful place to discuss blog ideas, share general WoW/MMO conversations and have a little bit of community interaction.  We'll see how it goes.

Anyway, that's all from me for now so have fun and hope to see you in the BGs :)

I'm sat in the office this Friday morning (which is when I'm writing this draft), one of only two people in as everyone else has the day off, listening to a bit of Adele (not my usual bass pumping dance music) with very little to actually do today.  On such days my thoughts naturally drift towards blogging which is why blogging is somewhat eratic; it largely all depends on my workload which is by no means consistent.  Such is the life of a consultant.  Lately, however, I've been finding it harder to blog about WoW and then I suddenly realised that's because lately I haven't been playing a whole lot of WoW.  Sure I'm still running the RBG matches, I've been making my arena team commitments and I even ran with a guild 25 man Firelands Raid so we could finish the legendary (congratulations Anoris by the way, I'm insanely jealous of course but you completely deserve it) but I haven't really been 'playing' WoW.  I've been going through the motions.

Don't worry this isn't some 'I'm quitting WoW' post, that time may come and it may be soon or it may be a long time from now but it isn't now I can assure you of that.  But I can't help but be aware that my enthusiasm has waned somewhat.  I still love PvP (I've always loved PvP really) and when the RBG team gathers with our war drums sounding I get goosebumps.  I have euphoric moments in arena when we thrash a team that, by rights and looking at composition, should have easily defeated us.  I'm still playing aspects of the game and I love those aspects, but I'm picking and choosing not playing the game as a whole.  Now some people have been playing like this for a long time but it's not how I like to play.  I was mostly levelling through TBC (in the days before speedy levelling) but once I hit max level with my little Magey wagey I started in Wrath, I played every aspect of the game.  I raided, I never missed a daily heroic, I never missed out on dailies, I BG'd, I even did some arena (although then I was experimenting with it and did it to experience it and never consistently).  The idea of missing out on some Emblems of Whatever was abhorrent, I would never even dream of it.  A gentleman raider would do his duty, get his emblems and do his dailies to ensure he had the gold to make sure his gear was in tip top condition.

Now I still make sure my PvP gear is always ready to go, but my raid gear is a dusty hotchpotch of Tier 11 and 12 gear that lies mostly unused in the corner of my study (that's a euphemism for being sat in my bags by the way).  So what's changed and why?

If I had to pick a word (in a very gross and over generalised way) to pinpoint the cause then that word would be Cataclysm.

Anyone currently playing Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR) will know that Bioware released Patch 1.1 a couple of days ago which sought to fix a number of issues with the initial release(and forced a very hurried addendum to my first impressions article, cheers Bioware... bastard).  Well aside from making the UI a little more user friendly it would also appear that Bioware broke Ilum, the world everyone goes to at level 50 for their daily and weekly quests.  The intention was good, they wanted to provoke more world PvP on, what is essentially, their world PvP planet and so they adapted several quests to require the killing of players from other factions AND upped the amount of Valour earnt from each kill.  Unfortunately it would appear that Bioware didn't bother to look at the server population balances before they rolled the patch out, which meant good times for any Imperials but the Republic players had to endure this...

Additionally, there is a handy little feature that alerts you to whenever an enemy player gets near an important objective, you know just in case you try to be sneaking and avoid the big roaming packs of death called the Imperial Playerbase.

Even on those servers with a slightly fairer population balance the net result seems to be one big AOE grindfest as demonstrated below.

Bioware did not think this one through... no siree... *sucks gums*... nope.

What with the recent ‘blackout’ conducted by Wikipedia, Reddit and a whole host of other websites in protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA), I thought it was worth taking some time to highlight a couple of other issues.  Whilst I wholeheartedly support any opposition to SOPA and PIPA, and fully accept that legislation passed within the United States has wide ranging consequences that not only affect internet usage outside US borders but also basically set the ‘world minimum baseline standard’ with regards to internet freedom, I was somewhat disheartened and frankly annoyed to see so many British bloggers, youtubers and websites so actively supporting US activists’ efforts to get the US Congress to reconsider these acts.

Totalbiscuit blacked out his youtube page and posted a highly informative video about why SOPA is bad, Yogscast blacked out their page and linked back to TB’s video etc etc.  And all of this is great, I’m not denying that.  It shows a bright new future where the internet community is not divided by country or flag, where we can all stand up and speak in one voice and it showed the power the voice of the internet has when we bother to work together.  Obviously I say that in the knowledge that SOPA and PIPA could still be passed into legislation, but the White House is actively against SOPA meaning that a veto is highly likely.  Building on that, considering the very public backlash against SOPA it is extremely unlikely that SOPA at least would get the 67 votes required for a supermajority in the US Senate (allowing the Senate to supercede any presidential veto).

Wait.  You’re pissed at fellow Brits opposing SOPA/PIPA but simultaneously applauding their efforts?  WTF RUNZ????