It's a bit different this time isn't it? (From Thog's Blog 21/11/2008)

Hey folks, the weekend is here at last! Give me a woo and a hoo!!

I've been on the move today, from one side of the county to half way back across it before going back to my work base. Been quite a decent day actually, just there never seems to be enough hours in the day to get everything done.

Made omelette for tea following Denkai's instructions, actually turned out okay except for having to eat mushroom omelette - I'm not a mushroom fan but I chopped up way too much so I ended up having mushroom instead of ham omelette to make sure it didn't go to waste. At least it was edible, which is a plus for me.

Thinking about the expansion, I do listen to WoW Radio (it's great! Check outwww.wcradio.com) and one of their presenters, TotalBiscuit, was saying how there is such a better story in WoTLK compared to original WoW and TBC, which I have to agree. Everything is linked to the Lich King and his nastiness, you see you fiddling with things and post-quests you get letters in the mail from old quest givers telling you stuff, it really makes you feel more like you're playing a Role Playing Game than just an Action Adventure game, which to me is a good thing, and is a win-lose situation - if you like the role playing stuff, you get that stuff extra, and if you just want to grind up to 80 and get raiding you can ignore it like you always did before.

As a side note, if anyone does have any topics you'd like me to write about by all means let me know.

I'm enjoying the Grizzly Hills at the minute, I first came here at level 72, but didn't really have any quests, but now at 73 all the quests seem to have opened up and I'm having a great time!

As part of my regular rants about raiding, I'm going to go indepth about Ventrilo, and how it works, and why you need it if you want to raid.

So what is Ventrilo? It's a chat program that lets you talk with other people over the net. It is free for guildies to use (I pay for it for the guild) and is great for general talking, as well as for parties and raids.

We have it for raiding (reminder - if you want to raid, use Ventrilo!) but it's also available for guildies for general chatting or when doing instances. As long as guildies are using Ventrilo, it's fine by me.

You might say, "But I don't have a microphone!". Nevertheless, if you want to raid get Ventrilo. If everyone is on Ventrilo for a raid it makes things a lot easier than if some are and some aren't. It lets the raid leader give out instructions quickly. It is great if you have a microphone but not essential.

You can download it free from www.ventrilo.com - I think linux people might have problems though, unless you can get some sort of emulator to run the windows version. Then you need to set it up.

Install Ventrilo, and then open it.

Pick a username (generally the name of your main character) by clicking the top button with an arrow on it, click new and enter your chars main in the first two boxes, then click ok.

Then click on the second button with an arrow on it, and select New. Enter Ravenswing as the name. The Hostname/IP, port and password are available in the Guild Information. Enter this and click ok.

Then click connect. It should now connect you to the Ravenswing Ventrilo server.

Couple of common questions:

Q: I'm having problems with Ventrilo!
A: There is a good FAQ page on the Ventrilo website athttp://www.ventrilo.com/faq.php

Q: Why don't you use Teamspeak / MSN / ICQ etc.
A: Because we don't. Live with it 

Hope this helps. We've had Ventrilo for a while and only ever really had 70% people on Ventrilo when raiding, but when we go back to raiding, as normal we do want everyone on it, because it really does help. Plus it means you get to hear me sing!