Over the weekend most of my gaming has been focused on World of Warcraft and getting ready for the Battle for Azeroth expansion.

My first ever character, a druid, has been completely neglected during the Legion expansion and as such was still only level 100 and had not set foot in the Broken Isles.

Late on Saturday I made a start and very quickly managed to get level 103 in just a couple of hours. Yesterday, somehow, I managed to hit the maximum level of 110 even though I had things to do around the house and needed to get some shopping done. I even had 3-4 hours spare having reached level 110 by 7pm!

This is not a huge accomplishment in the scheme of things, but anyone who knows me will know that I do not enjoy leveling my characters in World of Warcraft. There are several reasons why I managed to do this, the first is I am able to fly in the Broken Shores, making travel between quests much easier and quicker. Another reason is the druid flight form not only makes it quicker to farm herbs, but it also makes it quicker to do quests which involve collecting something or activating something. Finally and perhaps most importantly, I enjoyed playing the druid which is something I did not expect.

I seem to remember doing the same thing at the end of the Warlords of Draenor expansion. Rushing towards the end to reach level 100, only that time, I did not particularly enjoy playing it. My druid has been neglected for many years now, something I hope to change during the upcoming expansion, although I will give no guarantees.

This now leaves me with 4 characters which I have leveled from level 1 (no boosts here!). I have a paladin, warrior, mage and druid, the mage started life during Wrath of the Lich King but the other 3 started out during the vanilla Warcraft days.

I have not spent much time playing EVE Online this weekend, I did however spend some time taking my Vexor Navy Issue for spin to see if I can scan down some combat sites and get some good loot and/or escalation sites.

I found myself in Gallente space on Friday and scanned down a Serpentis Narcotic Warehouse combat site which I completed with ease. Thankfully I managed to pick up a Coreli A-Type 1MN Afterburner and a Coreli A-Type 5MN Microwarpdrive in the stronghold. Because these are fairly popular fittings they should sell easily and for close to their combined estimate value of 70.4m ISK.

Yesterday I decided to try my luck again and found two Serpentis Vigil combat sites. Once again I completed both sites with ease but they had virtually no loot to speak of. I did get an escalation but it lead to low-security space which somewhere I want to avoid for the time being. I did have some luck by scanning down a Desolate Site which is a drone combat site and managed to get some Drone Capillary Fluid, Drone Synaptic Relay Wiring and a Sentient Signal Amplifier which comes to a total of 24.2m estimated ISK. The rest of my haul was made up of 3 or 4 warp disruption items that I picked up on my travels.

What I got is not much but considering I spent so little time playing EVE Online this weekend, I can’t complain.

My friend Jason and I live on different sides of the Atlantic and as such we try to set aside some time once a week to Skype and catch up on each others lives. During this typically 3-4 hour Skype call we also set aside some time to play a game together. Currently, that game is Snooker Nation.

In my view Snooker Nation is possibly the best snooker game on the market, powered by the unreal engine, the game has some decent much needed physics for a snooker game. While the game does have flaws, all in all, I would recommend this game for any two people who like snooker. If however you are unlikely to find someone else to play the game with you, I wouldn’t bother, the AI is terrible and is only good for getting used to the game and for practising. The games developers, Cherry Pop Games, have also produced an older pool game using the same unreal engine called, you guessed it, Pool Nation. Unfortunately however, for both of these games, Cherry Pop Games no longer seem to provide support or updates to address some annoying bugs, mostly found in multiplayer.

This week I won 4 frames to 3 in a best of 7 which I am very pleased about, especially as at one stage I was down 2 frames to 0. I also managed to get the only century break of 101 in frame 3, although both Jason and I got very close with breaks in the 80’s and I believe Jason had a break of 99 at one point. We have had some really scrappy games in the past but last night was a different story, we both played really well.

While this website is primarily here for me to document my gaming activities and achievements, there will be on occasion the odd personal post, unrelated to gaming.

Last Friday for around 8 hours and the following Saturday for around 5 hours my Friend Jason and I worked on putting this website together. This meant that for me I was up all night on Friday, something I have not done for some years now.

Jason has been a professional web developer for 20 years or more and I met him when I started to work for a little known ISP back in 2001. Since then we have been friends, although I have considered him more like family for a while now. So it made sense that I should ask Jason for a bit of help and ask him to share his thoughts. I had no idea that he would do so much as to completely build the website from the ground up while keeping me in the loop at every stage.

If I were to pay someone to do what Jason did, I would have spent a great deal of money, something I do not have. When the website was coming together, Jason showed a genuine interest in getting it the best we could, where I would have accepted the odd, minor flaw, Jason wanted to strive for perfection and I am more than delighted with what we have achieved. I have since found that there are a few small issues, which I will speak to Jason about this Friday.

There is future development planned for the website which Jason has also agreed to help me with, when the time is right.

Thank you, Jason, for giving so much of your time to get this website together, and for sharing some of your knowledge while doing so.

I would also like to thank my friend and colleague Sam, who has agreed to proof read my about page and suggest ways of improving what is essentially the most vital piece of content on the website.

For the first time in at least 4 months, probably longer, I logged in to World of Warcraft. The main reason for me logging in is because on the 14th August the new expansion, Battle for Azeroth, will be released. I have a collectors edition on pre-order from Amazon.

I need to use the time between now and the 14th to get my characters and myself ready for what I hope will be an exciting expansion. There is an amazing cinematic trailer and several other trailers for this expansion which you can see on the Blizzard youtube channel below;

World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth Cinematic Trailer
Cinematic: “Old Soldier”
Warbringers: Sylvanas
Warbringers: Jaina
Warbringers: Azshara

In getting ready I will need to perform some ‘housekeeping’ and tidy up my characters bags and bank to get rid of items I will no longer need. I should also make the time to complete the odd quest or achievement that I have been meaning to do before I am pre-occupied with new Battle for Azeroth content. There is also a new quest string available for a limited time which will lead to a mount as a reward. At the end of this quest string, I will see the Night Elf city of Darnassus be set on fire by Sylvanas and the horde, something I have feared for a long time. It is my hope that during the expansion the Night Elves find a new, even better home, or Darnassus is somehow reborn from the ashes anew.