What's in a name ?

One or two visitors may be wondering where the name of the Blog came from ... Not the Sleepypete bit but the Iceangelthemerc bit ...

Around 8 months ago, a group of people from work got the idea that it would be a good idea if they could help each other out on the online game World of Warcraft. We'd start up new characters on a new server, band together and get ahead by sorting things out between us. The new server was The Maelstrom and the guild name we chose was the Mercenaries Of Darkness. Or rather, one fella suggested it and it was a dark enough name that we jumped on it. I like the name. Seems like a few other people do as well, as we've seen other guilds spring up since with similar names. Army of Mercenaries and Legionnaires of Darkness. Oh yeah, we play as the Horde, aka the Bad Guys. My main character is undead, with the 3 other Horde races being Trolls, Orcs and Tauren. You'll have a fair idea of what trolls, orcs and undead will be like, the lesser known ones are the Tauren which are modelled on big, bipedal cows.

To play on World of Warcraft, you need to pick a class as well as a race and my first and main character is Iceangel, the undead mage. Mages specialise in doing damage on a grand scale over multiple targets, the trouble is that if anything even waves a pointy stick vaguely in their direction, they'll go down like the proverbial feather. Answer - don't get hit ! (I'm getting better at that).

Could have been worse - Iceangel was nearly called Darkangel but I figured that was a bit too close to a TV series character. Iceangel has worked out to be a pretty decent name. I have a few more characters but because I'm limiting my WoW time a little more now, I don't get to play them too often. After last night's marathon, I've managed to avoid WoW completely tonight, currently chillin', writing blog, with Madonna's Ray of Light on in the background.

Arg ! I've been digressing again ... You may have noticed the link to the guild, Mercenaries of Darkness. Unfortunately, we're having a bit of a leadership led coup at the moment to get things little more under control, hence some of the messages on the front page. We started up with a pretty free recruitment policy, which means more likelihood of picking up bad eggs. We've got rid of most of those now, shame that we didn't act sooner because we lost a couple of other people who I'd have liked to keep. However, I'm fairly happy that we can get back to monster thumping, with a relaxed, happy guild. We'll see how it pans out over the next week or so. [fingers crossed!]

Anyway, that's where Iceangelthemerc comes from, it was the first attempt to get a Blogger login name that worked out of the many attempts ... Somebody had already beaten me to Sleepypete.

Last bit - I can't mention World of Warcraft and the guild without mentioning Guildlink. As far as we know, nothing like Guildlink has happened on any WoW server. Guildlink is a collection of the smaller guilds, coming together so that we have a chance at hitting the big end of game dungeons. The one we're going to hit tomorrow, Molten Core, needs 40 people. The Mercenaries only average round 15-20 at peak time, so we'd have no chance of hitting Molten Core on our own. We're part of the engine room of Guildlink though and there will be around 6-7 small guilds, including the Mercenaries, in the group tomorrow. Should be fun. First time there, we did a huge amount better than everyone was expecting (killed the first Big Monster) and definitely better than the latest "big" guild to try on our server. They didn't even get to that first big monster. I've also linked the Guildlink forum page, which is the place we use to get organised for group stuff, swap tactics or generally have a natter about the game. All credit to the person behind the character Sarai for setting all that up as well as the calm, controlled and fair way she looks after it. With the 200+ people with accounts, you can probably guess the influence the odd politician is having on it ...