That hot time of the year, the Midsummer Fire Festival, has now ended. Once again the denizens of Azeroth go about their humdrum lives without any brilliant fires and spirited naked flame-ladies dancing to and fro on the bridges of Ironforge. Life is boring. The Ice Stone Has Melted.

But alas, not for I and my tabard! After a good half day of solid grinding I trekked my Paladin throughout the dunes of Kalimdor and the lush forests of the Eastern Kingdom, extinguishing the flames of the bastard Horde and honoring those of the blessed Alliance. All was done well, so say we all.

It didn't take long though for me to realize that I didn't want to do this on more than my main. However I found myself exerting as much discipline as possible to finish the dailies every day on my dual boxing Recruit a Friend alts, pulling in about 50% of a level each day just from the daily quests alone. It was quite a nice XP bump.

All in all I accomplished with the Fire Festival I wanted to, and it wasn't too bad of a time. Although I can definitely wait a year to extinguish another flame.

Did you accomplish everything you wanted to with the Fire Festival? Are you satisfied?

Robin Torres writes WoW, Casually for the player with limited playtime. Of course, you people with lots of playtime can read this too, but you may get annoyed by the fact that we are unashamed, even proud, of the fact that beating WoW isn't our highest priority. Take solace in the fact that your gear is better than ours, but if that doesn't work, remember that we outnumber you. Not that that's a threat, after all, we don't have time to do anything about it. But if WoW were a democracy, we'd win.

Holidays are for all players, of course, but I think they are particularly appropriate for players with limited playtime. Sure, there are often raiding quests or achievements that we can't complete, but overall, the activities seem to be designed for casual gameplay. For the most part, I think I'm preaching to the choir, here. But every once in a while, I read comments from people who just don't get holidays and avoid them completely. So here is my sales pitch about why every casual player should give each holiday a try.

The Eastern Kingdoms were flamed and we had fun doing it. Our It came from the Blog event last Saturday was actually two events: an all levels event followed by a mounted/flightpathed event. Many players took my advice and created Death Knights, giving the lowbies plenty of protection for the run through dangerous territories. Mike Schramm, Allison Robert and Daniel Whitcomb all joined in on the fun.

The lowbie event honored all of the flames from Falconwing Square to Hammerfall, with a couple of desecrations on the side. The mounted event took to the flightpaths and completed the Flame Keeper of Eastern Kingdoms achievement. I also got the unofficial achievement for running into every fence along the way. Running + typing = hard.

A pictorial journal of our fun is in the gallery below. And I used the wow.com addon to upload my activity for the event. I wish I had used the in-game blog feature to annotate it, but I will next time. If you use the addon to upload your It came from the Blog activity, it will show up in the guild log as well.

I'm thinking of trying video for future events. Maybe Turpster can give me some pointers. Allison does a good job with her videos, too. Would you watch It came from the Blog videos?

We here at WoW.com are on a Daily Quest to bring you interesting, informative and entertaining WoW-related links from around the blogosphere.

• RP Made Simple takes a deep look at an up and coming RP mod, Gryphonheart Items, which allows you to create custom vanity/flavor items to trade and share with others using the addon.
• Alterac Volley has added another Daily Quest Guide to their site, this time tackling the Midsummer Fire Festival.
• World of Snarkcraft reviews Wowhead's new Profiler feature.
• Blessing of Kings breaks down the patch 3.2 emblem changes, and gives some thoughts of their own.
• Should Rogues pick up Killing Spree in their PvE raiding spec? Slice and Dice says yes!
• Elemental Shaman extraordinaire Binkenstein is hard at work rounding up all of the applicable patch 3.2 changes.

We went live with the WoW Insider Show yet again last Saturday, and this one was a good one: not only did Turpster and Lesley Smith join us, but we were also graced with the presence of Michelle Madison, of the podcasts Warcraft Outsiders and Video Game Outsiders. She was kind enough to make it past all of our inside jokes (she agreed it was prounounced "Fah-jord," which is as it should be) and mixed it up with some great discussion, including about the Midsummer Fire Festival, the new Tier 9 gear coming to the game (and the lore figures they named it after), and whether including quest objectives on the official map dumbs things down too much (spoiler: we basically said no).

It was an excellent show, and you can tune in to hear it by following any of the links below, or subscribing to our feed right over on iTunes itself (that guarantees you get the new shows every single Monday). We'll be back next week as always, so be sure to tune back in then.

Oh, and while we have you, keep an eye out soon for more information about what we're doing at BlizzCon. We've already scheduled our meetup on Thursday night around 8pm, but we haven't announced a location yet, so look for that soon. And if you aren't going to be in Anaheim, worry not -- we'll be streaming a special episode live from the meetup (with video, if everything works out as planned), so you'll be able to join us virtually. Will be really fun, so stay tuned.

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After you listen to the WoW Insider show today, join us for some Midsummer fun:

• When: Saturday, June 27th, 5PM Eastern (2PM Pacific, 3PM Server time)
• Where: The Midsummer Fire Festival site in the Court of the Sun, Silvermoon City on Zangarmarsh, U.S.
• Who: Any Horde character who is not in the service of the Lich King. (Death Knights are recommended as long as they have finished their initial quests and have been accepted by Thrall.)
• How: Just send a tell to Robinella or any It Came from the Blog member to get an invite to the raid and the guild.

Expect fun, fire, experience, and lots and lots of running/riding. Our goal is to grab an achievement or two, as well.

We hope to see you there!

I warned you this was coming, and now it's almost here! Join us for WoW.com's It Came from the Blog Midsummer Fire Fun and let's go desecrate some Alliance flames! For the Horde!

Actually, we have a lot of players who normally play Alliance -- this isn't a jingoistic event. It's just an excuse to get together and have fun. We may even pick up an achievement or two. Here are the details:

• When: Saturday, June 27th, 5PM Eastern (2PM Pacific, 3PM Server time)
• Where: The Midsummer Fire Festival site in the Court of the Sun, Silvermoon City on Zangarmarsh, U.S.
• Who: Any Horde character who is not in the service of the Lich King. (Death Knights are recommended as long as they have finished their initial quests and have been accepted by Thrall.)
• How: Just send a tell to Robinella or any It Came from the Blog member to get an invite to the raid and the guild

More info is after the break.

Bornakk has just announced that they're currently rolling out a fix to our Midsummer woes that will reset all of the associated Midsummer quests. If you've been following along so far this holiday, it turned out that if you did all of your fire honoring/desecrating last year, you wouldn't be able to do it again this year. That meant you weren't able to get enough Burning Blossoms to purchase what you needed for the various achievements.

We expected a fix from the beginning, and we're all glad to see it happen. It didn't take them long to do it, and that's a huge plus. The more time we have to get the Flame Keeper/Warden achievements done, the better.

The Midsummer Fire Festival went live yesterday in Azeroth (but with a few glitches that will hopefully be cleared up soon.) With so much to do during this festival, we here at WoW.com we're wondering what your main goal was for this event.

Are you focused on finishing the associated achievements on your way to a proto-drake? Are you using the quests as a way to level an alt or low level character? Farming Ahune for a Scorchling pet? Or perhaps you're enjoying the role-playing aspect of the event or even the thrill of raiding the home cities of the opposition. There's plenty for the casual player, too.

Let us know in the poll below and if you don't see the answer you like, leave it in the comments! Also, if you like to learn how to make the Midsummer magnet in the photo above, check out our World of WarCrafts article with detailed instructions.

The Midsummer Fire Festival should now be live on almost all North American realms. If it isn't, it will be shortly! Not much has changed since last year, beyond the addition of the achievements.

Speaking of achievements, while we have our guide to the Achievements of Midsummer, you might not be able to make a significant dent in them today if you made rounds with the flames last year. None of the quests seem to have reset from last year, so getting your hands on the holiday currency to buy the items you need is going to be difficult, to say the least. By difficult, I may or may not mean borderline impossible.

I don't expect this to be a permanent issue, we'll probably see a hotfix sometime in the near future since the problem is already being checked out. Of course, that's assuming the issue is something that can be hotfixed. If not, I don't doubt we'll see a fix of another flavor down the road. I don't foresee Blizzard keeping What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been out of players' hands because of something like this. In the meantime, at least you can still take a crack at Lord Ahune.

Our podcast returns once again to the virtual airwaves this afternoon, and this is going to be a good one: we're welcoming back both editor Lesley Smith and Rogue columnist Chase Christian, and as usual, Turpster and I will be on to answer your emails and chat live with you over on the Ustream page. We'll be talking mostly about patch 3.2, of which the patch notes hit our eyes just this week. There are some more details about the upcoming Crusaders' Coliseum instance, the Emblem system (that will definitely inspire some discussion), and all of the other changes that caught our attention in there. Plus, Midsummer Fire is almost upon us, so we'll chat about that as well.

Tune in this afternoon over on the our Ustream page at June 20, 2009 3:30 PM EDT, or you can jump after the break to see an embedded feed. If you'd like to email us questions, feel free: the address is theshow@wow.com. And what the heck -- we'll be giving some loot card codes away on the show today as well, so tune in if you can and you might pick up some free in-game loot. See you this afternoon!

Another week has brought us to another weekend, which means it's time for us all to work out what we're playing this weekend. The Midsummer Fire Festival begins today, but surprisingly enough, it's not what any of our crew seem to be looking forward to for weekend World of Warcraft entertainment. Leveling alts? Raiding Ulduar? Or, gasp, dare I say it, some kind of crazy life beyond the keyboard? How dull! There's summer to celebrate!

For what the WoW.com team is up to this weekend -- and to let us know what you're playing this weekend -- read on!

It's that time of year again, folks. Frankly, I'm glad to be back in the realm of more reasonable and just plain fun holiday achievements, because I hated School of Hard Knocks, and wound up giving up and quitting the achievement after hours of fruitless battleground deaths. Fortunately, the Fire Festival has a lot less potential to drive you to the nuthouse, and a lot more potential to grant experience, gold, and cool items. From what I've seen, Blizzard hasn't changed the holiday since its 2008 incarnation, which is actually a good thing in a number of ways because last year's revamped and expanded Fire Festival was great.

A note on eligibility: your character will need to be at least 50 to hand in the items needed for King of the Fire Festival, and at least 65 to get the higher-level quests necessary for killing Lord Ahune in Slave Pens. With that said, we still recommend that lower-level characters participate, because you'll wind up with a ton of experience and gold even if you can't complete the meta-achievement.

Should you complete the meta, you will be awarded the "Flame Keeper" title. I've listed all of the required achievements in the order I think will be easiest/fastest for the average player to do.

UPDATE: Your character is currently unable to honor/desecrate any flame (including city flames) that you've honored/desecrated in 2008, which will make getting enough Burning Blossoms to purchase Midsummer clothing difficult, if not impossible. I'm still trying to find official confirmation that this is a bug (and I assume it has to be, as otherwise the meta-achievement isn't doable), but it also appears that fires have been added to Northrend as well. I'm heading ingame right now to assemble a list with coordinates and will update the post later.

[Guild Recruitment - City] It came from the Blog is now recruiting. We are an ultra casual guild where WoW.com writers join in scheduled events with readers. We have a tabard and even a Guild Bank (though usually empty). PST to Robiness if interested.

With the Midsummer Fire Festival coming up, we think it's time to revive the activities of our very own guild: It Came from the Blog. We will be announcing the date and time of our desecrating fires run soon, as well as other events that may or many not coincide with in-game holidays.

If you want to join us, make a Horde character on Zangarmarsh U.S. and ask an ICftB member for an invite -- many have the ability. I will also be popping in and out on one of my characters: Robiness, Robinelle, Robinella or Robinara. (Perhaps you see a trend?)

Events in the past have been for any level and the Midsummer Fire Festival get-together will be the same, but it is always easier to get around if you are mounted and/or old enough to defend yourself against mobs along the way. Also, there will be some events that are designed for higher levels. If you are interested in joining us, I recommend making a Death Knight on Zangarmarsh and getting it through the initial quests, so that it will be available when we start up again.

For more information about It came from the Blog, please read our FAQ.

Crygil wants to know: if you could design a new holiday for the game, what would it be? I don't think I've ever heard the question asked before -- holidays are really just optional fun for more players, and Blizzard has always covered the basics (Christmas, New Year's, Thanksgiving, Halloween, etc.), and even added in some of their own by giving real-world holidays some Azerothian flavor (Midsummer Fire Festival, and of course Brewfest). Are there really any holidays they missed?

I guess Labor Day and Memorial Day are the two biggest ones -- maybe all of the NPCs could take a day off, there could be giant barbeques set up in the capital cities, or players could take a day to remember those fallen in the past wars. Or you could go another route and just make up your own holiday: Grumpyfool of Azjol-Nerub recommends Gnome Appreciation Week (a whole week?), where Azeroth's shortest denizens can get some love of their own. A more recently based holiday might be fun, too -- maybe once a year we could remember Arthas' (it was Arthas, right?) zombie attack on our homeland.

I doubt this is going to be used to determine actual Blizzard policy. Seems more like just a fun thought experiment. But there are definitely some interesting ideas in there -- if Blizzard ever wants to add yet another holiday to the calendar, there are plenty of ideas.