Our thanks goes out to OTD (Older Than DOS) and LOB (Legion of Boom) for some great scrim action this weekend. We're looking forward to matching up with you guys again in the future. If your interested in scrimming with IRE please register on our forums and start a post in the Team Fortress 2 section or get a hold of us via steam. We can usually field a 6v6 scrim most nights, for larger scrims we may need a little notice. Our best scrim steam contacts are:

<Ire>Ninja
<Ire>Magus
<Ire>Grubar

I thought I'd take a minute or two to fill you in on the orgins of IRE. In the begining (1998) IRE was a bunch of local geeks getting together in the Skagit county area to play a variety of games. Initially this group called themselves sLANgg (Skagit Local Area Network Gaming Group). This group hosted several small events as well as a large county event for all the local nerds. When World of Warcraft came about a large portion of sLANgg decided to play together and rebranded themselves the IRE guild. As for the name, IRE, stands for nothing other than the definition and the great play on words to pay homage to one of our favorite games. (By the way, yes we do know it's Aiur and not Ire) IRE for the most part has broken away from WoW but when we left we had some great friends that we felt wouldn't be represented by the sLANgg name, so we decided to stick with the IRE name and change ourselves over to a gaming communitty. We have a variety of players from the l33tsauce, self absorbed, "oh I just pwn'd you in the back of the face", hardly tolerable hardcore gamer. To the "I play support classes", my mouse glitched, I'm lagging, how do I upgrade my sentry? hardly tolerable nubcakes, and somehow we all manage to get a long. Amazing.

Everyone in Ire has a passion for gaming to some degree or another, whether it be paper and pencil, console gaming or fragging friends online we all have a good time. If you have any questions or smack to talk please feel free to register on our forums. Be prepared to enjoy Ire's unique welcome and dialog. >:)

After the last scrimmage we have been experimenting with 6-man combos that pack the most punch, give the best D, etc. We'd love to hear any suggestions as to what has worked well for other teams. If you'd like to swap stories and ideas, please start a new thread in our public forums!

For the Irelings:
A post called "Classes" under th TF2 forums has started talks about what classes people are interested in playing for up-and-coming matches. We're trying to organize a bit more before the next scrimmage so make sure to post your class favs!

We got to play our first scrimage in Team Fortress 2 last night. We played with against a clan named Double Ugly(UU). They are currently involved in a the Cevo Tournament and are mostly made up of guys I used to play with back in the day, so they're a pretty experienced bunch. Our team consisted of Cuda(Sniper/Heavy), Madwic(Medic/Eng/Pyro), Tysk(Medic/Scout), Grubar(Soldier), Relic(Spy/Demoman), and myself(Soldier/Heavy). NinjaPanda also known as Coyen would have joined us but his system was having problems. We held our own and Double Ugly invited us to scrim with them more in the future which we will certainly be doing. If you're interest in getting involved let me know, or just try to be around in the later evening(7:00pm+).

 Thanks to Double Ugly for scrimaging with us, and thanks to the Ire people that made themselves available

We now have a Team Fortress 2 and Ventrilo server up and running. They are both being hosted by GameServers. Those guys really seem to have their stuff together. We needed a codec changed on our vent server at 10:30pm last night. I was able to contact a support person on IRC immediately, they had us submit a trouble ticket on their website and the problem was solved within 10 minutes.

Today's comic is brought to you by the creators of Mac Hall. They are currently running a webcomic called Three Panel Soul.

Come join us on the Ire Gaming Team Fortress 2 Server...

We're not quite ready for you. But our forums are!

http://www.ire-gaming.com/forums