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Here’s some troubling news for my fellow World of Warcraft players. It seems that hackers, account thieves, and other miscreants have now embraced man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks to further their evil ways. Blizzard says it’s not a widespread issue, and it’s rather difficult to pull off, but it’s something y’all should be aware of.
The deal is that WoW hackers are able to infect your PC—this is a PC-only problem, mind you, so Mac players can more or less ignore all of this—with a bit of malware that’s then able to initiate the MITM attack. The purpose of this is to intercept your login name, password, and authenticator number so that they can log into your account. Once online, they can do whatever it is you’d be able to do inside the game world: sell items, mail gold to other players, etc. They cannot, it should be noted, delete your actual account or anything like that. Still, it’s potentially devastating, selling all your epics for fast gold, then turning around and selling that gold for real money to someone else.
MITM attacks aren’t new or anything. There’s plenty of programs out there can initiate them rather easily, letting people intercept passwords, instant messages, you name it. They work in that they sit in between your PC and the server you’re trying to connect to. So, if you’re playing WoW, instead of your username and password and authenticator number going directly to Blizzard’s servers, they first go to the hacker’s rogue server, which then passes the info onto your intended server, capturing the information in the process. It’s essentially invisible to you, the end-user, which is why the attacks are so dangerous.
Blizzard has already identified the piece of malware that initiates the MITM attack, so be on the lookout for emcor.dll. Be sure to keep your anti-virus software up to date.
One final bit: the odds of you being a victim of such an attack are quite low, if only because it requires so much work for the hacker to pull off; you’d have to be hacked a the very moment he wants to break into your account, and that’s something that simply doesn’t happen. Rather, your account will be compromised on, say, Monday, but it won’t be until the following Saturday that the hacker actually access your account. And again, the worst thing that could happen with this kind of attack would be for someone to sell off your character’s items and gold, then, for good measure, delete your character—your actual account cannot be tampered with. That may be a distinction without meaning, yes.
So yeah, just be sure to keep your anti-virus software up to date, and keep your wits about you. Stay away from the shady parts of the Internet!
You can run, but you can’t hide (in cyberspace). In one of the strangest stories of 2009, it’s been reported that Blizzard worked with law enforcement to help catch a drug dealer.
Law enforcement officials contacted Blizzard, who found the dealer in their player database, and then provided the IP address the guy was using to the U.S. Marshals. The player was located in Canada, so the marshals then contacted the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The RCMP then arrested the suspect, who was then deported to the U.S. to face drug charges from 2007. Hats off to Blizz for doing the right thing and helping bring a drug dealer to justice. If you want to take a look at the dealer’s character, it’s in the armory.
It’s almost January 1st, 2010 and we’ve been mulling over our favorites of 2009 – and the previous decade. Here we present another installment of our “Of the Decade” lists.
Winner: Half-Life 2
Valve’s follow-up to the revolutionary Half-Life is our game of the decade not just because it’s a fantastic game, but because it is a fine example of modern gaming. It exemplifies DLC done right, community support done right, and comes part and parcel with Steam, which has helped revolutionize digital distribution for games. All this while still being the standard by which other FPSes are measured.
Half-Life 2 is merely one game in Valve’s expanding oeuvre, but it is still the poster child for doing it right. Now let’s get episode three coming already, guys! Come on!
Runners Up
World of Warcraft
Having never played it myself, I can only report what everybody already knows about WoW: it’s like crack. Everything about it made for an optimized and addictive online experience leagues beyond what was available when it launched. The enormous world, regular updates, incredibly well-thought-out dungeons and classes — all part of a package so compelling that players now number somewhere around, what, 11 million?
Beyond that, it’s led to a halo industry of gold farmers and loot auctions that is unprecedented in its size. WoW shows little sign of slowdown and will probably not be replaced until Blizzard decides it’s a good idea.
Call of Duty (franchise)
While the early Call of Duty games competed directly with Medal of Honor in the heavily-scripted WWII shooter market, it has since gone on to be such a juggernaut in so many ways that it would be a travesty not to include it here. Not only is Modern Warfare 2 just selling like hotcakes, but the Modern Warfare games have expanded and refined what is possible, and what is acceptable, in modern gaming. The first Modern Warfare was a strong entry in the “games as art” category, and the multiplayer aspects (while controversially crippled in MW2) are a breath of fresh air when set next to the aging Halo and Counter-Strike.
The Sims
Raise your hand if you have never played The Sims. Oh, nobody. That’s really all that needs to be said here. But I’m paid by the letter so I’ll go on. The Sims was one of the first PC games your mom could play and like, and with more than 16 million copies shipped to date, your mom was obviously a market waiting to be tapped. Nintendo realized that as well, and has exploited it most profitably with the DS and Wii.
But EA and Will Wright were the first to the table, and let’s be honest, they overdid it with the Sims 2 and all its expansions. But if you can sell a million copies of an expansion pack that took a week to make, well, I don’t blame you for doing so.
Our take
Devin: I have to add Serious Sam and Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory to this list. I had more fun playing those two games with my college roommate than a hundred other games combined. And of course, let’s not forget Portal.
Matt: I doubt I played any game more over the last 10 years than the Day of Defeat mod for Half Life. I probably spent 5 hours a night for a couple years in that game. It was truly the best WWII multiplayer game until Call of Duty 2 came around 2005 and even then that game was quickly trumped by the Day of Defeat: Source. Man, I loved that game.
John: I’ve never been a huge PC gamer but I’ve loved the Civilization series over the decade and I’ve often fired up my emulator to play Civ IV. It just goes to show that a good PC gaming concept can shine for almost two decades. Nicholas: Super smash brothers brawl is what i eat for breakfast.
Greg: Super smash brothers brawl is what i eat for breakfast.
Dave: Super smash brothers brawl is what i eat for breakfast.
Doug: Super smash brothers brawl is what i eat for breakfast.
Oh, look, I’m taking a single remark from a lengthy interview and making an entire post about it. It concerns Blizzard, the famed developer of World of Warcraft and Diablo. You may think of Blizzard as a PC developer, but that ignores games like The Lost Vikings. Anyhow, Blizzard has said in an interview with Gamasutra, which always does good stuff, that it is not averse to making a console game in the future, just that it needs to be the right game.
An RTS like StarCraft II? That’s probably not the right game: have you tried to play an RTS on a console? Even if a developer pulls it off, as pretty much happened with Halo Wars, compare that to a a proper mouse and keyboard control scheme. It’s almost not even worth the effort to re-invent the wheel like that.
What about an MMO, like You Know What? Again, it’s so crazy to think that you can effectively take a mouse and keyboard and map it over to a controller for such a game. Look at how many buttons this mouse has, and even then it takes a while to get used to it.
As for being so damn pro-PC:
It’s obviously because we’ve made only PC games for the last 15 years, but there’s a perception, I think, that Blizzard is anti-console, and that’s absolutely not the case. We just want to make the right game for the right platform. Think about StarCraft II. Some real-time strategy games have tried to happen on the console. Some of those have been successful, but overall, our experience is that it’s going to be a better game on the PC, ergo it’s developed on the PC.
So it’s not that Blizzard hates your PS3 or Xbox 360, just that its current big games are so PC that it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense trying to pigeon-hole those onto consoles.
I saw this headline and immediately made my “skeptical” face. Rugged flash media? Don’t those things spend all their time jacked into your device? Why not have rugged batteries, too? But then I thought about those poor, fragile SD cards, living sheltered lives in cases, pouches, and so on because we’re too worried that they’ll snap in half or get a drop of water on them at any moment.
I mean, your 7D may be seal-resistant, but what happens when you have to switch cards in a blizzard? A little moisture between those cracks, some sub-zero temperatures, and that sucker is going to rupture like… I don’t know, something that totally ruptures.
Anyway, I’d totally buy these things. They’ll survive a whole day underwater, won’t get busted by bouncing around in your bag, and they’re guaranteed to hold their data for years without letting it degrade. I think a big 16GB one of these will serve for you for all purposes, and last long enough to see its successor take over. They even go faster than regular cards!
SD and CF flavors will be released in Europe before they hit us Yanks and others, but Samsung hasn’t mentioned price yet. Probably because these things are going to cost about twice as much as a regular card the same size.
Tuesdays usually stink for World of Warcraft. The servers go down early in the morning for maintenance, and then stay down well after the scheduled time more often than you’d care to see. Today doesn’t stink, since Patch 3.3 is indeed dropping. I cannot wait to leave the terribly fancy TC/CG office, get home, fire up the game, then PUG till the sun comes up.
So yeah, the downtime today is because Blizzard is preparing the servers for Patch 3.3, the last content patch for the game’s latest expansion, Wrath of the Lich King. That means we’ll be seeing more and more Cataclysm news and speculation from here on out. (I think I’ll be rolling a Worgen Rogue or Druid, not sure yet.)
The highlights of Patch 3.3 are as follows:
• Icecrown Citadel instance— take that, Lich King!
• Three more five-man instances
• Cross-server Looking For Group (which means when you PUG you’ll be paired off with people from servers other than your own, which should make PUGing approximately 3 million times better, especially for lower level characters)
More and more the 7D looks like the camera for me. Not that I go to Antarctica a lot, but when I do trek about, my camera comes with me rain or shine. My old 350D/Rebel XT survived quite a torrent in Kyoto, but I wouldn’t trust it or my newer Rebel XSi in a blizzard. Luckily, my job can be done from home; I don’t have to crawl on my belly through frozen mud and risk seal bites every day at magic hour. This guy does.
Ole Jørgen Liodden does field reviews of Canon gear, and he recently took the new 7D down to Antarctica to test it out alongside a 5D mk II and 1DS mk III. It performed admirably, I’m happy to say, though you can read the reservations and details in his write-up, which I won’t repeat here.
BY THE WAY. Did you notice the terrifying seal maw in the lower left right corner of the picture above? How would you like to take video of penguins with one of those bastards chewing on your tripod — or worse? The life of the nature photographer is a strange and terrifying one to be sure.
World of Warcraft turns 5-years-old today. Back on November 23, 2004, a year before the current generation of video game systems even began (with the launch of the Xbox 360), Blizzard released the massively multi-player online game at a time when massively multi-player online games were still largely the haunt of hardcore gamers, people with fast Internet connections who were willing to pay $15 per month for access to a game that they already bought. Who can forget the message board threads: Why do I have to pay for a game that I already paid for at the store? How do you beat the game? What happens if and when I stop playing?
You won’t stop playing. Five years in, Blizzard has 11.5 million (as of December, 2008) subscribers all over the world. (Note: Not every region of the world has a pay-per-month regime. You pay by the hour in China, for example.) In these five years, the game has gone from plucky upstart, going up against other, well-established MMOGs, to the undisputed number one such game. Now, that may not necessarily be a good thing, but it’s hard to see someone knocking World of Warcraft off its perch. Well, someone other than World of Warcraft II.
I’m a veteran of vanilla WoW, but only just. I bought the game in September, 2006; The Burning Crusade came out a few months later. I bought the game because I was roped into some consulting session for a rather big company. “Hey, you’re young. Play WoW and Second Life and tell us how we can better reach young people through them.”
I don’t know if the company got what it wanted (surely it didn’t!), but it certainly set me on my current path of, oh, you know, playing the game for at least three to four hours per night on most nights of the week.
It’s pretty funny. When the game launched in 2004, I was a freshman in college, and one of my two roommates was all about the game. We’re talking stay-up-until-4am-every-night-of-the-week-to-play-it. I had no idea what the game was about, but I distinctly remember the day he walked into the dorm room with a box from Amazon: “Gentlemen, it’s here.” (Actually, knowing the kid, it was probably more along the lines of, “Yes, it’s here! Fucking A~!” Memory fades, I’m afraid.) I’m like, so what? Can’t you see we’re playing Halo 2? (Halo 2 was very big that year. I was a good sniper. It was the last time I played a multi-player game with any conviction.) I’d say we teased my roommate about his “addiction,” but I had no idea what the game was about. I had never played any of the other Warcraft games, nor Diablo. Again, I was not, and still am not, a PC gamer, so the entire Blizzard catalogue played no role in my life.
The point is, the game’s launch came and went, but my only experience with it was waking up at 3:00AM because my roommate yelled, “Yes! I can buy a mount now!”
Then September of 2006 rolls around, and I’m forced to buy the game for that aforementioned consulting session. I still had no interest in the game, and was only creating an account as part of my job. (Well, “job” only in the loosest sense of the word, getting paid to try to help a huge company better tap into the “young people” market.) So walk back to my room from the local Best Buy (I wasn’t boycotting it back then. You can listen to my ordeal as told on the podcast here.), and install it on my iMac. I create an account, and create my first character. It was an Undead Warrior named Rocktober—Undead because I thought they looked (and still look) the best, and Warrior because, well, Warrior is the noob class, right? “Warrior? I bet you get a sword and stuff. Count me in.”
I still have that character to this day.
I then set aside Rocktober, and created a Night Elf Warrior on a different server so I could play with a friend of mine. (I had casually mentioned that I was playing WoW now, and he flipped out. “Oh, dude, join my server and I’ll hook you up.”) I named the Nelf Warrior Zardoz, in honor of that godawful Sean Connery moviethat I had just seen in a movie class I was forced to take. (We all needed an “art” class, so to speak, and watching and critiquing movies was considered “art.” Fair enough.) I was able to get Zardoz all the way up to level 58—it was harder to level in those days—before growing bored of the game. The Burning Crusade was installed somewhere around this time.
A year went by without me really playing the game. Note that I was still paying for the game, just not playing it. I don’t know, I guess I never bothered to cancel my subscription. Maybe it was too much of a hassle, or maybe I didn’t notice such a small amount of money leaving my bank account every month. The point is, I’ve been paying my $15 per month non-stop since September, 2006.
I’m probably never going to stop paying, either.
So here’s to another five years (well, three years in my case) of unpredictable PUGs, guilds joined but not really participated in, Auctioneer-assisted money-making, and lost sleep. So much lost sleep.
Even though Starcraft II was playable more than a year ago, Blizzard is still extremely selective about the assets they release. This latest video shows off the “Story Mode,” also known as the game, in which you can see a few characters driving the story, directing the flow of the game, and so on. The graphics, as we know, are very reminiscent of the original, yet polished and in high resolution; the added depth of 3D makes that Yamato Battle Cruiser look way meaner than it did in Starcraft. And the environment seems way more dynamic with the emphasis on high/low ground. How about that lava?
Just a friendly remind to all my fellow World of Warcraft players. You need to migrate your account to a Battle.net account by the end of the day today, lest you’re unable to login.
Why is Blizzard doing this? Probably to make things easier on its end, but you’ll also see some benefits. One day, Battle.net will be, and I hate to use the phrase, a type of “social network” for Blizzard gamers. You’ll be able to message your friends across different games while in the game and all that jazz.
For your troubles, Blizzard will send you an in-game pet, Mr. Chilly.
I converted my account about a month ago and have had zero problems.
Really big World of Warcraft news today, friends. (Why do I write so much about WoW? Oh, you know, it’s just the biggest, most successful MMO in history. Not writing about it would be like covering tech with mentioning Microsoft or Apple.) Blizzard is now selling in-game pets that you can buy with real money, $10. We’re talking cash money. Dollar dollar bill, y’all.
It’s significant because it marks the first time that Blizzard has gotten into the business of selling in-game items for real world currency. It’s key to note that this is merely an in-game pet; it’s a vanity item. It’s not like you can buy a brand new sword or piece of armor with your dollars and cents.
Silver lining: when you buy a certain pet, $5 of the $10 will go to the Make-A-Wish Foundation, so that’s at least admirable.
Now, we could speculate till we pass out, “will Blizzard one day sell proper, in-game items, like weapons and armor?” But we won’t do that.
Squabbling between Chinese government regulatory agencies delays authorization of Activision Blizzard's popular MMORPG, culminating in a diktat to shut the game down.
Clearly nobody has any idea what’s going on in China regarding World of Warcraft. The rules over there are such that Blizzard just can’t open up shop, but has to contract a local company to run the game for Chinese users. Fair enough, and Blizzard has contracted NetEase to do such a thing. The problem is that NetEase keeps running into problems getting the game’s expansion pack, The Burning Crusade, approved for public consumption.
In fact, the body responsible for approving the game, General Administration of Press and Publication, has just told NetEase to take a hike. Well, more specifically, GAPP has told NetEast that its review of The Burning Crusade is now officially on hold, and that it would do well to stop accepting new subscriptions lest it puts its Internet connection in jeopardy.
I’d be lying if I said this story affected me in any obvious way, but I still think it’s interesting.
Meanwhile, I’m busy all day and night farming for cloth to level my burgeoning Tailoring profession.
Back before I started playing World of Warcraft (because of something that was work-related, incidentally), I used to tease my then-roommate about playing it well into the night, every night. I was a freshman at a certain horrendously expensive school, and my gaming started and stopped with my Xbox; I had no time for time-sink PC games. Not my roommate, no sir. The day the game came out—he had also been part of the beta—he plopped into his small, uncomfortable chair, Sunkist in hand (man alive did he love Sunkist for some reason), and quested well into the night away.
That was five years ago, and, correct me if I’m wrong, but no other game has even come close to de-throning Blizzard’s little engine that… still does.
Look at the game’s subscription numbers. The current estimate is that some 13.1 million people subscribe to the game in one shape or fashion. Lump all these people together in the same geographic area, and it would be the third biggest city in the world, after Mumbai and Shanghai. (Or, to put it in American terms, that’s nearly twice the population of New York City proper.) That, and the game is still growing… Wrath of the Lich King isn’t even available in China yet! When that hits, bam! Hello, even more money.
So we’ve established that WoW is big; that’s not exactly breaking news. Its closest competitors, I think, at least in the West, are Warhammer Online and AION. Apparently AION has had some technical issues that has driven players away, and Warhammer Online sorta came and went. And it’s not that these games aren’t good, but that, well, if all my friends play WoW, why would I abandon them?
That’s why WoW is where it is, and why it’s not going anywhere any time soon: too many people are playing for someone to come along and not it off its perch. That’s not to say that another game won’t come along and find a successful niche of its own—my money’s on Star Wars: The Old Republic, whenever that comes out!—but you’re crazy if you think another game is going to “kill” WoW.
And what will kill WoW? WoW 2, provided Blizzard wants to rock the boat, so to speak.
The gist is, WoW seems to be pretty much unbeatable right now. It launched at just the right time, with just the right lore, with just the right number of updates, with just the right fanbase.
If that’s a good thing or a bad thing, I don’t know.
Really, really big news today for World of Warcraft players. Today’s the day that Zygor’s leveling guide hits version 2.0. Leveling guides are used by players to hit level 80 (or, soon, 85) as quickly as possible so they can more quickly enjoy the endgame content. Think of them like GameFAQs or the old school Brady Games or Versus Books strategy guides.
I’ve used a handful of guides over the years, and I’ve liked Zygor’s the best. Granted, I’ve never hit 80 yet on any of my characters—my latest alt is a level 49 Blood Elf Warlock—so what do I know, but the Zygor guides were pretty handy for automatically updating quest objectives as you moved along. Handy map markers, detailed directions, etc. It’s a fine guide. A bit pricey at $60 for Horde or Alliance (they’re sold separately, I’m afraid) but if you’re committed to dinging 80 then it’s not a bad investment.
So what’s new in version 2.0? Well, judging by the Web site (I haven’t grabbed the new version yet since the Internet connection at the TechCrunch office in New York is hot garbage, and I don’t have the game installed on my laptop)
• It’s updated to include content (quests and the like) up to patch 3.2.2a (the most recent one, of course)
• There’s some sort of new UI that’s customizable
• A talent advisor. Sort of, “what talent build should I use when I’m grinding/when I’m running an instance?” etc. (Not sure if that’s a pre-order bonus or not)
• Totally complies with Blizzard’s add-on rules. It’s just a leveling guide, no different than Quest Helper or anything!
I think that’s it. Like I said, I can’t try it out till I get home late tonight, and that’s provided the Web site comes back online so I can download it in the first place!
I’m pretty excited, I have to admit. I want to ding 80 before Christmas, which should be easy enough (again, level 49 right now) but my play schedule is pretty wacky.
Yes, WoW is more or less the reason I get out of bed in the morning. Sad but true!
Come on, people. You’re probably aware of the big Hotmail scandal going on right now, what with some 30,000 account names and passwords having been leaked over the past few days. And now Gmail and Yahoo! e-mail accounts appear to have been compromised. The thing is, these leaks aren’t the result of a software glitch or anything, but the result of successful phishing attacks. I have one question: what the heck is wrong with you people?
Seriously, I don’t understand how, in the year 2009 (nearly 2010!) people can still fall victim to phishing attacks.
Let’s make this clear: your bank, eBay, Google… NOBODY is going to ask you to “validate your account” or anything like that. If you ever see anything even like that, then yes, it’s a scam.
(Phishing scams are pretty prevalent in World of Warcraft, too. You’ll get a message from a player saying something like, “You have won free gold from Blizzard! Just go to www.blizzard-free-gold-giveaway-us.com to claim your prize.” Um… no, thank you.)
Here’s a few tips I can think of off the top of my head:
• Do you even have an account with these people? The other day I got a Pretty Real™ looking e-mail from “eBay” sent to my CrunchGear e-mail account. Now, the e-mail looked real—it even addressed me by my first name!—but for the slight problem that I do not have an eBay account set up with my CrunchGear e-mail account; it’s set up with my old NYU e-mail address. Still, credit to whomever drew up the e-mail, because, again, it looked Pretty Real™.
• If, for whatever dumb reason, you do click on such an e-mail, be sure to check the URL. If it’s something like http://74.98.30.203/ebayaccountverify.php IT’S A SCAM! Same thing if it’s like http://ebay-verify.com: it’s more fake than your average WWE Diva’s breasts.
Again, again, and again: NO ONE IS GOING TO ASK YOU TO VERIFY AN ACCOUNT, OR PROVIDE YOUR USERNAME/PASSWORD AS PART OF AN ANNUAL CHECKUP.
Chinese gamers can once again feel the joy of buying an epic on the Auction House for 100G, then selling it for 300G to some sap. Yes, World of Warcraft is officially, 100 percent back in China. This is clearly huge news that’s totally worth your time of day.
You’ll recall that WoW had been offline in China for quite some time, owing to a dispute between Blizzard, the local company handling the game’s operation, and the Chinese government. The game had to be censored to a degree, and then it was put into a beta, and then is came out. Oh, that’s where we are today—it’s out again.
Kotaku says more than half of WoW’s players comes from China, so you can imagine that this must have been quite the headache for Blizzard to deal with.
This is where I make the tenuous link between China, MMOs, and gold farming. Although I will say this: I am so damn sick of corpse spam in the game. It totally takes you out of the game, so to speak. I was going to do a “Please Kill the Corpse Spam, Blizzard” post, but then I’m like, “You idiot, you don’t think Blizzard’s already working on the problem? What good will your complaint do?”
Anyway, WoW is back in China. Let us celebrate by having many brews at Brewfest, which is still my favorite in-game holiday.
In an interview with Gamasutra, Kevin Martens, Blizzard Lead Content Designer, revealed his opinion on the "PC gaming is dead" mentality that has been of much discussion lately. Martens feels that Blizzard counteracts this best by keeping system requirements low while making sure its games are still marketable. "The death knell of PC has risen and fallen over the years, and we keep releasing PC games, and they keep doing incredibly well," said Martens. "I think that there is a market out there for PC games. The latest consoles are great; it's easy to get the game running and all that. They're useful.
Blizzard released some interesting information about the inner workings of World of Warcraft recently at GDC Austin. During their keynote speech, they talked about the history of the Warcraft games, and what exactly made their game so successful where others have failed. It’s an interesting read overall, however what we found amazing is the actual hardware required to run the game.
While it has seemed at times like it’s running on a old TRS-80, Blizzard is using some very cutting-edge equipment to keep us entertained. Apparently, in order for you to be able to log in whenever you want, it takes roughly 20,000 computer systems, over a petabyte of storage, and over 4600 people. Using multiple data centers around the world, this works out to a total of 13,250 server blades, 75,000 CPU cores, and 112.5 terabytes of blade RAM. They even monitor the weather in the areas where the data centers are, just to ensure that the servers don’t go down in the middle of that Naxx raid.
I think we’ve all wondered where our $14.95 a month has been going, and now we know: massive amounts of hardware so you can complain that the last patch “ruined” the game.
Tomorrow, Saturday, September 19, is Pirates’ Day in World of Warcraft. “Commoners wearing pirate garb have appeared in all the world’s cities with the news that the Dread Captain DeMeza and her crew have landed in Booty Bay and declared it Pirates’ Day!” Great, yes, but I say we take it one step further: let’s bring Pirates’ Day to the Real World.
Yes, there’s already Talk Like a Pirate Day, but that holiday, like so many others, has become so commercialized over the years. With Pirates’ Day, I propose the following:
• We all dress up like pirates, even if we have to go to non-pirate places, e.g., the bank, the supermarket, the local pizza place, the local nightclub, etc.
• Piracy will be encouraged. That’s either digital piracy or the Spanish Main kind. You’ll have to supply your own boat, however.
• Any and all jokes told during the day will have to be pirate themed. “Did ya see the man with the peg leg? That was me who shot him, lol!”
• Pirate lingo will be encouraged. Words like “matey” and “wench,” while rustic to our ears, are just part of the ambiance on Pirates’ Day.
I’m open to other suggestions because it’s quite obvious this list ran out of steam after the second bullet point.
In case you missed it, Blizzard made some big announcements the other day. Yep, an MMO is releasing another expansion set. However, this one is going to completely reshape the entire World (of Warcraft), and that’s really the best possible thing that they can do.
World of Warcraft was originally released in 2004, and is currently the most popular MMO in the world. With local servers in Europe and Asia, odds are you’ve either played WoW, know someone who has, or are at least aware that there is a game called WoW available. Since the game was originally published, there’s been two expansions released, The Burning Crusade in 2007, and then Wrath of the Lich King in 2008. Since then, Blizzard has continued to release free content updates featuring new dungeons, and pvp areas, however there hasn’t been a major update in almost a year.
WoW is starting to run into the same problem faced by games like Everquest, and Asheron’s Call. The people who were going to buy the game bought it, leveled up their characters, and are maybe getting a little bored. You can only level a character up so many times before you start to find it repetitive, and while raiding and PVP is fun, finding a group can be difficult, and pvp can be frustrating for some.
So why is Cataclsym the only direction for WoW to go? Because Azeroth has gone stale. Unless they want to end up like the Ultima Online’s and Everquest’s out there, they have to revamp it. So how do they do it? They either release World of Warcraft 2, or they do something like Cataclysm: create a world altering event, that is going to make people want to start over, to create a character just to experience the new content and art. And maybe get some of those people who left for other MMO’s to come back into the fold.
What’s even better is, World of Warcraft evolves. From the most popular user written modifications, to the way the starting areas for a character works, Blizzard is always paying attention to what people really like. 2008’s Wrath of the Lich King featured a very dynamic and scripted starting area for the new death knight character, and people loved that fact that they could quickly pass through the initial ten levels, get some skills and gear, and jump into the more interesting content. Blizzard has stated that the Cataclysm expansion will have that same content with the two new races available to players, the goblins and worgens. Again, listening to the players is one of the best things they can do, because it will make people feel like they are actually making a difference in how the world if evolving and developing.
I’ve been playing World of Warcraft since it was released. Frankly, I’ve grown a bit bored with it, but the new Cataclysm expansion (at least what we’ve seen of it) has rekindled my excitement. I sure I’ll be pre-ordering it and standing out in the cold to pick up my copy at midnight.
Despite the fact that Blizzard has warned us, there have been some fake beta invite emails starting to go out for the upcoming World of Warcraft expansion, Cataclysm. In fact, they tried to catch the CrunchGear crew this morning with their little fake email and site.
It started out looking legitimate enough; having received emails from Blizzard before, the format and tone looked legitimate. The first clue that something was wrong was when the URL that was shown in the email was different from the one that showed up on the webpage. Not to mention that to the best of my knowledge, “betasignup.com” is not a domain owned by Blizz, or somewhere they would ever send us.
After seeing the wrong URL come up, it was apparent it was a phishing expedition. The design of the page looked good, but when you refresh it, the captcha didn’t change.. Interesting eh? After bypassing the captcha screen, we get to the point: they ask for your account name, email address, and password. The fake site always warns to always check to make sure you are going to the “official” URL - a third different URL from the one included in the original email.
It gets better. After I entered in a fake user ID, password, and email address, the site told me that, “In order to ensure all accepted beta applicants have enough play time on their accounts, a 60 day pre-paid Game card is required.”
Yeah, right.
So not only are these scumbags trying to scam you for your account information, they are also trying to screw you over for a 60 day pre-paid card. Nice eh? This is why I use (and recommend you do too) the Blizzard authenticator. It’s easy to set up, and makes your account completely safe from any and all hacking attempts. There are two versions of the key, a dongle, and a mobile phone software version. The iPhone/iPod touch version is free, and definitely worth your time to set up.
So I hope you didn’t fall for that email. If you did, I suggest you contact Blizzard directly, unless your account is already gone.
Good news, everyone. It looks like Blizzard has finally defeated the Door Boss. That is, you should no longer, or not as frequently, run into the “additional instances cannot be launched” glitch. It truly is a time for celebration.
You’ll recall that, last Tuesday, there was an awful lot of server downtime, certainly more than one would expect on a Tuesday. (Tuesday, for the non-World of Warcraft players in the house, is set aside for regularly scheduled maintenance. Servers are typically down all morning.) You could go so far as to say it ruined my life! Well, it was during that extra long, extra tortuous downtime that Blizzard put a series of buffs on its equipment. The resulting buffs—upgrades. I’m trying to be cute here—have made it so that we can actually run instances. Rejoice!
This was a big problem on Aggramar last week. You try to run SFK or WC or whatever (my latest character is still only level 28) and you’d run into that dreaded, “cannot launch any more instances” glitch. So you’d stand there for many, many minutes, running in and out of the door, trying to launch the instance. It wasn’t fun, no.
So, with the servers upgraded, have we seen any results? I know I was able to enter Gnomer last night no problem, which is one tally in the anecdotal evidence column!
The World of Warcraftfaction change went down yesterday. That is, for $30 Blizzard will take your Human Warrior and turn him into an Orc Warrior. It’s handy, yes. But the fun doesn’t stop there! Blizzard is prepping a service that’ll change your intra-faction race. That means you’ll be able to go from a Blood Elf Warlock to an Undead Warlock.
Is this news new? Well, not in the strictest sense of the word. Blizzard had mentioned it during Blizzcon, but sort of in a passing fashion. A recent official message board post re-confirms that, yes, race changing is planned.
It’s primarily an aesthetic change, I think. There’s a few racial traits that may be gained, but hardly anything worth paying for.
In other news, maybe I’ll become a Druid? Not in the game, but in real life. Respect for nature, sitting Indian style a lot, etc.
The World of Warcraftfaction change service is now up and running. It costs $30, and will take your Alliance Priest and turn him or her into a Horde Priest. You can go from any race to any race: Human to Orc, Human to Blood Elf, Human to Troll, you get the idea.
Any and all changes are made from the Account Management section of worldofwarcraft.com. Note that, during the faction change, you can change anything else about the resulting character: name, hair color, hair style, etc. It basically comes down to, “Give us $30, and we’ll turn whatever you have into whatever you want, class permitting.” Like, you can’t change a Human Priest into an Orc Warrior.
The whole process, from the time you pay Blizzard, to the time you can run around your new capital city, could be as long as “several days.”
The Door Boss is a new phenomenon in World of Warcraft. You face him when you try to enter an Instance, only to find the error message, “Additional instances cannot be launched, please try again later.” It’s quite annoying when all you want to do is run through, say, BFD once before you go to bed.
And while the glitch is annoying, at least Blizzard seems to be doing something about it. Many Realms (servers in non-WoW speak) were offline yesterday well beyond what you’d expect during the normal Tuesday maintenance. Many of these Realms were down again this morning. It’s widely assumed that Blizzard is, indeed, upgrading the necessary hardware to make this annoying little glitch go away once and for all. So while it may have been a pain in the neck not being able to play for much of yesterday—the Realms that are down now are scheduled to return at 12:00 PM EDT—maybe it’s all part of the greater good.
I hope, at least. It’s bad enough that Aggramar, home to my latest alt, has crazy queues at night, but it’s worse when, after waiting 15-20 minutes just to log in, that you cannot run any Instances:
Patience, friends. Patience. (And yes, that’s my personal e-mail in that screenshot. I did the expected utility equation, and it’s not worth the effort to blot it out and still make the screenshot look decent.)
Notice less phishing e-mail lately? There’s a reason, hot shot: the volume of phishing e-mail has dropped from 0.79 percent of all e-mail sent to 0.49 percent. If we’re looking at just “bad” e-mail, though, phishing scams still make up the bulk: 86.9 percent of “bad” e-mail was phishing-related this month. That’s down six percent from July.
Why the drop in phishing e-mails in total, and as a percentage of “bad” e-mails? Web browsers now have better built-in phishing prevention; spam filters have gotten better, leading to less phishing e-mails even reaching your inbox; action taken against cybercriminals may be paying dividends; and, maybe users are becoming more educated so as not to click on links that read “citibank-login-account.com.”
You know where phishing is still alive and well? In World of Warcraft. You can’t walk around Azeroth without getting at least a few PSTs per night: “You have been selected by Blizzard to win a special five times experience card. Just log into wow-account-win.com for more details!” It’s quite annoying, and I wish these people would just go away. That, and the dumb corpse ads I’ve been seeing a lot of lately:
If you do nothing else today, tell your less computer savvy friends not to go around clicking on crazy stuff on the Internet. The Internet at large will thank you.
It was only a few days ago that I gently chided Apple fans, telling them to “hold their horses” with respect to Snow Leopard’s release date. One Blizzcon later, not only have I re-rolled another character (a Warlock), I’m now trolling message boards, comment pages, and the like looking for more and more information about Cataclysm, the upcoming expansion pack. The most important bit of information still eludes me: its release date.
Watching Blizzcon—thanks to my Uncle Justin, wink-wink—you got the feeling that Cataclysm is a lot further along than Wrath of the Lich King was when it was first announced, back at Blizzcon 2007. (My, how time flies!) The game was already on display in playable form, allowing conference attendees to experience its joys some time before its release.
That’s just the thing, though. If the expansion is already this far along in development, and with Wrath of the Lich King’s storyline set to terminate with a rapidly approaching patch, 3.3, which is currently rumored for a Christmas/New Years release, then how long do we have to wait till we can roll Worgen?
Blizzard has already said “2010” (along with StarCraft II) when asked when the expansion will debut, but “2010” is awfully vague. If you assume that Blizzard doesn’t want to wait much longer than the average 3-4 months in between patches, then that leaves you with a first-half 2010 Cataclysm release. That is, three to four months after the release of the storyline-ending Wrath of the Lich King 3.3 patch.
There’s other reasons to believe in a first-half 2010, and it has to do with other games. What would Blizzard gain by letting WoW grow stale when there’s games like Star Wars: The Old Republic on the horizon? We can’t have other games taking away mind share, if not market share, now can we?
As it stands, provided a giant meteor doesn’t smash into the planet, or the sun doesn’t unexpectedly run out of hydrogen, I sincerely would like to attend Blizzcon 2010 now.
You can run, but you can’t hide (in cyberspace). In one of the strangest stories of 2009, it’s been reported that Blizzard worked with law enforcement to help catch a drug dealer.
World of Warcraft
Call of Duty (franchise)
The Sims
Anyway, 
Blizzard released some interesting information about the inner workings of World of Warcraft recently at 
In case you missed it, Blizzard made some big announcements the other day. Yep, an MMO is releasing 
Despite the fact that Blizzard has warned us, there have been some fake beta invite emails starting to go out for the upcoming World of Warcraft expansion, Cataclysm. In fact, they tried to catch the CrunchGear crew this morning with their little fake email and site.
