By CrunchGear, on 2010.02.28, 08:00.10 pm
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!
via wow.com
By PC World, on 2010.02.07, 11:20.09 pm
By CrunchGear, on 2010.01.02, 02:00.50 pm
 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.
[Via The Kokomo Perspective]
By CrunchGear, on 2009.12.31, 09:26.31 am
 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.
By CrunchGear, on 2009.12.23, 04:30.55 am
 Most people would probably view a hardcore, 16 hour-a-day addiction to World of Warcraft as a bad thing. That was certainly the case for Hubert Thieblot a few years ago, when he dropped out of school and his parents decided to kick him out of the house because he was playing so much. Flash forward five years. Thieblot has managed to turn his addiction into a thriving company called Curse that generated over $3 million in revenue this year. Today, the company is disclosing a $6 million Series B round it closed in early 2009 with participation from Ventech Capital, AGF Private Equity, and SoftTech VC (Jeff Clavier). The round brings Curse's total funding to $11 million, after a $5 million Series A round in 2007 led by AGF Private Equity.
In some senses, Curse is akin to a SourceForge for computer games, in that it offers a directory of plugins that players can use to customize and enhance their PC games. Many of the site's users are World of Warcraft fans, who have made Curse.com the definitive site for WoW add-ons. Alongside its directory, Curse also makes a native client players can use to manage their plugins.
By CrunchGear, on 2009.12.21, 01:30.17 pm
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.
via Fudzilla
By CrunchGear, on 2009.12.16, 01:30.39 pm
Like with every game not called World of Warcraft, I played Assassin’s Creed II for a solid two or three hours, and it’s been collecting dust ever since then. This is relevant because, what, Ubisoft sold me (and all of you!) an incomplete game? Apparently! The game’s upcoming DLC, Sequence 12: Battle of Forli and Sequence 13: Bonfire of the Vanities, which go on sale in January and February, “complete” the game. At least they’re cheap: $3.99 and $4.99.
This is news to me because I never completed the game and had no idea about this corrupted DNA nonsense. Yes, it’s merely a presentation issue—Ubisoft could simply have added DLC like everyone else does, as “bonus” content, but to present it as though you’re completing the game by buying the DLC? Rubs me the wrong way.
By CrunchGear, on 2009.12.14, 12:50.09 pm
For me, the best part of Patch 3.3 in World of Warcraft is the new dungeon finder. I’ve used it a bunch in the past couple of days, and can say this: PUGing is now fun (though it’ll change the way we look at guilds).
PUG stands for pick-up group, a term to describe a ragtag collection of players thrust together to run though a dungeon, or instance. Prior to this latest patch, setting up a PUG was a pain the the ass: you’d join a specific chat channel then submit yourself to a pretty rubbish queuing system. It would take an awful long time to get five players together. We’re talking 30+ minutes. Inconvenient, yes. You’d get prepared to run a dungeon, have all your potions and items and whatnot on you, then enter the queue… then you’d wait. And wait and wait. Needless to say, by the time you got a group together, you were often no longer in the mood to run the dungeon.
And then you’d find that the group itself was rubbish. Not fun, no.
The new system changes things. The biggest change is that the dungeon finder looks across servers, so even if your server has, say, only 100 people in it (for argument’s sake), that’s no longer a problem. You’re no longer handcuffed by your server’s inadequacies!
The queueing system has also improved, and dramatically. Now you select your role in the group (damage-dealing, healing, or tanking), then the system scours several servers to find other plays queuing up for the same dungeon. What used to take 30+ minutes to set up now takes around 10. I say that as a damage-dealer (Warlock); healers and tanks, being more rare, are placed into groups even quicker. (Groups consist of three damage-dealers, a healer, and a tank.)
Like I said, I’ve used the new system several times since the patch went live. I couldn’t be happier. Within 10 minutes of entering a queue I’m fighting my way through the game’s dungeons.
Yes, this is what I do with my life, such as it is.
But the new dungeon finder may change the way people look at guilds. Before, you’d join a guild so you can get to know a bunch of other people who you’d run dungeons with. It was a lot quicker for a few guildies run a dungeon than sit though the old PUG system. But now that you can have a dungeon run up and ready in just a few minutes, why bother with a guild? This is especially true of people who like to play the game alone like I do: I have no interest in asking my fellow guildies “hey, what’s up guys?” If I can find a group in a few minutes, then be done with a dungeon in double-quick time, why put up with all the drama of a guild?
This only speaks to pre-endgame raiding, of course. That’s a whole different animal where being friends with people and knowing what are people’s motivations (what gear they’re after and so on).
So there you go. Running dungeons is infinitely easier, and faster, now, but it may change the way people look at guilds. Are they even worth the trouble now, especially at lower levels?
By CrunchGear, on 2009.12.08, 04:00.13 pm
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)
And other stuff.
SO yeah, it’s a pretty big deal. I’m excited; it’s going to be a late night!
By CrunchGear, on 2009.12.02, 02:00.17 pm
Does getting every achievement in World of Warcraft mean you’ve “beaten” the game? I wouldn’t say so, but that seems to be the meme going around, with word that a man in Taiwan has ticked off all but one achievements in the game.
The character, Small Gray (according to Google Translate), has 986 of the game’s achievements. There are 986 achievements in the game, but sharper eyes than mine have noticed that he only got to magic number 986 via a glitch. He’s actually missing one achievement called “BB King,” but he glitched the game to give him one, unearned achievement.
The bottom line is, the guy has 986 out of 986. Good for him.
The beauty of this is that a new patch, Patch 3.3, comes out in the next few days, so he’ll have a whole bunch of new achievements to attain.
More importantly than any of this: achievements are dumb. I don’t care for them, no sir.
By CrunchGear, on 2009.11.23, 06:31.52 pm
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.
By CrunchGear, on 2009.11.16, 02:00.08 pm
Short version: A comfortable mouse whose main gimmick will take hours upon hours of dedication on your part to fully exploit.
Like a dork, I looked up the word “naga” in Wikipedia, and it turns out that it refers to “a deity or class of entity or being, taking the form of a very great snake—specifically the King Cobra, found in Hinduism and Buddhism.” That would explain the snake-like logo of the Razer Naga ($80, available now), a new mouse that’s aimed at people who play MMOs, specifically World of Warcraft and Warhammer Online. The biggest feature: 12 buttons on the left-hand side of the mouse.
Unlike last year’s SteelSeries World of Warcraft Gaming Mouse, the Razer Naga doesn’t come with the full Blizzard licensing. If that matters to you you’re a fool. And also unlike said SteelSeries mouse, the buttons here don’t stick like an old Sega Genesis controller after using it for a few hours.
It works, out of the box, with both Windows (tested on Windows 7) and Mac OS X (tested on Snow Leopard). Thank you, Razer. No need for my fellow Mac users to spring for a third-party driver just to use the mouse!
So let’s do this. I tested the mouse using World of Warcraft over a period of two weeks. That may seem excessive, but this mouse absolutely has a learning curve. The documentation that comes with the mouse—I actually read the instruction manual!—says to expect up to 18 hours to get used to the mouse. Yes, 18 hours. As Doug said in our chatroom, you might as well learn Russian.
The mouse’s raison d’être is the 12 buttons on the left-hand side, where your thumb would normally rest. The 12 buttons are designed to replace any number of keyboard keys that you’d use to play the game. You know, 1 is regular attack, then 2 through whatever for your spells and whatnot.
My latest character, an Affliction Blood Elf Warlock, has the following key-mapping:
1: Shoot
2: Shadow Bolt
3: Immolate
4: Corruption
5: Curse of Agony
6: Life Tap
7: Drain Life
8: Health Funnel
9: Drain Soul
0: Rain of Fire
-: Fear
=: Howl of Terror
These spells and abilities are mapped over to the 1-12 buttons on the mouse.
Razer has created an AddOn for both games that rearranges your on-screen icons, à la Bartender, to better visually correlate the 12 mouse buttons to your spells and abilities. (Here’s a screenshot of the interface AddOn. It’s the squares on the right-hand side.)
As I said, using the 12 buttons effectively will absolutely take you several hours, especially if you’ve been playing the game for a long time. It’s like trying to write your name with your left hand when you’re a righty.
I had gotten used to running close to a mob, then taking taking my middle finger off the “W” key, then hitting 4, 5, 6, 3, and 1 till the mob died. (See the above key-mapping for what those numbers translate to.) Now all of a sudden your left hand stays on the WASD keys, while your right thumb has to navigate the little button patch on the mouse.
After about of week with the new playing scheme, I had more or less acclimated myself. I now quest with the 12 buttons just fine, but I still find myself going back to the ol’ keyboard when PVPing. I find that the frantic nature of PVP doesn’t really lend itself to the 12 buttons. Practice makes perfect, of course, and you may be more patient than I am, but I couldn’t get used to PVPing with the 12 buttons even after several days.
And to allay a fear I read somewhere, no, I really didn’t find that pushing one of the 12 buttons would cause the mouse to move a great deal, if at all. It’s not as if you need to exact an incredible amount of force on the buttons to get them to click.
So it’s a fine mouse, yes, but you really do need to be prepared to fully re-train yourself on how to play the game.
Is it any better than using the plain on’ keyboard keys? Meh, I wouldn’t say so, and I expect that many of you are already used to your current setup. Still, it’s a fine mouse in its own right, and its use to you is 100 percent dependent on your willingness to learn how to effectively use it.
Product Page
By CrunchGear, on 2009.11.11, 02:30.37 pm
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.
By CrunchGear, on 2009.11.09, 10:30.54 am
UPDATE Activision just contacted us and in no uncertain terms said that nobody has been given permission to sell the game early. Not GameStop, not the indie video game store on the corner, not anybody.
Activision has not given any retailer permission to sell Modern Warfare 2 prior to the Nov. 10 street date. The company fully supports the Nov.10 street date.
And there you have it. (I always thought this whole thing sounded fishy. Why would Activision spend millions upon millions of dollars publishing the game, marketing the Nov. 10 date, only to break it because a couple of mom-and-pop video game stores decided to sell it early? It didn’t make sense. As it that doesn’t happen all the time, street dates being broken by rogue stores.)
So if you do find a copy of the game before tomorrow consider yourself lucky.
I’ve kept the original text down here, just because. You’ll notice that I cleverly struck it out, indicating that it’s no longer valid.
You most certainly already know this by now, but Modern Warfare 2 is probably already available at your local GameStop. The release date (tomorrow, actually) was broken last week by various so-called mom-and-pop video game stores, so Activision went ahead and started letting select GameStops sell the game.
GameStop, with Activision’s eventual approval, made the decision to break the street date, as its known, because other stores, particularly in the northeast, had already broken the date. Can’t have li’l ol’ mom-and-pop have all the fun, now can we?
What does this mean for you? You can try to call your local GameStop, and see if it’s selling the game early. If so, hooray. If not, you’ll have to wait one more agonizing day to play the game.
I’m still undecided if I’m going to get it, seeing as though World of Warcraft takes up a supermajority of my gaming time. Not that any of you care, which I fully recognize.
By CrunchGear, on 2009.11.04, 07:00.28 pm
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.
via wow.com
By PC World, on 2009.11.03, 03:20.17 am
By CrunchGear, on 2009.11.02, 05:00.53 pm
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.
By CrunchGear, on 2009.10.27, 12:00.53 pm
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.
By CrunchGear, on 2009.10.20, 01:40.56 pm
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!
By CrunchGear, on 2009.10.08, 04:30.08 pm
Yup, another airline is poised to offer in-flight Wi-Fi. United Airlines has said that it will start use of Aircell’s Gogo service beginning with flights between New York and California. It’s $12.95 for laptop access for the duration of the flight.
A grand total of 13 planes (Boeing 757s) will be equipped with Wi-Fi. If I had any business in California, I would just play World of Warcraft for the duration of the flight.
Oh, and one thing I was wonder: what kind of security are we looking at here? Can some punk kid just fire up Ettercap, and steal everyone’s username/password to every single site they visit? You can see the headline now: HACKING AT 30,000 FEET!
Picture added for humorous effect.
By CrunchGear, on 2009.10.07, 07:31.22 pm
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.
By CrunchGear, on 2009.10.06, 05:30.37 pm
We all know that real world officials have used games like World of Warcraft to monitor the spread of infectious diseases, like trout flu. But what’s new to my eyes, broken pieces of junk that they are (I wouldn’t be able see Jupiter even if I were five feet away from it), is that researchers are using them to study economics. It’s simultaneously a bad and good idea.
It’s good in that you’ve got a lot of people to study, all of whom are buying and selling goods on the Auction House (or your preferred game’s equivalent). But the thing is that not everyone is motivated by pure profit, which seems to be the case in the Real World. Someone could be trying to level up a skill (like, say, Leatherworking) just for the sake of leveling it up, and not trying to make any money on the transaction. So they’ll make a piece of armor, and sell it for next to nothing just because. Then you’ve got people who like to disrupt, selling items for way below the “real” value just to ruin the economy. My brother actually did that back in the early days of Star Wars Galaxies.
One thing that researchers have already observed: when a new server opens up, or when it allows transfers to it, the flood of new players, with their new items in their knapsacks, be on the lookout for inflation. If, prior to the server opening up to new players, there was only 10 of Item X on sale, and now all of a sudden 100 items are on sale, say goodbye to your profit margins.
So, yeah… happy Jocktober, everyone.
By CrunchGear, on 2009.10.05, 02:30.07 pm
Good God. There’s an article that was published on Green Pixels not too long ago that discussed video game addiction. It’s your standard-issue “question” piece, where the writer asks a question—can video games be addictive?—and goes to a variety of experts, be they doctors, industry executives, and whatnot, and tries to ascertain their opinion. What’s insane, however, is this retort (of sorts) by Neils Clark, who co-wrote the book Game Adiction: The Experience and the Effects, which was published in May. He also teaches at Digipen.
The retort—again, of sorts. It’s not as if Clark rubbishes the entire Green Pixels article—lists 10 things to think about before after having read the original article. I just finished reading the whole thing, but unless you’re used to reading the obtuse language of Academia, you may want to just skim it.
Of the 10, I’ll highlight a few here:
• Games aren’t drugs. You cannot necessarily treat (or liken) drug addiction and video game addiction as one in the same; video games aren’t drugs that can be consumed, like alcohol or heroin.
• Addiction is a proper medical condition, though most people tend to throw it around all the time. “I’m addicted to caffeine!” Really? Maybe you really enjoy that cup of coffee in the morning, and at lunch, and at dinnertime, but that doesn’t mean your body is physically addicted to it. People ought really up on actual, legitimate addiction before, say, accusing your kid of being addicted to World of Warcraft.
• Gamers should stop seeing themselves as a “victim” in the crosshairs of media blowhards. Media blowhards—some so-called expert on CNN or Fox News who’s constantly running down video games as being ruinous to out society—exist, and you do not need to “no” every time they say “yes.” Stop seeing yourselves as enemies, and instead use the opportunity to examine yourself (and your friends and family) to make sure that everything is on the up and up. The talking heads may be jerks, but that doesn’t mean that whoever yells loudest is most correct.
• Do you think you have a problem? Like, an actual problem, and you’re not just being a lazybones playing Xbox instead of working? Professional help in the form of a psychologist may not be a bad thing to consider, though it’s always important to recognize that they have a financial incentive to keep you in that chair week in, week out.
• We need more research into “video game addiction.” Essentially, the American Medical Association is open to the idea of exploring video game addiction, but it needs to see more solid research before it can say, “We think this issue merits further research.” Because once the AMA puts its stamp of approval on video game addiction research, then doctors all over the country can approach the money men and say, “See, the AMA says this is a legitimate medical issue, and it’s one my team and I would like to investigate further.”
That is all. Phew!
By CrunchGear, on 2009.09.30, 10:00.55 am
 Looks like the Obama Administration, which really ought to be focused on getting Americans like me affordable health care (unless doctors now accept World of Warcraft Gold as payment, lol!), has set its sights on eliminating the scourge of distracted driving once and for all. Case in point: Transportation Sec. Ray LaHood is holding a summit this week that has the ultimate goal of “finding ways to eliminate texting while driving.”
By CrunchGear, on 2009.09.30, 09:30.50 am
Man alive, there’s only a few topics I write about with any regularity here: e-books, World of Warcraft, sports, and robots. I’m not even a fan of robots, and yet I always get assigned the robot stories! Like today, I wake up and see this assigned to me: new WowWee robots. What? Oooh, WowWee, I know them.
Right, so there’s two new WowWee robots out there: the Roborover ($69) and the Joebot ($99). The names are fantastic, yes. (WowWee, incidentally, is my favorite name for a company. Much better than “Apple” or “Microsoft” or “Sony.”) The Roborover moves around on those treads you see, shaped as such so it can roll over dangerous household items with relative ease. Think action figures and the like.
Meanwhile, the Joebot actually walks around on his two legs, and you can issue commands either via voice or “tapping his arms,” whatever that means.
Look, they’re neat toys for kids. What do you want? I wish I had a robot as a young boy in the Bronx.
By CrunchGear, on 2009.09.21, 06:00.26 pm
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.
By CrunchGear, on 2009.09.21, 04:30.00 pm
Above: Nicholas and Dave talking about World of Warcraft in the CrunchGear chat room. I threw in some stuff about EverQuest to try to be funny and they ignored me.
Nerds [CrunchGear.com]
By CrunchGear, on 2009.09.18, 04:50.13 pm
 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.
By CrunchGear, on 2009.09.18, 09:30.36 am
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.
via wow.com
By CrunchGear, on 2009.09.14, 05:00.28 pm
 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.
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