Archive for the “WoW” Category

In what has turned into a somewhat frightening (in the reality it brings) twist, angry WoW subscribers have decided to show Blizzard what a bad idea this publicizing your real, full name on the forums can be.

A Blizzard employee, Bashiok, decided to post his real name on the forums. An almost deranged seeming act of faith that the community won’t take advantage of that information. And oh, how wrong Micah Whipple turned out to be.

Over on the website wowriot.com, a poster named godmode decided to turn the paranoia around on Blizzard.

Not only did he find Bashiok’s Facebook account (which has since been deleted), he uncovered and publicized Bashiok’s:

• home address
• phone number
• family members’ names and ages
• photos of his current home
• photos of the home where he grew up

Scared yet?

What about the rampant hacking that goes on in this game now? I know of four people, within the last month, who have been hacked. What’s to stop random psychopath hackers people from using that information to go on the official boards and smear people’s names now? It’s almost tinfoil hat scary, especially when you consider how much the internet and the record of what we do on it during your personal time is becoming a bigger part of people’s professional futures and reputations.

I read a comment somewhere in my travels today: “Empires fall apart from the inside before they are destroyed by outside forces.” Blizzard is turning into their own worst enemy at a time when the MMO market is about to be in a state of flux with incoming competition for them. In the end, they may be the perpetrators of their own undoing.

Related articles: [wow.com] [mmo-champion.com] [kotaku.com]

Remember when I was heralding that whole RealID thing? Yeah, I totally take that back like ten-fold now.

Yes, it has been awesome getting in touch with at least 3 friends of mine from college who play/ed. I enjoy chatting about stuff with them while grinding away on my almost 77 mage.

However, Blizzard has decided that RealID is waaaaay too good to pass up and not exploit, so now if you post on the official forums (once the change goes live- it won’t be retroactive, thankfully), no longer will your “handle” be whichever of your toons you choose. Nope. Once this goes live, your “handle” will be the same thing you go by in real life- your first and last name.

Of course, some people were still untrustworthy and didn’t use their *real* first and last name when setting up their Battle.net account. For the rest of us, sadly, no such luck (unless you can go in and change it? I’m going to need to do that eventually anyway, as post-divorce I’ll be changing my name back).

Yes, the elimination (or reduction, at the very least) of trolls on the official boards is nice. Having punk ass unnamed kid being able to search for more info on you on the ‘net? Not so much.

A few years ago, when I took my current job in the public sector, I thoroughly went through and locked down or removed any information about me I could that I wouldn’t want a co-worker or other person stumbling across when looking for me. Not everyone, however, out there has the ability, skill, know-how or, well,  had the foresight to do that themselves.

I’ve been reading various forums about this issue today, because yes, it does concern me greatly. There are, as expected, people on both extremes but then there are people with serious concerns- people who were previous victims of stalking, people who worry about this coming up when a future employer does a background check (as MMORPGs and WoW in particular have a certain stigma and stereotype attached), female players who are concerned about the impending influx of “socially backward” males taking the fact they’re a female on an MMO as free reign to obnoxiously hit on them. It’s not looking good here on the horizon.

When RealID launched a few weeks ago, Blizzard came out and said the service was for people who were looking for some sort of cross-realm/game communication with friends and family members who were not nearby. It was something that customers had been requesting for a long time (and as I said in my previous post regarding this subject, something FFXI already offered through the PlayOnline interface). They were emphatic that if you didn’t want someone- or anyone- to know your RealID information, you could opt out and either choose not to join in, or completely turn off the functionality via the Parental Controls options.

Granted, this is just on the forums. For now. Is this where it will start or end, though?

Tuesday brought about Patch 3.3.5, which contains the eventually-will-be-activated Ruby Sanctum Raid, but the big one is the Real ID system.

People have been asking Blizzard for a long time for some kind of cross-server chat functionality. This is something FFXI had a looooong time ago (though its implemented through the pain in the arse called Play Online).

When I started playing WoW, like rolled my first toon started playing, I was with my boyfriend at the time, and we were playing along with a couple we were friendly with from FFXI. Time passes, we went our separate ways, and eventually, I came back to WoW. I decided to stick with my original server, since now that I was back I knew no one. Time goes by. I quit and start playing again. This time I find out not only is another good friend of mine from FFXI playing, but a bunch of people I was friends with in college also play.

And of course, everyone’s on different servers.

And all seem to play dirty Horde (but I digress ).

The only way we could ever keep in touch in WoW, was to roll alts. I have a smattering of them across a few different servers (including a Tauren with a name based on Mad Cow Disease). But between raiding and real life, it was hard to find time to just hop on a shoot the breeze. And how did I even know said friends would be online when I logged into my level 9 cow?

In comes Real ID, and it makes my life SO MUCH EASIER. My current boyfriend? I can now delete all eleven thousand of his toons off my friends’ list. I can chat with my one best friend’s husband, who’s out in Arizona (I am here in New Jersey, for those who don’t know). I was able to reconnect with an old friend of mine last night through it. My boyfriend can now chat regularly with his best friend (who lives in Vegas) and his mom (who lives in Oregon, and yes, plays WoW).

Hell, thanks to Real ID I’ve got tentative plans to see a friend from college for dinner sometime soon. And I know had it not existed, I probably wouldn’t have made those plans (because I despise talking on Facebook, whose privacy policies are about a thousand times more shady than Real ID).

Seriously, I am thrilled with it. I have some other friends who used to play WoW, but will be rabidly playing Starcraft II once its released. While we chat on a very regular basis (thanks to the wonder called Blackberry Messenger), we can now harass each other in-game now. Cross-game. C’mon, how awesome is that?

When it comes to security… I’m not concerned. I’ve been tinfoil hat careful with my PC (Avast! and Firefox with AdBlock and NoScript. Plus I do zero casual web browsing on my gaming rig). I have an authenticator (and will lecture guildies to suck it up and get their own once they get hacked. Like I did the other day). Your battle.net email is not displayed anywhere once you’re friended. As I stated above, Facebook’s privacy policies are a lot worse than this.

Now, I’m not going to add everyone and their brother, obviously. Going to keep it to people I know in real life, and people I’m in contact with on a regular basis. Everyone and their brother doesn’t really need to know how much I play when I’m at home, after all. :3

So last week, if you follow my twitter/facebook or just paid attention here, I got to do something I’ve been *itching* to do since Icecrown Citadel went live.

Last Wednesday was a particularly painful raid night. All sorts of things were messy/sloppy, I was annoyed we were carrying people (I was also PMSing, which may have made me way more irritable than I’d normally be). Fast forward to Thursday night, I was invited along to fill a spot in a 25-man Icecrown Citadel raid with US Horder Patrol. They only had 3 bosses left, but I didn’t mind because one of those 3 was the (dun dun duuuuuun!) Lich King!

Prior to the big bad fight though, we did hard-mode Rotface, which while it was hectic because I’d never done it before, wasn’t too bad, honestly. Anyway. We downed Rotface, then Professor Putricide (on normal mode) and then it was off to the Frozen Thone!

Learning the fight, for me, was rough. There is a LOT going on and to keep track of. However, a few attempts (and thankfully no royal eff-ups from me) we killed him! I’m now the proud owner of a shiny Kingslayer title (which is not so special, since everyone and their brother has it these days)! I was on a crazy high after that, and I totally want a chance to do the fight again.

Friday I got totally shocked though… Shadow Prophecy’s core group was all online! So what did we do? Something we don’t do normally… PROGRESSION! We killed Valithria (we’d had problems with her on Wednesday, due to sleepy healers) and moved onward to Sindragosa.

Now, you may wonder why we’re rounding out the ice wing before even touching the blood wing. The reason is simple- the mechanics of the Sindragosa fight are easier for us to work with than the Blood Princes right now. Anyway, we got a few really solid attempts in, and got her down to 24% (this is a huge improvement for us, as we were previously wiping during phases 1/2). It was incredible, actually. No one even remotely screwed up the initial ground and air phases. We’re still working the kinks out of the 3rd phase, but we can get there pretty consistently now, and I have confidence that if we go right to the frost wing tomorrow after Saurfang (instead of going to clear Fester/Rot/Putricide like normal) we can totally get her down this week. Which if it happens, will be amazingly awesome.

In other news, yesterday brought the start of the Midsummer Fire Festival. There have been a bunch of changes, which if you follow my twitter you’ll see I am totally. not. thrilled. but anyway. I’ve had 2 goals for this holiday: 1- get the scorchling pet on Binya (now impossible, thanks Blizzard!) 2- get the Frostcythe of Ahune for my mage, Étain. Of course, while the minimum level for the Brewfest boss (and I’ll guess the Valentine’s guys) was 75, Ahune’s minimum level to engage is 78. Urgh.

So while my plan had been get Étain 4 levels (from 71 to 75) and farm away, it’s not get to 78 as fast as humanly possible. Don’t get me wrong, I’m having a lot of fun playing her (who wouldn’t love playing a pink, puffball- haired gnome?!) my brain is starting to stall on going quest crazy. I’d queue for random dungeons back to back, but then I’ll burn through all my rest exp faster than I want to, and this whole process will take longer.’

Anyway, been grinding her since Saturday, and she’s now 74, with 25% more to go til 75. I figure if I can keep my momentum going, I can probably get her to 78 by sometime this weekend. Which will give me roughly 5-7 attempts on Ahune for the scythe. Which kind of sucks. Oh well. Once she hits 78, she’s going on a nice, long break for awhile.

In non-WoW news, I managed to get a Frigost beta key for Dofus this past weekend. Of course, this is pretty silly since I’m pretty sure the content of the next expansion is for 100+, and I am but a lowly little 48 Enutrof. I’ve been playing intermittenly with WoW, as kind of a break. The play styles are completely different, so it can be kind of a nice vacation for my brain. The only goal I have in that game is getting my Enu to 100 so she can basically be a lootwhore (you get a spell at 100 that gives you a summon that lets you get 2x the loot from monsters, basically). That’s a loong way to go, though.

Waiting for my financial situation to… make more sense (cents?), and then I’ll probably reactivate FFXI for a bit. The future for me with FFXIV is unsure, since I can’t get the benchmark to run (and I’m terrified to run a manual driver update… mostly because the last time I did it ended with my video card exploding. Literally). We’ll have to hold out and see what the future holds for me there.

Hey, this place looks familiar!

Hello again. It’s been awhile, much of the personal drama that was the reasoning behind the extended-hiatus here has subsided, and life is finally starting to settle into some sort of familiar routine-ness.

On the gaming front, I’ve been spending my time playing WoW, of course. Aside from Esa being fully kitted out in ICC-10 gear (and a few ICC-25 pieces) and Binya on her way to the same, I now have a third 80 thrown into the mix. Yup, my Death Knight, Brieanne, has hit 80 and is working on an ICC-ready DPS set, as well as putting together a tank set.

In the off time on WoW, I’ve been levelling a Mage, and you know what? I am having a BLAST. So much fun! My ‘lil gnome, Étain, is currently 69 at the writing of this post, and working her way in Northrend.

On the non-WoW front, I’ve been playing Dofus again as well. I now have my highest character ever, a level 46 Enutrof named Missesquan. I’m pretty sure level 100 (level cap is 200) is a long way away from me, but I’ve been having fun with it and it’s a nice distraction when I want to play an MMO but don’t want to play WoW.

While I do get pangs every now and again for FFXI (moreso to play Etain’s THF more than anything), I’ve pretty much come to the conclusion that I’m done with that game. In the almost a year I’ve been gone, too many things have been added, improved, or changed for me to even consider putting the time into now. Add to that the incoming level cap increase and, yeah. Like an old ex-boyfriend, these days I look back at FFXI with fond memories, but that’s all.

Looking ahead, I am currently planning to give FFXIV a whirl when it’s released. I’ve really been hoping to get into the Alpha or the Beta (so I can make up my mind without having to drop the cash on the game, heh), but I have this feeling that’s not going to happen. So, we’ll see.

On the blogging end here, I am planning on a site revamp and/or tweakage next weekend. Will I return to blogging weekly? Hard to say. Things in WoW are fairly stagnant (I’ve re-undertaken my achievement goals. Currently working on a few that shouldn’t be too difficult for me to bang out this weekend) and will probably remain that way the next few months until the Cataclysm info starts flooding in. Completely legitimately, of course. Even FFXI/XIV-wise I’ve been way on the outside of the loop. My job finally got around to blocking the bunch of sites I relied on for information there and since work is the place where I have the most downtime, yeah. I am waaaay out of the loop.

So that’s where I’m at. Like I said, I’ll be doing a revamp of the blog next weekend, and am going to try to blog semi-regularly…ish again. I will definitely try to keep it game related, with 2 MMO’s being played currently and a potential third, I think I can drag some sort of content together from somewhere.