How's the guild finder working out for you?

This is something I've been meaning to write about for a while. I was quite excited about the introduction of the guild finder in 4.1. Of course it was never going to replace the full application process for a raiding guild, but at least people would be able to see that we were out there, right in the game, without us having to do any special advertising!

Right after the introduction of the thing, we actually managed to find a discipline priest who was kind enough to sign up for our guild website and ended up joining us as a somewhat infrequent but loyal raider. Then there were two or three people who applied to be social members and were invited straight away; they usually chatted for a few days and then left again or simply never logged in again.

Since then however, ninety percent of the applications we've received either contain no text at all or something like "i need a gild". I reject them with no comment, but it gets tedious. The other ten percent actually do write a line or two but then never seem to log in again either, as you can tell from the guy who applies at level 15 and says something like: "I'm a really fast leveller and will be able to join you guys at the cap in no time!" Twenty days later he's still 15 and inactive. It kind of makes you wonder just how serious the churn in this game is, or whether there are really that many people who keep rolling up new characters just to abandon them again after 5-10 levels.

I originally volunteered to take care of in-game applications, but I've been finding the task increasingly depressing. I've written so many in-game letters to people, telling them that they are welcome to join us and to just whisper any guildie next time they're online... and yet the recipients are never heard from again. It wouldn't be so bad if we still got some serious applicants every now and then, but I just haven't seen any in months. It feels as if all the energy that I'm putting into these attempts at being welcoming and friendly is being poured down a bottomless hole; it shouldn't be surprising that this gets draining after a while.

I don't know if that's just my guild, my server or what. Still, I can't shake the feeling that the guild finder is at the end of the day too much like a dungeon finder for guilds. Press button to queue apply, later press "accept" to join the group. No talking required. I would imagine that if you're running the kind of guild which only exists for the perks and to collect some money from Cash Flow, this could work very well. However, the "classic" guild is a purely social construct with no inherent gameplay elements, and you can't be social by just pressing a button and not interacting with people.

I could see it working much better if guilds could set up some simple filtering mechanisms for applicants, such as a mandatory "why do you want to join us" field to keep out the pure button pushers. On the other hand the tools for prospective applicants could use improving too - I can't imagine any half-serious raider (or PvPer... or roleplayer... or anyone who genuinely cares about what kind of guild he's going to join) trying to apply purely via the guild finder right now, where they'd struggle to find out anything about any guild beyond the little paragraph that the guild master can fill with information.

Blizzard Entertainment wants my feedback!

That (sort of) was the title of a mail that I found in my inbox this morning. After careful inspection it turned out to not be just another stupid phishing attempt - Blizzard does indeed ask random players for feedback this way sometimes. Considering that I've been rather unhappy with recent developments, I thought that this would be a good opportunity to make my voice heard and immediately went to fill out the survey.

Unfortunately... I'm not sure it's actually going to be very useful to anyone. On the plus side, the questions indicated to me that Blizzard is quite aware of most of the game's current problem areas, but the way they were phrased I doubt that my (or anyone's) answers are truly going to provide a lot of useful feedback to the developers.

Am I "satisfied" with daily quests? No, not really, though some are better than others. They never asked about the whys though, so for all I know they could interpret my answer as "There aren't enough dailies, we need to make more!", which could hardly be further from my intended message.

Same with raiding. How useful is it really to simply ask me to rate how "fun" I consider raiding on a scale of one to seven? If you're just going to guess about what exactly I like and dislike about it, you're just as likely to make things even worse. Am I satisfied with Cataclysm raiding? Considering that it made me quit that part of the game after more than four years, definitely not, but it's not as if Cataclysm just dropped one big change on me that instantly flipped my feelings from love to hate; it's been a long time coming based on changes that already started in WOTLK.

Do I approve of storyline quests? In principle yes, I just wish that they didn't turn entire zones into one giant linear quest chain. But again, if I simply declare that I haven't liked the Cataclysm storylines that much, how are they going to interpret that? Now I'm actually kind of worried about my responses being used to justify more changes that I won't like.

At least I got a chuckle out of how many questions they asked me about Star Wars: The Old Republic. Are you going to buy it? Are you going to stop playing WoW then? They may not care about the details of my opinion about the game, but they are certainly concerned about the competition...

12 days without WoW

So, I mentioned at the end of my last post that I was going on holiday. I did, and I am now back! I'm fairly poor and don't get to go on holidays often, but I was still somewhat surprised when I realised that this was the first time since I started playing WoW that I was going to be away from the game for over a week, as well as from the internet in general. I mean, that's kind of crazy if you think about it, isn't it? Logging on to a game almost every day for over four and a half years! Not even moving to a different country disconnected me from things for that long.

As it happened, my subscription was due for renewal only a few days before I was going to leave, so I decided to let it run out and then renew it after coming back. No sense in paying for the game while I wasn't going to be around, right? The only problem was that since my subscription had been running continuously for years, I didn't know how to cancel it and couldn't find an option on the account management page to do so.

I did some research on this and it was rather... interesting. I found a couple of old forum threads on the subject and they were bordering somewhere on the edge between amusing and insulting. Basically, someone would ask where the link to cancel your subscription was located, and people would respond as if the poster was stupid. "It's right there!" they would say, sometimes even including screenshots, but these certainly didn't match my own screen. Yes, I'm sure that I do have a subscription; I've had it for over four years. No, I don't have any pending payments. And no, I do not have a cancel subscription link! The best theory I saw someone come up with was that Blizzard has been sloppy with transferring really old subs onto Battle.net and that's where this problem originates. I don't know, it made more sense than anything else. Fortunately I realised in the end that I could simply delete my credit card information and stop the payments that way, but the whole thing still felt slightly awkward to me.

You might think that someone who's been playing the same game with such regularity for four and a half years must be pretty addicted to it. However, I'm quite happy to say that my holiday was pretty good evidence of the opposite, because I didn't really miss WoW at all. I had two dreams that featured the game during that time, and I occasionally wondered how some of my guildies were doing (as people, not necessarily in the game), but that was it. I did miss the internet in general however. Not having internet access these days when you're used to it is just annoying. I saw some statues that I couldn't identify while in town and I knew that the internet would have been able to enlighten me, but of course I couldn't check. I actually had to read the newspaper and listen to the radio to get access to any kind of news, and they often only offered limited coverage of the things that I was actually interested in. Outrageous!

So while I had a good time during my holiday, I was also happy to be back home and have my computer back afterwards. I immediately checked my guild's forums to make sure that nothing too bad had happened in my absence, but I actually hesitated a little when it came to resubscribing to WoW. I thought it was telling that I hadn't missed the game for its own sake, and it had been kind of nice to devote more of my downtime to other things in its absence, such as reading. Also, the latest bunch of WoW-related news that I had glimpsed since my return hadn't exactly been encouraging either. (More premium services? Massive raid nerfs? Meh.) However, in the end I also had to admit that spending all my evenings reading had got a bit boring in the past week as well, and I really wanted to play with my guildies again.

So I tried to resub, and Blizz wouldn't let me.

Oh, now you're on! Whatever doubts I had had momentarily, they immediately vanished as I furiously wanted to subscribe to the game again simply because I wasn't allowed to. In specific, it kept rejecting my credit card for no discernible reason, and after three attempts I got locked out of trying again for the day. Who knows why? This morning it went through just fine, and I was actually rather happy to log back in. The graphics seemed crisper than ever, and I even enjoyed slipping back into my guild admin duties, dealing with some of the guild finder requests that had piled up in my absence. Having habits is not a bad thing as long as you remain aware of them.

Hack happens

I always thought that it wouldn't happen to me, but then I also know that sometimes shit just happens... so I wasn't completely shocked when I tried to log into my WoW account yesterday morning just to be greeted by a message that I'd been banned, with an accompanying e-mail about my account being involved in gold-selling activities in my inbox.

There had actually been warning signs: On Tuesday evening I found that my account had suddenly been locked by Blizzard, supposedly due to "suspicious activity". Since this happened just after I had repeatedly failed to log in successfully due to the login servers being down, I thought that it was a probably just a glitch in the system, went through the automated process of account recovery and was back on my merry way very quickly. There were no signs of anyone else having accessed my account, and Real ID confirmed this by stating that I hadn't been online since I last logged off.

I guess I should have known when my boyfriend noted in confusion that his friends list suddenly showed two different Real ID entries for me late the other night. Oh well, hindsight is always perfect.

So I found my account frozen on Friday morning just before I had to go to work and obviously I wasn't happy. I couldn't shake this vague feeling that someone had violated my private space. On the whole however, I was quite calm, and that was actually a pleasant surprise. I mean, I had found myself wondering recently whether I wasn't playing a bit too much WoW, relying on it too much to keep me entertained - but I think the way this incident hardly fazed me is pretty good proof that it's actually not that bad. There's no better way of putting things into perspective than having to go "well, I've got to go to work now so I'll have to deal with this later".

When I came back home in the evening my boyfriend had already turned on my computer and run a full virus scan, which did indeed turn up a trojan (which was promptly removed of course). I still don't know where I picked it up as I pretty much only ever visit the same couple of websites every day, but my best guess is that I somehow got it via the Curse Client. Now, before anyone jumps on me to defend Curse, I'm not condemning them, after all it's only a guess. But rumours about it being a security risk in some way have been pretty persistent from what I can see, and while it might have been a coincidence that all this happened shortly after I installed it, it also might not. I got rid of it either way.

I then decided to call up Blizzard's German customer service - since I'm bilingual I figured that I had a choice and I was hoping that the German customer service representatives might be slightly less overworked. I got through quite quickly and I timed the call - it took less than five minutes to explain my situation and get my account restored. Kudos to customer service rep Matthias for his swift help.

I immediately changed my password and went to survey the damage. Two of my low-level alts had been deleted and replaced with level one alts for gold-spamming. Kind of funny that, why do they shy away from doing it on existing characters? Trying to make a point that while they may be evil, they are not that evil? All my characters had been robbed blind in terms of money, but otherwise the hacker seemed to have been in quite a hurry, as he didn't touch any of my characters' gear, items or guild banks. I hadn't even completed logging onto all of my alts by the time I started receiving in-game mails from support that were returning the stolen money. The GM didn't bother doing this on all of my characters, so I still ended up a few thousand gold short of what I had before, but I'm not too bothered about that. My two deleted alts were back as well.

What is the lesson here? That nobody is completely safe? I already knew that. That someone hijacking your account feels intrusive? Hardly a surprise. That sometimes Blizzard customer support can actually be really good? Yeah, that one was new to me, but I did think it deserved a mention. I was back to playing on the same day of the incident and didn't lose anything but a little bit of potential play time and a bit of in-game gold.

Five things I liked about WOTLK

I liked this post over at Tank like a girl and decided to make my own version of it. Even if WOTLK wasn't my favourite expansion, I still think that it improved the game in some ways. So, without further ado, my five favourite WOTLK changes (with the reservation that I might have forgot about something that I really liked, in which case I'll probably feel the urge to edit it in later).

1. Raid ID extensions

This is one of those features that didn't get a lot of press as far as I'm aware, even though it transformed the face of raiding quite considerably. Probably there wasn't much discussion simply because people couldn't think of anything to complain about. It was truly an improvement for everyone: hardcore guilds could choose to skip farming to push progression that little bit harder if they wanted; super-casual guilds that never would have been able to make it through all of Ulduar or Icecrown Citadel in a week were actually able to see the end bosses of those instances. "Medium" guilds like my own benefitted from having a choice as well, instead of having to wade through the first couple of bosses every week while lacking the speed and efficiency of a more hardcore guild and thus never having much time left to work on new bosses.

I suppose the one "downside" one could list is that having to kill all the bosses every week used to add to the epic feeling of having to overcome big obstacles, but that particular aspect of challenge is something that even I don't really miss.

2. Guardian Spirit

I was quite skeptical when I first saw this new top talent for holy priests. It seemed powerful for sure, but also extremely situational. I did struggle to get myself to use it first - with a three-minute cooldown it was way too easy to get trapped in the "must save it for later" line of thinking where that "later" never comes. However, the first time I managed to save our kite tank's life in Naxx ten-man (he had been a bit too slow and got debuffed by the locust swarm), I knew that I was in love. The whole "giving healers survival cooldowns" mechanic has generally worked out nicely in my opinion, truly adding something unique and fun to our already large arsenal of spells.

3. Dual spec

I actually don't even use my main's dual spec - at first she was holy/shadow but then the raid leaders always picked someone else to dps when it came up, so I went holy/disc for PvP, but quickly grew tired of it after the introduction of the dungeon finder, as I didn't want to PvP badly enough to sit in the considerably longer battleground queue instead of lining up for an instance.

However, several of my alts have made good use of it. For example I could never really decide whether my druid was to be feral or resto and respecced her quite a lot back in BC - now she can be both and change within a couple of seconds. When I levelled my shaman as enhancement, I also gave her a resto dual spec as soon as it became available and enjoyed the convenience of getting to practice restoration in instances without feeling completely gimped while questing.

4. The item icons you get while quest tracking

Sometimes it's the simplest of things... I don't know which patch added this, but when you track a quest now and said quest has you using a quest item, that item also shows up as an icon next to your tracker, so you can click on it easily without having to dig through your bags every time you need to use it. When my boyfriend pointed this new feature out to me I was simply stunned. Amazing!

5. The Sons of Hodir

I know they've received a lot of flak for being grindy and juvenile, but I genuinely liked the Sons of Hodir. I think the quest line to unlock them as a faction is great fun, and I'm not ashamed to admit that I found all their silly quest titles rather amusing. Until the release of the Argent Tournament, Dun Niffelem was also the only proper hub for daily quests in Northrend - I still don't know what Blizzard was thinking when they placed most of the early dailies in seemingly random locations all over the map - bleh! I got six characters to exalted with the Sons and I'm proud of it. I just think they were wasted on being tied to shoulder enchants. They definitely should have had some sort of tie-in with Ulduar, especially since the quest to reconcile them with Thorim simply ends when he gets abducted by Loken. Seriously, after all the trouble I went through to get them to forgive each other, they can't even be bothered to send anyone out to search for him? Silly giants.

I might make a list of things that I didn't like as well later on, but I'll have to think about that one a bit longer, as a lot of WOTLK changes just left me feeling ambiguous more than anything else.

Return of the search terms

More strange search terms that led people to this blog:

cap the amount of death knights allowed in one pvp match - You know, I could totally get on board with that, especially for the 50-59 bracket. I shudder to think back to my shaman's Warsong Gulch experiences in that level range...

celestial steed floppy legs - I believe the word that I used to describe the sparkle pony's legs was "spindly", but yeah, I agree that something about its legs looks off.

drakes oculus cannot dismount - Well, there is this button with a big red arrow on the right side of the vehicle interface; pressing that should dismount you. That said, I have heard of cases where it bugged out for people and pressing the button seemed to do nothing. Puggers that I ran with seemed to be able to solve this problem by either reloading their user interface (/console reloadui) or by relogging.

eu stormscale jerks - Now, now, no need to be so harsh. As my almost scientific observations of pug composition showed, Stormscalers simply like to pug a lot in general, which is why you seem to meet more rude players from that server - simply because there are a lot more of them around. Don't judge them too harshly.

humminghippies.com - I had to go and have a look at that website after spotting this search term, but it only has a front page that seems to have been under construction for several months and nothing else. Just going by the overall look of it, I'm guessing that it's probably meant to be about proper hippies though. I'm only a hippie in the eyes of certain rage-quitting tanks.

lalapala - Okay, I made fun of a guy with that name once, but am I missing something here? Is he someone famous? Or is this actually a proper word in a language I don't know? I'm not sure why people would be googling for this repeatedly...

lfg tfa/cit - Assuming this wasn't meant to go into general chat instead of Google, I'm guessing that people searching the internet for this are trying to find out what that acronym actually stands for. It means "looking for group for Threat From Above/Battle Before The Citadel" (though on my server they tend to shorten the latter to bbc instead). These are daily group quests in Icecrown that become available once you've become a champion of your home city at the Argent Tournament.

old guild feels betrayed - Yes, yes, we do. Especially if you've been raiding with us for a year or longer and then just leave without as much as a word of goodbye. Hmph.

pukaja sport day - Pukaja is the name of my tauren hunter, and upon reading these words I couldn't help picturing her in a tennis outfit - something that makes for a very bizarre mental image, let me tell you. My curiosity was piqued enough that I investigated a little further and from the looks of it pukaja is actually a word or a name in a language that I don't speak. Anyone happen to know anything more about that? I think it's kind of ironic, since her first incarnation was called Pünktchen (German for "little dot"), but when I mentioned this to a friend he told me that it was against the naming rules for roleplaying servers, so I deleted and re-created her with what I considered a completely random name instead. Seems there is no escaping those pesky real words.

running around zul drak and sometimes all objects disappear and and i only saw the main frame of the terain i hope this is only a 1 time error - Holy convoluted search term, Batman! I really don't know what else to say to that.

tail sticking out near the drakkari colossus / elemental room in gundrak - Well spotted, though it looks more like a giant snake to me. One of my friends pointed this out to me during one of our earliest Gundrak runs and we got all excited about what it might be, but there's nothing in the game that gives us any further information about it. I've only heard vague speculation about how it might have been part of a scrapped plot for Zul'Drak involving a raid instance, but nothing official.

what is the weekly raid quest this week - I really hope that this one was meant to go into general chat instead, because Google isn't going to tell you the answer to that one, buddy.

Trying to be positive

I've never seen the WoW blogosphere go as crazy as it's been going in the last couple of hours over the proposed changes to the official forums that will force you to display your real name on your forum posts. I wonder if Blizzard will actually go through with the idea in the face of so much outrage. I'm doubtful, to be honest. Either way, there's been a lot of good food for thought out there, and that's always a good thing.

I think Rohan's stance over at Blessing of Kings is the one that I agree with the most. I may feel apprehensive about the idea of posting under my real name (not that I've ever posted much on the forums anyway), but at the same time I like the idea of such a bold social experiment. If it goes live, we'll see how it works out.

Dwism has a very thoughtful post on the subject as well, talking about how attitudes about identity change with the generations. Each new generation brings about change. Maybe giving out your real name online will be perfectly normal in twenty years time? My own mother still thinks that computers are evil and that their very existence is eroding the basis of society. I just shake my head at her. Maybe this is also just one of those things where our children will shake their heads at how old and stubborn we are later on?

I have to admit that despite of my apprehension, I'm inclined to be optimistic, unlike most other bloggers apparently. Many only seem to be willing to see the worst possible outcome.

For example the issue of crazy stalkers. The case of this poor fellow certainly gave them a lot of fuel for that particular fire. On the other hand, the way I look at it, all this proves is that it's unpleasant to be the only identifiable person in a crowd of anonymice. It's like having a big sign over your head that says "if you want to harass anyone, pick me - I'm an easy target". That's not news. The system that Blizzard is proposing will force everyone to use their real name if they want to use the forums, so nobody will stand out. Who are you going to pick on then? The guy with a funny name? Everyone who disagrees with you? You'll be busy for a while and nobody will be impressed. If using your real name is the normal thing to do, it won't attract that much attention anymore.

People are worried about discrimination. Certainly a valid issue, but at the same time one we have to deal with in real life all the time. Surely learning to deal with it online as well won't ring in the end of the internet as we know it? I understand that people would mourn the loss of a safe space where they could be anonymous, but at the same time I don't think that being identified as a woman or whatever is as horrifying as some make it out to be. It all seems to boil down to what we're used to. We're used to the internet being anonymous, so we don't want it to change. The real world is not anonymous, but would it be better if it was? Would it be better if we only left the house wrapped up from head to toe to be completely unrecognisable? At least this woman doesn't think so, and that's why I'm at least willing to consider that a non-anonymous WoW community might actually be a better place.

There's also the concern about (potential) employers finding out that you play WoW and people getting stigmatised. Again, a valid concern, but again there is more than one way to look at it. After all, stereotyping works more than one way. If so many people are ashamed of admitting to their gaming hobby and try to hide it for whatever reason, of course others are going to think that something must be wrong with it. On the other hand, if a lot of reputable people were suddenly forced to make it widely known that they play WoW and that it doesn't harm them in any way, couldn't that shatter a lot of preconceptions?

The main reason that I'd personally rather not have my real name associated with the WoW forums is not really any fault of WoW's or Blizzard, but the way the internet works as a whole. Everything you say might get stored somewhere, for years, just to randomly show up on a Google search out of context, which leads to rather bizarre results at best. I mean, if I look up my own real name on Google, of the results actually related to me there's my Facebook page (okay), some article that I wrote for a young adult writing competition a couple of years ago (eh?), a medieval text that I translated while at university (random)... now add a bunch of posts on the Blizzard forums to that mix and it will give anyone who happens to look me up a very skewed picture of my online activites. Awkward.

Then again, if Blizzard's experiment is a success, more companies might go down that road, leading to more and more varied search engine hits for all of our names. I try to keep an open mind.

Actually, this Real ID thing isn't all bad.

I've been following the discussion about Real ID for a few weeks now and mostly found myself agreeing with the skeptics whenever the subject came up, whether it was because of the occasional urge to play on your own or due to serious privacy concerns. (I was going to link to a post on the subject at Murloc Parliament here, but the site seems to be down for the time being. Oh well.)

Now the patch finally reached Europe and I have to admit... when I logged on and found a guildie whom I know and trust online, I immediately whispered her asking whether she wanted to be my Real ID friend. She was happy to oblige and we then played a bit of "now you see me, now you... still do" with me hopping back and forth between various alts. There still seem to be some bugs though, as the realm and zone fields were always blank, so you couldn't actually tell when you were talking to a character on a different realm. My customised (with the default interface) chat windows also got messed up so badly by the chat change that I had to reset them completely, but it didn't take long to get things back to the way I wanted them to look.

A bit later I asked another friend whom I've known for years to exchange Real IDs as well, but she declined saying that she was using a super secret e-mail adress for her WoW account that she didn't want anyone else to know. I didn't take offense. The old, "normal" friends list for WoW only still works fine so it's not as if I'm losing anything by someone not accepting my Real ID request.

Don't get me wrong, I still agree that the Real ID privacy options are very poor (though you can't actually see the online status of friends of friends as I had feared) and could do with some more choices. But if everyone involved is aware of how much information they are giving out and fine with it, it's a fantastic way of staying in contact with people who have a lot of alts, especially if you have a lot of alts too. (If you don't have some sort of shared friends list addon, remembering to add all your friends' alts to your friends list on all of your alts is quite a hassle, not to mention that it can eat up a lot of your limited friend slots.) I've only just started cleaning up my friends lists (removing all the individual alts of people who I now have as Real ID friends anyway), and it's rather liberating.

I can't guarantee that I won't have regrets later on if I ever feel like "hiding" on a new alt and find myself unable to, but then again, I'm only adding people whom I trust a lot anyway; what's the worst that could happen?

Friend: Oh hey, is that a new alt?
Me: Yeah, I felt like doing the human starter area again and wanted to get away from the guild for a bit.
Friend: Ah, I guess you wouldn't be interested in coming to ICC then?
Me: Not really, sorry.

And they'd understand, because they are my friends.

A plea for more stable servers

You know, I'm generally not too fond of just making rant posts that don't have much of a point, but I just have to get this one off my chest: What in the world is currently going on with my server (Earthen Ring - EU) and with its whole battlegroup for that matter? I tend to be pretty laid back about things like lag and overloaded instance servers, but the way ER has been completely and utterly broken in the past week is seriously bordering on the ridiculous.

Last Monday we went to ICC, killed Putricide, continued to Valithria Dreamwalker... and then the server went down. We stayed on TeamSpeak for fifteen minutes or so but eventually had to call the raid since there was no way to tell when the server would come up again.

On Wednesday we had a great raid and almost downed the Blood Queen for the first time. I was hyped again.

On Thursday I wanted to run a ten-man. Since we were short on signups it took a while to get the group together, but after half an hour or so we finally found a tenth person. A mere minute later, the server went down again. All that work for nothing.

Yesterday, Sunday, we struggled to get enough people for a twenty-five-man together but the officers pulled it off. We intended to start with clearing the plague wing, started by killing Festergut, but just as we were about to pull Rotface a bunch of people - including myself, the raid leader and the healing leader - got booted off the server. This time the server wasn't down and the majority of the raid was still online, but the people who had been kicked off for no reason were unable to log back on and so another raid had to be cancelled.

I checked the official forums and I could find nothing, absolutely nothing about those issues on there, apart from a few resigned posts about dead hamsters on our realm forums. The people of Earthen Ring are used to their server not always working properly, but come on!

I love this game and I want to keep playing it. With the next new and exciting major patch a long way off, it can be hard enough to motivate people to attend raids as it is, and all this nonsense with servers going down or randomly booting a quarter of the raid is not helping. When you finally get enough people together to raid and then it doesn't happen because Blizzard won't let you, people are even less motivated to try again - because how do they know that it won't just be a complete waste of time again?

For one of our warriors, last night was the straw that broke the camel's back and he decided to call it quits. With three out of four raids having to be cancelled due to server issues this past week, I can't say I can blame him.

I don't understand the authenticator hype

And no, this post is probably not what you expect from the title, considering the most recent news...

I remember when authenticators were first released, most players didn't care too much about them. I was one of them, but unlike many people I haven't changed my opinion on the matter since then. Basically I think that authenticators are definitely useful - but no more and no less. They are sort of like home security systems: you may have valid reasons to believe that you should have one (because you are very rich/because you share your PC with your little brother who downloads all kinds of crap) and there are tangible benefits to having one, but it also costs money and causes a bit of extra hassle in your everyday life (having to turn the security on and off all the time/having to enter what is essentially a second password every time you log on). So even though it's a useful thing to have, many people still won't want or need one, and that's alright.

I don't have a home security system because I'm pretty poor and live right across the street from a police station. I also don't have an authenticator because I think that I'm pretty sensible when it comes to keeping my passwords and my PC in general safe, and on the very small off-chance that I should mess up anyway, Blizzard seems to be pretty damn good at restoring everything within a couple of days anyway. This is one of those cases where "it's only pixels on a screen" actually rings true for me, because well... they can be replaced easily. It's not like someone clearing out your house in real life, where the burglars might never be caught and even if the insurance company pays up it still won't be the same as actually having your old stuff back.

Lately I noticed a lot of what I'd call "authenticator fanboy-ism" emerge all of a sudden, especially in the comment section on WoW.com, but in other places too, where people say things like "People without authenticators shouldn't get support from Blizzard" or "If you don't have an authenticator, you deserve to get hacked". What the hell? Do you think people who didn't buy a mini Kel'thuzad pet shouldn't get support either, since you seem to think that support is a bonus feature for buying extra gadgets on top of the game instead of, you know, actually paying for the game? Do you think people deserve to have their stuff stolen in real life if they don't have a direct line to the police? It just strikes me as utterly out of proportion.

If you want to buy an authenticator and don't mind the extra hassle every time you log in, by all means go ahead! It does provide an extra layer of security. But don't talk about people who don't feel the need for that as if they were all handing their passwords out to hackers for free. As the latest piece of news on the subject shows, it still always comes down to what the person behind the keyboard actually does with their information. No security system can protect you if you actually invite the thief into your house.

There's also been some talk about Blizzard making authenticators mandatory in the future. I'd really prefer if it didn't come to that. I will accept it if it happens and will pay those extra five pounds or whatever it will cost because I do want to continue to play the game, but I'm convinced that it will not be the end of all hacking, and Blizzard's support team will be no less busy - they might have to deal with fewer keylogging problems and the like, but instead they'll likely get lots of calls about people not knowing how to work their authenticators, losing them, breaking them, or having them stolen by "that friend who originally made the account for me". Authenticators can make people feel better about the safety of your account, but they still can't protect anyone from their own mistakes.

Seeing the world with new eyes

Merry Christmas to my fellow bloggers and all that.

For various reasons I decided to make myself a Christmas present this year, namely a shiny new gaming PC. Looking at WoW now and at the way it looked to me before, it's hard to put the sheer magnitude of the difference into words.

See, my old PC wasn't a complete piece of crap or anything. It was already a few years old however, and had never been a top of the line machine, not even when I got it. It served me well over the years, I played WoW with all the graphic settings set to something reasonably high throughout BC, and it never caused me any problems except for occasional slowness in Shattrath during peak times.

When I first set foot into Howling Fjord I was amazed at how pretty it all was and continued to marvel at every new WOTLK zone as I discovered it. Dalaran was pretty slow for me from the start, but I didn't mind too much at the time. But the first time I set foot into a twenty-five-man raid... hoo boy. It was nothing more than a slide show, and for a while I was seriously concerned whether I'd be able to continue raiding at all. In the end I managed to do so, but only by turning all my graphic settings down as much as possible, disabling certain addons during raids and adjusting my playstyle to a point where I mostly limited myself to instant-cast healing spells and often had to base my movement on mere predictions of what was going to happen instead of seeing what was actually going on.

During my everyday play, the loss that hit me the hardest was that of greater viewing distance. I don't know if you've ever played on the "low viewing distance" setting before, but what it basically means is that you'll perpetually be surrounded by grey mist. Whenever you fly, there's nothing but fog around you, and you can only really base your movement on your position on the map, and not anything you actually see around you. People with better PCs were often baffled by my helpless flailing around in Icecrown because the airship wasn't correctly showing up on the map and I couldn't actually see it until I bumped right into it, which sometimes meant circling it repeatedly without even noticing.

So yesterday I installed WoW on my new computer, jacked all the graphic options up to their highest settings, logged onto my druid in Dalaran, marvelled at the fact that her tabard looked like more than a brown blob, ran to Krasus' Landing, switched to flight form... and stopped. My boyfriend laughed at my gaping and exclamations of wonder, but it was seriously amazing to see Crystalsong Forest stretch out ahead of me, Stormpeaks and Icecrown off the the side - I was used to being greeted by nothing but a grey wall!

When I ended up healing a heroic Halls of Reflection I also noticed the increased performance: While I didn't have any major problems in five-mans before, even the slightly increased responsiveness already helped a lot with things like getting off that nourish when the tank's health plummets too quickly or casting a quick regrowth. I can now cast spells that aren't instant and they still go off within a reasonable amount of time, zomg! I can't wait to see the difference it will make to my performance in raids.

So this Christmas, my heart goes out to all of you who still have to struggle with PCs that limit your view of the World of Warcraft to about a circle of a hundred yards around you and that make it hard for you to play at your best. May you be able to experience the game in all its glory soon!