General: July 2008 Archives

Last night the beta realm got a new patch, which brought in a few of the discussed features, and a couple we hadn't heard about before. One of the features it showed was the new section of the interface for your mounts and vanity pets/companions in Wrath of the Lich King. It looks cool, though WoW Insider is reporting that... well.. you can't actually use mounts in the current iteration, which might make testing Wrath a little slower than expected.

Another interesting addition this patch is a build in Calendaring application. Coming with in game events already listed on the calendar, the Calendar tool is no doubt meant to be more usable and useful than the current solution, Group Calendar. Implementation in guild and so on has not yet been tested, to see how it would work as a in game events calendar, but I for one am excited to see Blizzard bring this in and thereby fixing the previously mentioned mod's problem in one fell swoop.

Glowing eyed Death Knights and Calendar tool aside, one thing I was really intrigued to see was a third tab in the Mount area, Pet. No, these aren't your Non Combat Pets, those are Companions. While some will choose to not speculate, I am under no such restrictions. While this could be merely an extension of the current Pet tab, and the toon we see int he screen shot is a Warlock, I would love it if they extended the Pet page we see in game now with a more expanded one, and possibly removed the need for Stables all together. Even if this was limited to 5 slots, it would be enough for most current hunters to be satisfied that we could fill the roles we want.

Oh, and money sinks? Look below for the newest one from the Beta.

Yesterday I posted a thread about the Blizzard Authenticator being sold out on the General forums, and the thread got to 3 pages before Blizzard put their own sticky about the topic, and even addressed the US only concerns I have previously expressed. The thread, though, was dominated by one clear message which I found both foolhardy and completely misinformed. Add to that a healthy dose of 'WTF' factor, and you begin to see a really disturbing picture of the WoW community.

The first bit that really annoyed me was from Celada of Lothar. 

Its a false sense of security... Nothing beat knowledge and a litle bit of common sense. You can about 100% protect yourself with

Firefox
-addons
--FlashBlock
--Adblock Plus
--Noscript

Celeda, you talk about a false sense of security? Tell me the FCC and many other government agencies from around the world have a false sense of security in this form of multi layer authentication. You have a false sense of security if you think that such measures have any form of security to them. With new bugs and holes being found all the time, all it takes is a single day of being unpatched for your computer to be infected with a keylogger. How many mod sites have found trojans in their code? Almost all of them, and everyone has them as trusted.

Next up we have Celeda's response to my points about a true false sense of security coming from Firefox:

Ive been playing this game since beta never once been keylogged
Cause im not stupid enough to click any links i dont know

Blizz can sell false sense of security all day, that cant sell common sense and they cannot cure stupid

Just because you have not, does not mean you will not. Past actions do not dictate future results, especially with the rising value of WoW account info ont he black market.

Now to this gem from Kybeorie of Baelgun

Clue:

Someone has a trojan on your computer.
You have the authenticator.
They can't login to your wow account, but they are STILL LOGGING YOUR KEYS. The difference is that now you don't know it, because your wow account is ok. So you go merrily about your business, while your mother is now sending some money "you need to borrow", because you said so in an email, to some address far away

All due respect, Kybeorie, if you are using those Firefox addons as your only protection from trojans and keyloggers, you deserve to be scammed. Also, if your mother can't pick up a phone and check with you to make sure a sudden 'I need money' email is real, well, then your mom needs some lessons in common sense, cause I know my mom is smart enough to actually talk to me when I ask to borrow money.

In the end, this is not the be all and end all of protection, but it is not a false sense of security. This is a very secure additional form of security for your WoW account. If you feel your Firefox plus addons method of security is fine, great. It just means that when Blizzard does start shipping these to Canada, I won't have to wait in line behind you to get mine. I, though, will be very comfortable paying a lowly $7 USD for this increased measure of security.

According to the writer of the isheepthings blog, the Blizzard Authenticator, after about two and a half days on sale, is listed on the Blizzard store as sold out. This all happened with no Canadian being able to order one themselves unless they had a US shipping address. There are those who advise that Canadians go and order from the European store, but to my knowledge the Authenticator was never available from there, only showing Sold Out for the entire duration.

[Update: Blizzard has now posted both about the sell out and the lack of availability to Canadians. Thank you Blizzard for answering the questions I and others had.]