July Blog Posts

This is a digression from my normal topics, but my husband sent me this awesome article and I know there's a bunch of women who follow this site simply because I'm a woman in a high-end raid guild (and, incidentally, I'm a computer programmer.)

Standing Out in the Crowd is about open-source programming -- but it's also about starting in on programming even if you never have.

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The patch out on the PTR's right now is called "retail_build" in its internal structure, and "people who know people" who were previously dismissing the idea of a patch before Blizzcon have turned around and say things like "Yeah seems likely" and "Guess I was wrong."

This is good news for everyone except guilds near a Yogg+0 kill.... like us. It would truly suck to have Yogg+0 be the only fight we didn't get pre-nerf.

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Summer has taken its toll: we lost one to getting a job out of college, another to losing a job and having to move, and another to going to college and not having time to play.

We're currently looking for:

• A paladin who will be either primarily holy or primarily ret (we have a paladin who can do either)
• An excellent hunter
• An additional ranged pure dps (mage/warlock/hunter)
• potentially a tank who is experience at tanking on progression and also happy to DPS. You are a protadin, DK, or feral.

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Source: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=18679999890&sid=1

As a means to provide more flexibility to play with your friends, or move to a realm that may better serve your needs, we are reducing the cooldown of the Paid Character Transfer service from 30 days to 3 days. This should prove particularly beneficial to players who move to a realm they don't enjoy and wish to quickly move to a brand-new realm. For more information, please see the Paid Character Transfer FAQ -

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I was sending random tells to a paladin friend tonight, such as:

Oh pally yooouuuuuuu,
You got what I neeeeeed,
Even though you won't cast JoW,
Even though you won't cast JoW...

And I remembered something I had forgotten for too, too long: a song written by Creep, a priest in my old guild (Untold Prophecy on Zul'jin) right at the end of original WoW before Burning Crusade came out.

He dedicated it to our resident enhancement shaman, Crosswell (we just called him a "dps shaman" because no shaman was elemental.) Crosswell had been the guildleader of his old guild where he had, appropriately, stolen all the rogue leather. And then he came to my guild where, well, we weren't sure if we really needed a DPS shaman. So we asked him to heal a lot.

Creep recorded it for us all: I Can Be Your DPS Shaman (original: "Hero" by Enrique Iglesias)

Or use the embedded player:

The lyrics are:

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The four officers have spent a total of 16 man-hours putting the guild banks back together.

In the process we've come to grips with just the sheer amount of materials that go into making sure we can run a guild of this size as cheaply as possible.

While the hackers got 300,000 gold, they also got almost 250,000 gold worth of materials.

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There's a very interesting article on WoW Progress graphing disbanded guilds versus their world rank. The big "at risk" rank was 3300-3500.

Time-wise, the disbands occured all before the big XT nerf which made a hardmode doable for many guilds. XT has little coordination, and is more of a test of 'wow basics' than the more complicated hard modes.

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Day 8, account is still locked, no news from Blizzard. Ulduar was interesting with everyone doing different jobs since we had no main tank (and no warriors at all in the raid on Tuesday.)

I would be very interested in hearing (via comments on this post), about whether 8 days with your character locked is "normal."

Anecdotal polling of friends says "hellz no" since everyone got their accounts back within 1-2 days. But not everyone was hacked recently.

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(which was its purpose) here's some more information:

Trouble:

Just read that article and it's a bit light on details. Bazz uses Firefox with noscript and he's a paranoid motherfucker to say the least. As the primary officer alongside him for multiple years I was never once given access to his account. Maybe he was downloading donkey porn but even then I have no idea how that'd translate into getting a WoW targeted keylogger. I didn't think it likely that someone could get a keylogger if they were smart and used noscript and took those kinds of precautions, but the first thing I did when I heard what happened was manned up and got the iphone authenticator. But yeah it's rather difficult to get an authenticator if you don't have an iphone.

If you're sitting there saying "I'm smarter, I use noscript" -- think again, so does Bazz. No one had his account info. He doesn't log in from a friend's house.

Also if you're like me, playing on a Macintosh and confident that since you haven't heard of a Macintosh keylogger that you're safe:

Cadfael:

There was a wave of hacks at least in the german speaking EU part. It was custom tailored for Macs (it didn't work on windows, only on Mac) and the exploit code was smuggled in some Java JAR archive.

It's over a year past and I don't specifically remember many details, but it did target Mac WoW users.

Further scary stuff for PC users after the cut if you're not convinced yet.

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On Delays

We heard from a GM that it should be 3-4 days, as did friends with that experience in other guilds: accounts made available again in 1-4 days. Heck, when a shaman in our guild was hacked he was back online in 3 days.

But apparently 5-6+ days without word from Blizzard on an account isn't that unsual. We were worried that it was due to the magnitude (and the fact that the account got a permanent ban for "account exploitation" via an automated script) that the delay was Bad News (tm).

On Authenticators

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