July 31st, 2009 by Kyth
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.
Male or female, programming is easier than you think, and especially if you’re spending a lot of hours playing WoW, why not shave off one or two of those each day and instead spend them learning Ruby and contributing to some of the projects the presenter mentioned or making your own website?
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
July 28th, 2009 by Kyth
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.
Patches always hit someone hard, and if we don’t get Yogg this week, after over a month of pre-nerf work, it will be sad indeed. We’re seeing multiple sub-10% wipes and are so close we can almost taste it. All we need is the internet stability gods and the vacation gods and the health gods to shine on us for one week.
And after that, vacation until icecrown.
Tags: 3.2
Posted in Fusion and Administrivia, PTR and Upcoming | 15 Comments »
July 20th, 2009 by Kyth
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.
For more information:
Our WoW forums recruiting post: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=18601084353&sid=1
Our application: Fusion – Application
Posted in Fusion and Administrivia | 10 Comments »
July 20th, 2009 by Kyth
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 -
http://us.blizzard.com/support/article.xml?locale=en_US&articleId=20558
Interestingly this puts the character transfer cooldown at less than the raid lockout period (transferring resets your raid ID’s.)
An expensive way to get more clears of Ulduar, but doable now.
It also opens the barn door very wide for RMT companies (exchanging real-world money for in-game goods): for just the cost of two transfers they can move you to a server where they have a cooperative guild that will run your character through instances. It also means they need fewer level 80’s if they want to move money server to server, since the cooldowns are shorters.
Overally, this decision leaves me very puzzled. Two weeks, for example, would’ve solved “raiders stuck due to trials” and most casual player concerns with transferring to friends without making it so capable of being abused by gold/gear sellers.
Posted in PTR and Upcoming | 1 Comment »
July 19th, 2009 by Kyth
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:
This text will be replaced by the flash music player.
The lyrics are:
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: enhancement, Shaman
Posted in Humor and Miscellany | 10 Comments »
July 18th, 2009 by Kyth
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.
Bazz created a compilation screenshot of all the guild banks, which you can see at the start of this article.
If you’re curious the breakdowns of “what does Fusion have hoarded”, read the details and gold totals at our page: Fusion’s Guild Bank: The Hackers’ Haul
I do most of the bulk purchasing in Fusion and some of the totals surprised even me. We apparently have over 12,000 lichbloom (600+ stacks) and over 13,000 goldclover.
Tags: fusion, hacking
Posted in Fusion and Administrivia | 7 Comments »
July 17th, 2009 by Kyth
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.
Basically: these were the guilds who could kill Yogg but were unable to do any hardmodes, so disbanded rather than have nothing to do other than farm easy-modes.
The author also suggests that there may have been a correlation between “we don’t care about doing hardmodes because we’ve already seen the content” and the disbands. Although I think that’s less likely to be the primary reason, there certainly is a split in many guilds between those who are interested in doing everything the game has to offer and those content with just farming easy targets.
Tags: hard mode, xt
Posted in Guilds and Leadership | 20 Comments »
July 16th, 2009 by Kyth
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.
Any data would be appreciated (about just being able to log into the account again — I realize that it can take tons of back and forth to get items restored, I’m just curious about being able to log into even a naked character.)
Update: Finally Blizzard budges an inch. Bazz received his first response today: they said they agree the account was hacked, and he now needs to send an email to “account restores” to start that process. If he doesn’t hear back in 2 more days he’s supposed to email again.
I wonder if we’ll ever know why they took so long on this account which is about as pristine as WoW accounts go (doesn’t even have any other IP’s accessing it: no one has the password and Bazz hasn’t traveled.)
Update 2: No actual account login yet, but thankfully the restoration process seems to be proceeding apace. We may actually have Bazz back by tomorrow.
They also seem able to restore the items from the mail, which we were very concerned about (Bazz bounces…. a lot of herbs just back and forth between characters.)
Posted in Fusion and Administrivia | 19 Comments »
July 14th, 2009 by Kyth
(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.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Fusion and Administrivia | 8 Comments »
July 14th, 2009 by Kyth
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 ™.
On Authenticators
I’m probably just too old to have thought of this, but a tip via IM is that you can buy them on eBay. You pay more, but it’s possible. I haven’t ever bought or sold anything on eBay and I never buy things that aren’t available online in some way — so it never occurred to me.
Another tip is to check the store at 11am EST (8am PST) each day — I usually checked in the evenings before raid which was probably my problem!
Either way, since I use a Macintosh, I’ve never been actually concerned over account security — I look anyways, because it wouldn’t hurt, but I don’t have actual account concerns until I hear of a keylogger on the Macintosh platform. The good news is a friend has offered me his spare and I’ll be taking him up on that.
Posted in Fusion and Administrivia | 3 Comments »
