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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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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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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I've had a decent number of people rolling level 1's to ask about my guild tag. It's currently Fusion for Hire. This is because our guild leader's account got hacked last Wednesday night.

He's the most paranoid fellow I know (he runs Firefox and noscript, he never even shared his account information with his felllow officers, everything has different passwords, he won't allow software like eqdkp to be installed on the site due to a history of exploits.)

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I got this comment on the previous blog entry about Stars 250+ level 80 roster and 5 warlocks (which they considered "not extreme stacking"):

I’m curious to hear your thoughts: How are guilds that run a tight roster supposed to be able to compete against ‘bizarre’ makeups with guilds that field such a large pool of people? It’s so frustrating working to get a well-balanced comp (theoretically) and then get decimated by fights tuned in a ‘gimmick’-y way.

The Short Answer

The short answer is: you don't.

And you accept that -- you don't try to be who you already chose not to be. If you don't have a 50+ raiding roster you won't be able to raid stack.

Raid-stacking helps beat a fight because classes have different abilities and fights need to be sufficiently interesting to be hard (unless you fall back on gimmicky vehicle fights exclusively.)

Fusion is, in part, founded on a philosophy of avoiding raid stacking whenever possible. And we're comfortable with that even though we know the limitations. We accept that we won't be able to get some fights as quickly, but we're still happy because we prefer being who we are rather than a guild who has the ability to raid stack.

For the majority of the guilds out there, there will be someone who raids longer hours, has a bigger roster, has a larger guild bank, has a better server, has less lag, has fewer people on Comcast east coast.... something.

I'd be lying if I said I was never frustrated -- but I try very hard to become un-frustrated, since there's nothing I can do about it. I just work to make Fusion the best it can be.

The Longer Answer

World firsts aren't everything, and I am very happy to give them up in exchange for what we have:

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