Early Christmas shopping

Quite a while back I complained that the EU Blizzard store only accepts credit cards. This is not entirely true, it seems. The store requires a credit card for all items that are physically shipped – at least when it comes to the collectibles, as far as I have checked. So while I still couldn’t get my plushy Gryphon, I was severely tempted to get a few of the other pets.

And I did.

So now in my budding collection are Li’l XT (finally! A companion to my Li’l Smoky!) and the Alliance Moonkin Hatchling! Both are absolutely adorable, and I absolutely love watching them.

I also bought the Celestial Steed – I know, it’s already out of fashion by now, but hey, if you’re going to shop for vanity pets, might as well buy the epitome of vanity mounts.

 

That’s 40€, for, frankly, nothing but virtual bling. But surprisingly enough, I’m quite happy with that. Although I’m debating if I should have got Li’l KT and Li’l Ragnaros instead of the steed. Oh well, there always time for more shopping next year…

An Alt by any name…

You know what the hardest part about Altolism is? Coming up with at least okay-ish names. So lets take a look at this weeks Shared Topic and evaluate where my current character names have their origins.

Perhaps the easiest names to explain are my two Humans, Belenor and Yllwinn. They are both named for characters in pen & paper RPG groups I’ve been a player in, Belenor being one of my own characters and Yllwinn a pivotal NPC in a different campaign. Both kind of fit to the characters in WoW and I like the general sound of the names – vaguely Tolkienish (given since they’re from MERP campaigns) and not sounding too out-of-place in Azeroth.

Another simple naming schema are my Dwarves. Sadly, the name of my Dwarven warrior was taken: Steelheart. But Ironbiter works just as well. And with the starting location and my general state of mind at the time, Wintermind was a logical choice. For a rogue, a good name in my opinion. Together they both allude to Sword of the Stars, where a mysterious ancient race is described with the words “Wintermind. Iceheart. Stonesoul.” _{(Shameless plug: If you’re playing SotS, be sure to use my Starname mod that eliminates all the boring repetitive names)}

Then it starts to unravel a bit. Yinn is a nice, short name for an angry short gal. It is also vaguely reminiscent of Yith from Lovecraftian lore – and I’m a huge fan of Lovecraft. There’s also Yin and Yan, and with several years of Asian martial arts under my belt, another welcome connection. Yinn is my short, angry, hell-raising warlock, in sharp contrast to most of my other characters who I see as mostly good-natured.

It tumbles down into obscurity with Kreesha, my first character (when I knew next to nothing how NPCs would be named like). I loath the traditional, stereotypical Elvish names and bynames. So I turned to an old classic in computer RPGs, Quest for Glory. Kreesha Sah Tarna is a minor NPC in the third part, while Tarna is  the name of the country. The honorary title of Rakeesh Sar Tarna got turned into Tarshinar, which isn’t too bad for a Draenei, I suppose.

Last, my druid. I was really out of ideas. Since I like occasionally to use Latin phrases in my campaigns, I looked for something Latin-sounding. Imodeus it was. No meaning at all. But if you want to pronounce it, it’s four syllables.

And that’s it. In the meantime I’ll be busy thinking up a fitting name for my Worgen – thankfully I have until the start of December to come up with one.

Status: Preordered

Wowhead reports that patch 4.0.1 – the big free Cataclysm patch – is now active on the PTR. As such, I made up my mind and pre-ordered a boxed version of Cataclysm. Originally I wanted to just purchase a key for download only, but in the end, supporting my local gaming retail shop seems equally good. And I imagine the download servers will be near their limits on release day anyway.

Speaking of release day. Operation Gnomeregan is live. The Cata patch is on PTR. I think we’ll see the release well before Christmas, maybe as soon as some time next month.

RealID – you know what I’m going to say

Currently there is a topic circulating the web that you just can’t ignore. RealID. You all know what’s coming now, what I’ll be saying, but I want to take the time to say it anyway.

Really. Bad. Idea.

Tankspot, Tobold, Spinks, Gnomeageddon, Shades of Grey – the list of very articulate, eloquent and popular blogs is endless, I won’t even try linking and quoting them. Just click through my blogroll and you’ll find that 90% of them say the same thing.

UPDATE

Here is a very good compilation of various posts on this issue. And here is another one.

Now, I’m admitting that I’ve linked my Facebook profile to this blog. But that is something I chose to do – I also automatically link this blog from my Facebook account. The reason I feel comfortable doing this is that a) I’m not a high-profile poster or player and b) there are several other WoW players both in my company and among my Facebook contacts.

However, I wouldn’t (and didn’t) do this from the beginning. And I wouldn’t do this if the general perception of gaming was different in my current job environment. Every potential employer today uses the power of Google. Automatically letting him find out you’re a hardcore WoW progression raider – really bad idea. And what if a CEO of a company dares to relax on his weekends by casually playing WoW for a couple of hours? He’s likely to be on Xing or a comparable network. Google, RealID, WoW – “No, I don’t think we should offer that contract to this company, their CEO doesn’t look very business-man like”.

I brought the topic of RealID up with a few colleagues who are WoW’ers and who don’t follow the Cataclysm build-up that closely. Their initial reaction: “Have they gone fucking mad? That’s the single most stupid idea I’ve ever heard!” And that was the PG-13 version.

It doesn’t help that we (as in our company) are currently working hard to implement more privacy protection for our customers, anonymising data, separating data storages, introducing tight guideline on how to work with customer data and so on. Pretty much every company today has to be on edge how to treat the personal data of their customers. And then comes Blizzard.

Yes, you can disable RealID. I tried. The mail for the parental controls doesn’t arrive. Yes, I mailed Blizzard support, stating that I want to disable RealID. No answer.

Blizzard, you should learn from the numerous PR disasters Facebook had in the past whenever they tried dropping privacy protection features. You are in a hugely powerful position as market leader in MMORPGs. With great power comes great responsibility.

There is still time to stop RealID. Do so. I have not seen a single positive post on this matter. Never before has the blogosphere (and the forums) been so unanimously stating the same fact: Really. Bad. Idea.

Auction House gone gold

A short while after the feature went live on the US servers, now EU has their out-of-game auction house at the armoury as well. I won’t go into the discussion if this supports goldsellers – Blizzard thinks this feature is ‘safe’, so we all have to deal with it.

However, I think this benefits the casual gamer. Not the hardcore raider.

Hardcore raiders or WoW’ers in general spend so much time in game, equipped with addons like Auctioneer that they hardly have any need for this new way of accessing their auctions. Sure, it is very convenient to claim all gold from sold auctions at once, but Postal also does a good job of that. The casual, however, doesn’t spend as much time playing. They don’t want to configure and learn Auctioneer to utilise its full potential. They don’t want to have to log in every couple of hour to check if they’ve been outbidden on that sword they want so much.

The Armoury auction house is indeed the perfect solution for them. Coffee break at work? In a beer garden, public viewing the World Cup? Having a barbecue? Log in, place a handful of auctions (undercutting is made easy by displaying per item buyouts), maybe compare with WoWEcon if there’s something worth buying, done. Let’s face it. 200 transactions per day isn’t enough for true hardcore brokering. In beta, I hit the 25 transaction limit within the first hour of trying the service. It is enough, though, for the casual gamer (who can essentially treat the auction house as it’s own browser game) to enjoy it and make some gold.

Point in case: Even if I haven’t got any time for playing like the last two or three days, I still make some decent gold (I consider 75 gold per day on level 30 decent enough), just buying and selling various bars and gems. It’s even less work than ingame, because I can access bag, bank AND mail from the same interface. Is it worth three Euro a month? I don’t know yet – but since that is approximately the amount I save by buying gametime cards from a small reseller instead of a regular subscription, I’m not particularly bothered.

However, I still don’t see why I can pay THAT with normal methods, but I’d absolutely need a credit card for the Blizzard store. But that is a rant for another day.

Oooh, shiny!

Blizzard just (well, yesterday) released the new Celestial Steed mount in their store.

Tobold has a pretty good analysis why this steed is an example of ‘good’ RMT, and personally I agree. It doesn’t give anyone an advantage, it scales with your in-game progress and it’s cosmetic in nature.

Anea bought one, and came out with the right message: “I like it because it is pretty. So there.”

I visited the store, and originally planned on buying the steed. However it looks a bit overkill on my level 20-30 toons, so I decided to go for the mini bots (yes, plural, one of them is EU exclusive, and I happen to be European) and maybe one of the plushies.

Shopping basket full, personal gaming budget maxed, perfect. Well, sort of. Despite the fact that Blizzard accepts PayPal and bank transfer for subscriptions, their store only accepts credit cards.

WHY, Blizzard, WHY?

I was ready to fork over 44 Euros for completely unneccessary fluff, don’t you WANT my money? If you can accept PayPal and others for subscriptions, it can’t be that hard to accept it in a general store, can it? Most of the people I know that play MMO’s don’t have a credit card. In fact, most people I know don’t have one, period. It’s just not that common in Germany.

If you are reading this, Blizzard, fix it! Accept PayPal like any other sensible online store! I’d be eternally grateful. Broke, but grateful. Also, amazed that you read this blog, but that is not the point.

Goldsellers and you

There have been a few ripples going through the World of Warcraft blogging community. One in particular caught my attention today: Account hacking. And goldselling. Amazingly enough, those two issues seem to be closely connected…

Now, not all goldsellers are bad. Some of them may genuinely farm the gold, or employ players to farm it for them.

Goldsellers are also the kind of people that would happily strip your character naked, clean out the bank, and leave you stranded in hostile territory. If they’re feeling particularly nice, they might even server-transfer the char and enable a mobile authenticator, so they can later use your account for in-game spamming.

Goldsellers are the kind of people that gleefully rub their hands when a guild actually trusts their members and then proceed to sell the entire guild bank. In addition to your character being stripped and cleaned out, then deleted.

So if you’re pleading ignorance, or buying from “safe sources” – next time you read a horror story about a hacked account, keep in mind that it might have well been your purchase that triggered it. The next time you log in, have that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach, because goldbuyers are among the favourite targets for goldseller hacking.

And for those interested in actually solving the problem, Tobold has a nice article why Blizzard selling gold wouldn’t help at all. Other games have cash shops, yes, but they don’t sell a universal in-game currency. They sell items, often one-use items.

I couldn’t care less how you play your game. But the moment you decide to employ people, goldsellers, that actively destroy that which other players have spent a long time (and subscription fee, and emotional investment) of gaining, I stop not caring. I start loathing. The time it took me to gather the links and type this entry, about 50 gold arrived from the auction house, simply from selling stuff I got during questing anyway. And that’s with half of it going to my disenchanter for training. On nothing but level 20 chars, starting from scratch without any prior knowledge or experience.

Buying gold not only makes you a bad person.

Buying gold means that Chuck Norris will come to your home and deliver a roundhouse kick for every copper bought. And you wouldn’t want that, would you?