Blizzard Real ID fiasco fallout: Escaping ourselves online
With the Real ID burnout basically over, and Blizzard wisely chose to take the feedback backlash from the community seriously, there’s still some discussion to be had about why that feedback is inherently correct. The implementation of displaying people’s legal names on a forum would have a profound impact on all of the users, in a very negative way.
One especially important aspect of being part of the social community of the Internet is the ability to escape ourselves. While first-world countries have certainly grown into a strange new sense of privacy—the concept of private spaces and private lives—which is all but unheard of in small communities, especially tribal communities, it has actually become paramount in our lives. With employers looking to the web to discover our thoughts and natures, we find sudden necessity in cloaking our personal lives away from our professional lives.
In the programming world,
…
Blizzard drops the Great Banhammer, removing almost 320,000 Warcraft, Diablo accounts
A giant number of Battle.net accounts woke up last week to discover themselves on the wrong side of a 30-day ban. The move came because Activision Blizzard had become bothered by the amount of game exploits running rampant in their now almost 10-year-old game series between Diablo II and Warcraft III.
Account abuses generally take the form of game mechanic exploits or users running third-party programs designed to advance one’s own statistics or steal information from other users.
"These types of activities can severely impact the stability of our servers, and we’ll continue to aggressively monitor Battle.net in order to protect the service and its players from the harmful effects of cheating," said Blizzard on its official forum.
Chances are good that Blizzard is not banning players for exploiting already present features of the games themselves; in fact, from their
…
StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty Collector’s Edition details released
If you’re like us, you have intermittent emissions from Amazon.com glowing about fantasy novels, new audio-visual recording equipment, and oftentimes video games. Recently, we saw a fun little mote appear from Amazon.com about the upcoming release of StarCraft II. Possibly one of the most anticipated Blizzard games since—Diablo II. Ever since it’s announcement we have been pouring over YouTUBE videos detailing game play and offering up chunks of information we could digest, however, we’re still not satisfied.
At a price point of around $100 the collectors edition is going to be prohibitively costly to those of us penny-pinching gamers who have been hit hard by the economic recession, but details have been released about what will be in it.
Included in the Collector’s Edition will be items such as a StarCraft issue #0 comic book, an Art of StarCraft: Wings of Liberty 176 page book,
…
Battle.net Ultimatum Date Draws Near, Merge Accounts Or Perish
Blizzard is advising all players in their vast and sprawling World of Warcraft empire to join together in merging Battle.Net and Warcraft accounts. The move to merge all players onto a single account system has been coming for some time, with Blizzard offering gentle nudges and suggestions. The gentleness has ended.
Now the axe comes out.
All players, users, hackers, spammers, pubbies, puggers, scammers, keyloggers, and ERPers must merge their accounts before November 11th. Dire wrath faces those who resist the purity of Blizzard’s single-account system.
Read more at World of Warcraft’s community site.
World of Warcraft and PUGs the fix is coming?
Well, as much of a fix as can possibly be done to the bane-of-all-MMOs. Speaking of which us voces absolutely love PUGs—ignore Nelson’s complaints and objections, he won’t play with anyone not vetted by the FBI. They are an experience in both frustration and hilarity for any given game play event. PUGs are the groundwork that we use to gather our friends, sally forth into a strange world, and get our shy socialization shirts on.
Needless to say, Blizzard is introducing a new thing that should make PUGs the next-big-thing.
Blizzard drops details on the new dungeon and raid system for World of Warcraft, which brings with it cross-sever instancing, daily random dungeons, and special rewards for taking part in a pick-up group.
Pick-up groups, or PUGs, are the bane of many an MMO player’s existence. Rather than grouping with your guild
…
World of Warcraft: Icecrown Citadel Preview
Part of the Citadel, anyhow. The back entrance up through the Lich King’s rose garden, it’s known as the Frozen Halls.
Read about it at WorldofWarcraft.com.
World of Warcraft: Pirate’s Day
As we all know, September 19th is International Talk Like A Pirate Day. A fine tradition and a noble internet holiday. To celebrate, World of Warcraft is hosting their own event, Pirate’s Day.
In short, Booty Bay gets taken over by pirates, and they have stuff. Lots of stuff. For you. Including an achievement. But it’s one day only!
Check out Blizzard’s WoW holiday page for the details.
World of Warcraft: Cataclysm Rumors and Speculation
Recently, a few rumours broke out about the next planned expansion to Blizzard’s crushingly popular MMORPG, World of Warcraft. These whispers in the dark centered around Cataclysm, the next expansion to WoW after Lich King.
It’s said that the great dragon Deathwing will join forces with the immortal and exiled elf-queen Azshara to summon a great power that will shatter the world.
It’s said that Warchief Thrall will pass the Doomhammer to the son of Grom Hellscream, and open war will come upon the Horde and the Alliance.
It’s said that Humans and Undead will finally get Hunters, I mean, damn, what took so long?
Oh, and something about new races and a complete rebuild of Azeroth.
Right now, MMO Champion has a decent rundown of the expected, or at least, more believable changes and details leaked out …
World of Warcraft Q and A Series Continues
Questions and Answers about the classes in World of Warcraft. Simple concept, deep insights. All you gamers sitting on your couches, downing snack chips and hooting like baboons at the screen, you don’t know what it’s like out there behind the curtain. There’s math hidden under the hood. And tradeoff. And compromise. And comparison. Designing games is a tough job, fit only for the most rugged of our kind, the sort who bites the legs off rabid pitbulls for breakfast. Designers abandon their families and curse their gods so you can grind away in blissful ignorance of what’s happening just out of sight in the code and the structure of the game.
So, here’s the Hunter. The Rogue. The Priest.
PaymentOne Destroys World of Warcraft Accounts with Inexplicable Chargebacks
The World of Warcraft is reeling under an assault, but not from any mortal enemy. Instead, the masses of elves and orcs alike suffer under the cruel whip of bizarre credit charges canceling their accounts.
The monster at the heart of this attack is PaymentOne, a company that allows players to pay their game subscriptions through their phone bills. It seems that PaymentOne has issued thousands of credit card chargebacks against WoW players, which caused their accounts with Blizzard to go deeply negative. In response, Blizzard shut down the accounts.
A chargeback is a type of credit card protection people use to defend themselves against nasty and unexpected charges on their credit card. It bodily sucks the money directly from the merchant’s account back to the user’s own, leaving the merchant …
|
|
Categories
- Fiction
- Misc
- Mods and Patches
- News
- Reviews
- Strategy Guides
Recent Comments
- Clueless Glad I got this explanation. Not being a WoW player, but int...
- Elaine Mercer Boo. Okay, okay, I am being unfair. Still, I also found t...
- Cole Is it only for the computer? I would be nice if it was for t...
- Elaine Mercer Privacy is a big deal online today, and the Real ID snafu wi...
- mark starmancer what are you taking about fire is the way to go not ice nor ...
- Helvetica >.< A man after my own frozen heart....
Archives
Blogroll
- Game Politics - Where politics and video games collide.
- Gamebunny - For all your obscure and free to play MMO needs.
- Mill Avenue Vexations - A gothic, occult thriller by Kyt Dotson—burning rubber where angels fear to tread.
- Pwnsan - Everything ever about Warhammer Online…for the moment. Subject to whimsy without notice.
- Wandering Goblin - MMO news and geeky stuff with that tangy goblin flavor.
