The veg is doing well, we have ripening strawberries, peas and the cut-and-come-again continues to provide random snacking for me while I’m in the greenhouse.  However, on that front I have to report that the greenhouse has been killed (it’s a plastic cover job) by the local fourlegged evils.  Sharp claws, a convient drop point from my utility roof and plastic do not mix, so on Sunday I moved all the tools and stuff being stored in it back to the shed (the leather gloves were soaked, we’ll see if they dry properly) and removed the cover and cut a piece to protect the metal shelving from the weather.

Thank you local cat owners.  Oh and as various additional methods for repelling your pets from crapping in my garden have failed I’m moving up a notch to the more offensive tools such as the sonic repellers.  Subtle hints do not appear to work for these buggers.  Any recommendations on things which do work and keep the little buggers out of my garden would be appreciated.

Picking up on the weekly topic from Blog Azeroth, when should I as a healer down tools (branches, arms, random squiddy wavey things) and say “Enough is enough, enjoy your damage you moron and your corpse run”.

Generally I don’t, when in 5-man content I am generally focused on doing what I’m meant to be doing and keeping everything standing which should be standing and let’s be honest the pain caused by letting someone die is counter productive.  Wipes are worse, they add 5+ minutes to a run.  In a PUG our collective aim is to melt faces, hack trash, grab emblems and get the hell out of there before we wake up something even bigger and move back into the queue for more badges or back to something else if all we’re after is the daily frosties.

Players dying means drama, complaints, more time spent ressing, waiting for players to release and bitching all the way back, generally I find it just too much damm effort.  It also weakens the trust a tank needs to have in their healer, when tanking I need to know I have a mana burning health monster watching my back we have a very simple symbiotic relationship going and it’s a good one.

Tank: I promise to watch the healer, pull mobs off before they eat face, keep an eye on the pretty blue bar while keeping the party moving at a good enough pace that we make decent progress through the dungeon.

Healer: I promise to keep healing the tank, shout if I need a break for mana and run to the tank if the mobs eat on my face.

DPS: Rawr.. we hits things.

That said, have I let someone die, actually no.  However in a recent PUG I did stop actively healing a hunter who kept pulling additional mobs for the tank, only healing him back up when the pack was dead, while nothing was said the behaviour did moderate, hopefully he noticed that his health was taking a beating and altered his own tactics to minimise his incoming.

wow.com has the details but in short, if you’re in the US and reported the Actizard RealID issue to the ESRB they decided to share your email address with everyone else who reported it.

Classy move, I call this a first class cockup, nothing more, nothing less.

It’s also why using tagged email addresses is still a good thing 15 years on from when I first started using them to work out which companies were being too free with my information.

More on the real ID fiasco when I finish writing it up, I decided to keep the 1000 or so words which I’d written already and somehow seem to have doubled it since the announcement of the climb down.  I’ll see if I can get it finished and out this week.

[Edit: 2010/07/14 – ESRB have apologised, stupid mistake but they have accepted responsibility without the normal “we apologise to anyone who might have been affected” weaselling.]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmSwITU9PLQ]

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=25968987278&sid=1

I’ll just go and delete the 1000 or so words I had been working on…and I’m bloody glad to be able to do it.

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

So, we wiped on him for an hour or two last week, and mashed him on the 4th attempt this week. I’ll do a proper post later on tanking P2 (shadow) which is … a challenge.

The Home Sec has just announced in Parliament.

About bloody time

Firstly an interesting article which might give some insight into one of the drivers for this change
http://watchingthewatchers.org/indepth/1365085/korean-law-driving-policy-blizzard

Now, here is the news

BBC News – World of Warcraft maker to end anonymous forum logins
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/10543100.stm

USA Today – ‘WoW’ studio Blizzard to require real names on forums
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/gamehunters/post/2010/07/wow-studio-blizzard-to-require-real-names-on-forums/1

Thanks to Matticus for shoving this on the radar, though given the noise it’s creating (118 pages on EU and 882 on US the last time I checked).

So firstly what are they doing and what are they not doing.

• New forums will be opened for Starcraft II & Cataclysm
• The new forums will be using Real ID, and will be showing your real name on the posts
• The old forums will not be changed
• The old forums will be closed once the new ones are open
• There is an explicit opt-in on the new forums making it clear that your name will be made public
• The parental controls have been updated so minors can be blocked from the forums

So, where’s the problem, surely having your name on the net has happened a lot of times already.

True but I’ve controlled, as far as possible what my name is associated with on the net, having come online around 15 years ago when the mantra was “never give out your real name”, usenet was a brutal place and keeping some security and privacy was a critical lesson to learn and learn quickly.  As was having to deal with the trolls.

What Blizz appear to have forgotten is that data should only be released where there is a clear benefit, and where it cannot be achieved through other means.  In this case a fixed alias for each battlenet account would do the same trick of cleaning up the forums, it stops the creation of level 1 alts, it allows a mapping of one account -> one identifier (not necessarily one person though) and without having to release additional information and the associated meta information, think of all the players who if they want to use the forums will expose their gender, their ethnic origin etc etc.  There are plenty of morons out there who will latch onto that information, some in the antipication of trolling and others (white knights) in the vain hope they might get laid.

What about the players in gay friendly (or gay only) guilds, if they have decided to keep their sexuality private outside of WoW then can no longer post to the forums.

As things stand (and we need more information) there is also the breaking of the namespace.  At the moment we know that each ‘name’ is unique as it’s <alt name>+<realm>+<region>, we know that has to be unique because of the way the system is built.  How is that going to be managed when there are 200 John Smith’s posting to the forum.  There is no realm tie in, so there is scope for trolling on a grand scale with confusion over who is responding to who.

Security

Releasing more meta information is bad where it’s not needed, at the moment there are a few people who know my real name within WoW, I think it’s about 13 people, with another 10 who might be able to make the right connections.   Pushing my identity out into the wider world in connection to WoW gives a scammer another hook to try and catch me, why not guess at the email address I use normally?  Scammers aren’t afraid of spamming the world in the hop of a 0.01% return rate, this would allow better targetting of their attempts.

Follow the Money

The change isn’t happening in isolation to clean up the forums, there’s a bigger game afoot, social networking and the piles of money corporate execs see in it.  So Blizzard/Activision are teaming with Facebook, that highly respected paragon of good data security and practice.

Is this the final act?

Not a hope in hell, I personally believe these are opening moves, what was once optional (realid in game) has become “optional but we’re going to freeze you out of part of the service” and I’m sure will become “optional, unless you want to log into the game“.  One thought which has surfaced already would be embedding realID information into tooltips / in-game nameplates etc etc.

I’m not sure where they’re going to go, but as I said above look for the money trails, look for where they can make the extra cash off their database.  This is what the world is about at the moment, all the large companies are looking to do something with their databases, the suits see them as money in potentia and want to convert it into big piles of the folding stuff as quickly as possible before the current bubble bursts.

The last word

I’ll leave the last word on this to Ctrl-Alt-Delete

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