It’s a noisy thing to have in the dining room.

Enter some birthday money and some decent recent reviews on Amazon for the TP-Link.

Installation

In short, a doddle.  Plug one in, press the button for 2-3 seconds.  Plug the other in, press it’s button for 2-3 seconds, watch until the lights calm down.  That was it, all working.

Performance

On the ethernet (100Mbs switch) 9-10Mb / sec transfers from Windows 7 to the server were the norm.  These drop off to ~7.5Mb/sec when running over the adapters, however that’s an acceptable loss given it’s new location shoved in the spare room.  The documentation recommends not spanning across different rings, or plugging into extension cables etc etc.

Naturally I’m doing both, the connection has to jump across different power rings (two MCBs) and 4-way extension cables at both ends.

Summary

As with all technology things vary, but given the nature of the house, it’s power setup etc etc I reckon this is a solid test.  I’d buy it again.

Anyway it would appear from the complaining on trade, level 85′s begging for gold and so on that making gold is hard.  That amassing enough for basic survival within the game is highly difficult.

To all those who don’t have gold I say “Stop drinking in Ironforge“, surely everyone knows by now that the innkeepers charge everyone, except dwarves, higher rates for beer.

Anyway.  Ways to make piles of gold.

1. Levelling
   It really is that simple, a recent experiment with power levelling a warrior, ignoring professions, ignoring gathering, nuking through the levels as fast as possible left me with a level 85 sat on his epic pony at epic speeds and 2k in the bank.If I had done some more work, had him gathering through the levels and clearing Northrend and the whole of Cataclysm the pile of gold would have been much higher.
2. Sell everything
   BoE items, check the AH, and see what similar items go for.
   BoP items, where you don’t need the reward always select the most expensive
   Pick up and vendor all greys
   Vendor any potions you don’t use, they don’t sell on the AH
   Cloth, if you’re not using it, slap it on the AH
   It’s pretty clear to see the plan here, everything has a value, the coppers add up.
3. Bags, invest in them
   Invest in at least 16 slot bags as soon as possible, carry the minimum of equipment and other stuff, clear out the junk every time you reach a vendor or mailbox.
4. Banking Alt
   This is a key, no one wants to break their levelling to play the AH.  So ship everything off to the alt and bulk list at the start or end of the session.
5. Dungeons
   At cap these are worth a decent amount of cash, particularly for tanks and healers who don’t have the queue times.
6. Professions
   There are guides a-plenty out there on making gold from your professions, however remember that for certain gold making schemes various professions link very nicely together (mining / blacksmithing / enchanting for example).  Experiment, look at what’s needed on the AH and how that can be provided.  Spreadsheets are your friend.
7. You don’t need to be a millionaire
   For most players having 20k or so is actually more than enough.  Raiders can burn through more and feed back into the economy by spending large wedges of cash on gear at the start of each patch grabbing BoE items.  Work out how much gold you need, put in that much effort and be happy.  Gold envy isn’t important, having enough so there’s no repair stress is.

Dear members of the Blizzard community,

I have read your feedback and comments about this year’s BlizzCon, and I have also read the feedback to the apology from Level 90 Elite Tauren Chieftain. I’d like to respond to some of your feedback here.

As president of Blizzard, I take full responsibility for everything that occurs at BlizzCon.

It was shortsighted and insensitive to use the video at all, even in censored form. The language used in the original version, including the slurs and use of sexual orientation as an insult, is not acceptable, period. We realize now that having even an edited version at the show was counter to the standards we try to maintain in our forums and in our games. Doing so was an error in judgment, and we regret it.

The bottom line is we deeply apologize for our mistakes and for hurting or offending anyone. We want you to have fun at our events, and we want everyone to feel welcome. We’re proud to be part of a huge and diverse community, and I am proud that so many aspects of the community are represented within Blizzard itself.

As a leader of Blizzard, and a member of the band, I truly hope you will accept my humblest apology.

– Mike Morhaime
President, Blizzard Entertainment

Firstly thanks to Mike for getting the apology out, while there will be some people who still want more I think this is a good response.  It’s a clear apology and it makes no bones about where the buck stops.

On the US forum there are still those wondering what it was about, complaining about people being oversensitive etc etc, however I strongly suspect those are the same muppets we see spamming [Anal] in trade.  I doubt whether any of them will change their attitudes or behaviour for a few more years, maybe when they’re old enough to vote, drive, drink, have kids, be responsible etc etc their views will settle down and spend less time proving themselves through abusing others.

Could they have handled this better, hell yes.  The blues could have not knee-jerked so much in their rush to dismiss it all as a bit of fun, nothing to worry about, L90ETC could have written an apology which did just that without trying to explain themselves.

Blizzard could have crushed this issue within 24 hours by doing what Mike did overnight.

So here’s to a new dawn and the hope that lessons have been learnt, understood and will be remembered next time.

As Ratshag says we have other things to discuss, such as Pandas.  Epic leveling experience or a good source of meat and leather for adventurers?

Hey guys, we read and heard all the feedback from BlizzCon this year. The Corpsegrinder bit was never intended to be taken seriously. We are sorry that we offended anyone; everything at our shows is just meant in fun. Thank you all for speaking up. We’ll definitely keep this in mind for future shows.

Our humblest apologies,

Level 90 Elite Tauren Chieftain

I’m entirely happy with that response from L90ETC, in fact it’s better phrasing than we get from most companies and politicians who normally weasel with “We’re sorry you took offence”

Now.  Blizz.

They’re still dodging

Thank you everyone for your feedback regarding the closing night performance at BlizzCon. While we had some other messaging worked up we were going to post, the members of band wanted to instead address it themselves: – Bashiok

Blizz, admit you also have some culpability in this and accept you need to look to yourselves in how you setup the shows, agree with the performers on what’s go and what’s no-go.

Stop dodging.

Edit:

Something I wasn’t aware of until I read Ratshag today

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlizzCon

The closing ceremony had a performance by Blizzard’s own in house band, The Artist Formerly Known as Level 80 Elite Tauren Chieftains (TAFKL80ETC), who changed their name mid concert to Level 90 Elite Tauren Chieftains (L90ETC). Foo Fighters performed afterward.

Which puts another spin on the whole thing, L90ETC are not some band Blizz can distance themselves from, nor can they claim that “they didn’t know”, because they are Blizzard in all the senses which matter.  In much the same way if I as a blogger put a trash piece against one of my employers competitors out on the company home page.

So Blizz, I say yet again, pull your heads out of your collective arses and accept you screwed up, and accept that as Blizzard not by shuffling it off trying to wash your hands of the affair as some in house company prank which went wrong.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cW_Lv0r-l4c

Now some commentary from a couple of other sites:

Piercing Shots & Huggywuggles

Now the Terms of Use Blizzard require us to abide by:

Section B
Rules Related to “Chat” and Interaction With Other Users. Communicating in-game with other Users and Blizzard representatives, whether by text, voice or any other method, is an integral part of the Game and the Service and is referred to here as “Chat.” When engaging in Chat, you may not:
(i) Transmit or post any content or language which, in the sole and absolute discretion of Blizzard, is deemed to be offensive, including without limitation content or language that is unlawful, harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, hateful, sexually explicit, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable, nor may you use a misspelling or an alternative spelling to circumvent the content and language restrictions listed above;

(vi) Harass, threaten, stalk, embarrass or cause distress, unwanted attention or discomfort to any user of the Game;

Some blue responses to complaints regarding the broadcasting of the video:

http://blue.mmo-champion.com/topic/203999/official-alliance-hate-from-blizz-at-blizzcon
http://blue.mmo-champion.com/topic/203994/complaint-about-blizzcon-closing-concert

Now apparently no one at Blizzard has seen the uncensored version before, all they’ve seen is the bleeped version used at Blizzcon.  To be honest I call bullshit.  Can anyone seriously believe the lawyers weren’t all over that? Well, thinking further about it, I actually can because they and the PR people should have looked at it prior to the broadcast and shouted loudly “this is a disaster waiting to explode in our faces”.  Given how much the mainstream media like to paint gaming companies in a bad light I’m surpised they’re not all over this (though given that it’s about some semi-celebrity using abusive, homophobic language and not cute girls wearing very little getting hit on by “nerds and geeks”, maybe I shouldn’t be surprised).

This isn’t about the inter-faction rivalry, though there is a whole other post there and how much responsibility Blizz has for behaviour outside the game (verbal attacks, physical abuse, spitting and the like).  Some morons will be morons and take things far too far, always.

Whether it’s Horde / Alliance; Rangers / Celtic; England / France; Ale drinkers / Lager drinkers.

Slack-jawed, knuckle-dragging, fuckwits will ever be the same.

However, large companies do have to weigh their actions because of the sheer numbers they broadcast to.  With Blizzcon 2011, it has been estimated at 26,000 attendees[1]. What we have is a company which, in it’s ToU, demands a certain level of behaviour from its customers, which is fair enough.  Then it goes and smashes their own Terms to pieces and implicitly endorses the levels of mindless thuggery and abusive crap seen day in, day out in the /trade and /general in-game chat channels.

So, Blizz, that was a first class move on your part. Do you have an encore?

It does reinforce the view that you are run by sub-25 year old males who’ve not yet got a relationship with anything that doesn’t have staples and are still fapping off to images of Jaina without her clothes on. The type that have to stress how masculine they are by putting [Anal] in trade and hitting on anything which appears to have boobs in the game.

I know you’re not a stupid company, stupid companies do not keep businesses of the scale of Blizzard running successfully for so many years.  However big companies can have their reputation trashed and, given the way – as I mentioned above – that the media likes to blame the evils of the world on computer games, I would have thought more business sense would have kicked in.

So…  Stop hiding, stop claiming “it’s a joke”, stop telling yourselves and others “it’s not serious” and start acting like you belong in the business world and not staring at dirty mags behind the bike sheds.

Edit: Online petition

Naturally a certain class of player has started to complain that anyone will be able to get hold of them and this will affect their profits.  Seriously guys get over the fact that you’ve had a monopoly on supply for approximately one year and been able to charge what you like.  With an artificial depression in supply thanks to those who have a pile in their bank they can’t use effectively.  Personally across the alts I’m sat on 40 of the damn things.

So yes, the price of orbs is going to tank relative to the /trade price.  This is nothing unexpected, you’ve made your gold from the closed market suck it up and deal with having to find a different source of income.  It’s not as if making gold in wow is hard these days.

I only have one request to Blizz, make them greed or need only, allowing need and greed will take us back two years to the hell of last bosses in wrath.

He started to get ill on Saturday and progressed from sore throat to swollen glands in his neck to fever to rash and cracked/dry lips despite not being dehydrated (he’s not eaten anything for several days but has been drinking plenty) with the GP seeing him every day and then him being rushed to hospital this morning. The specialist has said that today was the earliest they could have diagnosed it because they would have to have that whole progression to map the symptoms to this and not to some virus/infection. He’s booked in for an echo (I assume echocardiogram – Mum just said “echo”) at the children’s hospital in the morning (it’s early evening there now). Sister’s other half has been called home, he works in the mines, his employer arranged him a flight out straight away. Sis is staying at the hospital, Mum and Dad have got her younger son with them for now.

Poor kid. Looks like he’s going to have to be monitored for heart problems for the rest of his life once he recovers from the initial illness. At least the prognosis is good when it is diagnosed early and the treatment started straight away.

ETA: spoke to sister on the phone this evening, he’s being given the gammaglobulin i-v (8 and a half bottles at $2000/bottle… thank goodness he’s under 16 and they live in Australia so they don’t have to find the cash for it). She’s bribing him to take his aspirin tablets, apparently. He’s spending his time making lists of what he will buy with the money when he goes home! He’ll be in hospital for a week at least.

That is all.

Nothing which really explains why they’ve made the change.

So, let’s fall back to the standard in any business or political field and follow the money.

Authenticators, how they work

Authenticators are a third party product which are made and branded for Blizz by Vasco, functionally they’re pretty much the same as the RSA secureID system which many people will have encountered in a work environment or indeed to the systems which many banks are rolling out to their customers for online access security.

At the backend these systems tend to be the operators own authentication system, coupled with an API provided by the security vendor and hardware authentication boxes (HSM in my field, hardware security module) which do the heavy lifting of actually performing the security check on the supplied number.  Each of these machines as a finite capacity in terms of queries per second, usually some reasonably aggressive support contract response times (let’s face it having your auth system down is a bad thing) and often a license fee based on the number of queries over a set period (for example 90% of the peak value measured over the month).

All of which means $$$ to Blizzard, and the bad sort.  It’s money heading out to Vasco.

We have a trail.. let’s follow

The problem Blizzard face is controlling the costs incurred by the security system, something which is funded mostly out of reduced support costs (less compromises and clean up).  However that’s rather intangible and doesn’t keep the accountants happy.  From an opex point of view the authenticators are an overhead and one which is increasing with time, from a risk perspective there is a chance to reduce the load on the HSMs without significantly increasing the changes of a compromise.

If we look at the entire bnet customer base and extract information on accounts which have been compromised, then pull out the numbers for those compromised with authenticators and then further filter factoring in ‘location’ information based on IP.  Then I suggest that accounts which have an authenticator, log in from a ‘regular’ IP and have been compromised from that IP is a tiny fraction of the total.

Therefore altering the authentication mechanism such that it only checks for an authenticator value once ever “n weeks” or “z logins” when the auth is coming from a ‘regular’ location (defined as “the account has logged in from this location successfully using the authenticator Y times in the last P weeks”).  With some reset mechanics thrown in to drop back to full security checking when there has been suspicious attempts.  Then from the corporate point of view this is a good trade off.  It lowers the load on the HSMs, it cuts back the licensing / support costs without greatly increasing the support costs in dealing with a higher load of compromises.

Additionally we have Diablo 3 on the horizon which means fresh players, fresh authenticators and additional load on the system.  I have no doubt that the current bug which causes players to be kicked out when changing toons forcing a fresh login has also had some impact on their usage stats which might have triggered them making this live ahead of schedule.

Customer expectations

This is the big fail from Blizz, they’ve been banging the account security drum for ages, with good reason.  It’s bad PR for customer accounts to be hacked regularly, encourages criminal activity and generally annoys the paying customer.  Annoy them enough and they’ll go and get their MMO crack from somewhere else.

The biggest fail was rolling it out, letting the “good location” database populate and then stop asking for authenticators.  Which as any geek with an ounce of security sense would have told them will have normal players panicing.  The system changed, it changed in a way which the players have been told means an account compromise.

Stupid, massively predictable and stupid

If Blizzard needs to fix one thing it’s their internal processes and communication.

http://us.blizzard.com/support/article.xml?locale=en_US&articleId=24660

Need to ponder this one.