Guernication
My thoughts on games and the issues around them.

Its turning into a bad week for my gaming. For a start the beta of WoW is proving hard work. Not because of having to file reports on all the quests and bugs I find. But because I just can't seem to get more than five minutes of play before it crashes. There was a new patch this morning and it seems to have caused more bugs than it solved.

Before I gave up playing though I did find a few changes to gameplay. One is that mounts are no longer objects in your inventory. You have to learn the skill to summon them, just like learning a spell. This does save some bag space, but it also means that currently you have to spend gold to rebuy non-magical mounts. There's a new tab for your mounts in your character page and a whole new page for pvp stuff - honour points, arena record, etc.

I managed to get to Warsong Hold as well. Very nice. I much prefer this over the Borean Tundra. Maybe its just the colours - Warsong is predominantly red and brown, while the Forsaken's base of operations is all grey and gloomy.

The other negative note this week has been the impending collapse of my guild. Again. For some reason our GM threw a fit last night, posting on our guild's board he wasn't happy with the officers. I tried to talk to him about this on vent, suggesting maybe he shouldn't have said what he said on a public board. He didn't get it. He also didn't seem to understand that part of the problem might be his management and expectations. I got singled out for criticism because apparently I had not done a good job of being the Assistant Raid Leader in Kara over the weekend. He said he had been bombarded with pm's during the raid and had had to deal with more than he was happy with - explaining loot rules and so on. I suggested maybe he could tell me what he wanted me to do before we went into a raid instead of just doing it himself and building up an attitude. Still didn't get it. Accused me of trying to 'get out of it'.

What's most disappointing is that I'm the only officer that actually does anything for the guild. Seriously - I'm the only one that's recruited anyone ever and the only one posting guides and messages on our forums. So it feels pretty unjust to be getting abused by the GM.

And I can't even take refuge in the beta.... :(

Is it just me, or will gamers generally do anything to get a vanity trinket ingame?

A while ago, when I was playing SWG, there was some talk of serrver merges. Well, in SWG there is always talk of server merges. Almost as much as there is negative comments about the game from people who don't actually play it. But during this particular outbreak of merge-fever the question was raised about how SOE could persuade people to voluntarily move to another server in anticipation of closures. Some people wanted a t-shirt, others free game time. The truth, as I saw it, was that around 90% of the game's population could be persuaded to move server for the reward of yet another painting to hang on the wall of their virtual home. Many would probably also change their name to Buttkisser, swtich sides in the Civil War, and wear a dress for the remainder of their playing time.

I recently attended Blizzard's Worldwide Invitational event in Paris. Inside the goody bag every attendee received was a card. On the card were two codes. One for entry to an 'undecided' beta test of a future Blizzard game, the other for an ingame pet in WoW. Turns out the beta was WotLK and the pet was a mini-Tyrael (like the archangel in Diablo).

Both these gifts are pretty sweet. The pet dances with you and the beta is the beta. But both are still fetching quite amazing prices on ebay. A couple of cards I was watching both went for excess of £200 this week. In fact, the complete goody bags, full of promotional crap and a pack of cards for the WoW card-game, were going for £400 the week after the Invitational (when I saw this I bemoaned the fact I didn't buy my wife a ticket as well - we could have sold the spare pack and recouped the travel costs to get to France).

It just so happens that I needed a new bicycle last week. Long-story short: my old one is too small. I cycle a lot being self-employed in a small town. I checked out a few shops and found the perfect bike for me - for £210. I'm not made of money (not that succesfull as a small businessman yet!). So here was my dilemma: sell the card I had for just enough money for a new bike, thus saving £200 for other more noble purposes such as the impending birth of my child, or get a funky little pet and a chance at a beta.

Well, I reckon you can all guess which way I went with this.

I now have a nice little mini-Tyrael following me around in WoW and I am playing the beta for WotLK most days. And I blew 200 quid on a new bike. Its very nice, thanks for asking.

What kind of attention whore am I though, that I threw away the opportunity for a free bicycle, exchanged it for a vanity pet in a make-believe world populated only by people I have never met? One point of view is that I have spent £200 for a few admiring whispers and slight jealousy amongst my comrades. And, as mentioned earlier, the very dubious credibility of playing the beta or WoW's next expansion while everyone else is grinding out heroic badges in Kara.

Does anyone else find themselves making completely irrational decisions over ingame objects or gameplay benefits?

How many Einstein's have their been? How many Mozarts? Or Oppenheimers, Newtons, Pythagoruses (Pythagori?), or Socrateses?

I watched an interesting film the other night that many of you might be familiar with - The King of Kong. For those that have not seen it, it is the story of the battle for the world's highest recognised score at seminal arcade title 'Donkey Kong'. Essentially it is the story of two men, Billy Mitchell and Steve Wiebe, both of whom lay claim to being the GOAT. Mitchell had set the record decades ago at around 874k points and had been pretty much untouchable since then. His challenger, Wiebe, had come out of nowhere, practising on an arcade case in his garage for years until he was ready to lay claim to the title with a score of over a million. Suffice it to say his ascendency to the throne did not go unchallenged and the furore continues to this day.

Steve Wiebe, as talented as he is, is likely to only ever be the Greatest in the World at Donkey Kong. Even though he he is a competent drummer, having taught himself to play the kit he bought for his son, and artist and teaches science at a high school, he will probably never build a rocket, design a plane or bridge or building, or make the next breakthrough in quantum theory. If it wasn't for DK, his talents - his ability to recognise and work with complex patterns and timing, superb muscle coordination, and immense concentration span - would probably not even be known. If it wasn't for videogames then, it is quite possible Steve Wiebe would just be a good teacher who was known among his friends as a being pretty good with his hands, at being dedicated to whatever he was doing at the time and perhaps a little withdrawn sometimes.

The idea that there are hidden talents amongst the world's population is not new. There are people who make a career out of inventing ways to uncover the capabilities of our children, usually through their schooling. But videogames are, at least relative to human history. I believe videogames have the capacity to uncover talent and genius in a way we have never had access to before.

Think about it. There are six billion people on the planet today. This is believed to be more than the total number of people who have ever lived before, giving us a maximum number of humans to have existed at around the ten billion mark. Is it really likely that out of all these millions and millions, only one person ever had the intellectual capacity of Albert Einstein? Or Steven Hawking? Or Michelangelo? Of course not. But these particular men happened to be born at a time and in a place that enabled them to have the education and opportunities that developed their genius to a point where they could be recognised. All the others lived out their lives quietly. Some died as children. Others were peasants, farm labourers, or just worked in jobs that never presented them with kind of challenges that would allow their intellects to develop.

But the electronic games awe play today are becoming more varied in their content and more demanding of their players. Hand-eye coordination is no longer enough. To be good at Guitar Hero, to master songs at the hardest level, you need the kind of skills that would actually make you a pretty good guitar player (should you ever decide to actually pick one up!). End-game content for MMO's demand good teamwork at the least, and leaders must have the ability to coordinate, to lead, delegate, encourage and so on. New ways of controlling games such as those introduced by Nintendo are changing what we actually do when playing games, bringing more physical and spatial awareness into the picture. Games are no longer just about recreation - we do not relax when we play nowadays. For many of us, gaming is the most demanding part of our lives.

Take my guild-leader for example – let's call him French. By day French is a forklift operator. I'm not trying to be down on manual labourers. If that's what you do for a living, more power to you. Man's got to eat. But this cannot be the most stimulating job in the world. You get in the cab, start the engine, go pick up a palette, move it, put it down. And repeat. Limited variety, limited challenge. But by night (or whenever he's off-shift) French is responsible for a guild with two dozen members. He controls the guildbank, monitors member's progress, figures out what gear people need and where to get it, coordinates raids and groups, and so on. He built our website and runs the vent server. This weekend we're doing Karazhan – a ten-man raid. This requires recruitment skills, direction, resource management, diplomacy, and more. A range of emotions, challenges, rewards and setbacks await our leader. Is it likely French will ever have this level of responsibility in his work? Leadership over dozens? Charged with helping them all achieve success? Probably not.

I'd guess we're all familiar with the sentient AI scenario. Its been in a lot of films. Someone somewhere builds a computer to do a menial or repetitive task, the computer gets smarter and smarter until one day it achieves self-awareness and – pow! - the grey goo hits the fan. Think Terminator or 2001. But what if this self-awareness, this understanding of one's capabilities and the disparity between them and one's daily life expectations, actually happens to us, the meat-bags, before the computers? What would happen if all the thousands of keyboards wizards, Guild CEO's, and Guitar Hero prodigies, all suddenly realised one day that they are capable of taking over the world? That they have the same skills and brain-power as the leaders of industry and science? And what if they then also found that they never will work at that level because they did not go the right school, have the right parents, or just speak the wrong language? Will the uncovering of nascent genius and earth-shattering possibilities result in a new generation of bedroom Einsteins and Mozarts that bring forth art, culture, and technology that seems like magic to the rest of us? Or increasing dissatisfaction, ennui, and depression when these same genii realise they in fact trapped in their ordinary lives?

Not the most earth-shattering news for most of you , no doubt, but I just got my invite to the WoW Wrath of the Lich King Beta test :) I guess I got in because I was at the WWI in Paris last month and entered the code from the card in the welcome pack I received. A bit of shame - I would have rather I got in through the lottery and could use the Beta card to try out Starcraft II. But hey-ho, its better than a poke in the eye with a rusty nail.

I've never been in a beta before. I know some people attach a lot of cache to being beta-testers. I've seen many posts on forums where some over-opinionated jerk says something like 'well I've been playing this game for 12 years now, since the beta test, so that means I must be right'. I hope I'd never become like that, but then again, is beta testing an expansion close to as important as beta testing an original game anyway?

Maybe not, but then again, the collector's edition of WotLK will probably sell more copies than the Gold Editions of most other games on the market, so there's definitely some geek-cred in being in on the beta.

The only regrets I have about it is that I cannot save any progress I make on my character on the test realm when it all opens for real and I cannot adventure with my current guildmates in Northrend. I have copied my beloved level 70 pally over and will eventually get her up to 80 I guess. But when the gates of Northrend open in commercial reality later (this year?) I will be back to 70 again. I wonder if I should've waited till I got my last piece of epic PVP gear before copying over.... And while I'm traipsing around Grizzly Hills and Dragonblight my friends will still be running around in Outland. Without me.

But then that once again highlights the problem I have fond with my human body again and again - I can really only play one game at a time. Only got one pair of hands and eyes.

I wonder whether I can log in on both realms at the same time using different computers?

as for how much I can say about the WotLK content, I am not 100% sure. I skimmed through the legal bumf I had to agree to to upgrade my account and as far as I could tell I can say whatever I like about whats in the game. I cannot reproduce pictures, sound, or video though, and definitely cannot gold-farm, or launch a DoS attack on the server.

So, assuming I have read all that right, I will try to report a little of what I find in the new world on this site in the coming weeks. I am particularly looking forward to the new PvP arena's and BG - flying machines! Hopefully I won't be reporting getting kicked out of the programme here!

I had a chance while out shopping yesterday to evangelise the power of games to my five month's pregnant wife. She is not a gamer. I am not absolutely sure how she views my interest in them. She's married to a man in his early thirties who spends double-figures hours per week immersed in imaginary worlds. I frequently talk to her about the pro's and con's of alternate specs or how difficult pvp in battlegrounds can be. But, as I have pointed out to her in the past, I don't drink, do drugs or porn, or beat her. I keep the house clean and tidy, do all the cooking and shopping, and run a small business. And she did get a trip to France last month because of my 'hobby', so she can't complain that much.

But she's not a gamer. The only game she applied as a child was Pac-man and the only games she really enjoyed playing since we met were multiplayer Halo and Star Wars Battlefront 2 - essentially because they were uncomplicated shooters.

Yesterday I was deciding whether or not to buy Guitar Hero 3, or whether in fact Rock Band would be a better investment. My wife gamely (no pun intended) followed me around all the High St. shops that sell games while  compared prices. She asked me whether there were any good games for children. 'Not really', was my answer. I then had to explain that the majority of games designed for children are pretty poor quality, particularly movie tie-ins. This, I explained, is probably because the developers have short development cycles and are largely bound by the constraints of the originating film. So Superman Returns has to feature a man flying around beating people up, Kung Fu panda has to be about a Panda that runs around beating people up (with a few platforms to spice things up), The Golden Compass has to be a load of crap, etc., etc. Its not like an entirely original game which usually starts with a cool idea being expanded upon. Plus theres the fact that the ideal target market for games companies is a male in his twenties or thirties with large amounts of disposable income.

As I mentioned before, my wife is quite pregnant. We should have our baby at the beginning of November. 'So,' my wife asked, 'what games will our child play when he's five?'. A good question, and one that games companies today are probably trying to answer as I write.

My personal view is that the games of five, ten, or twenty years to come will be quite unrecognisable from what you and I play today and not just because of advance in technology. I think games for the next generation will occupy a completely different cultural space.

Consider if you will movies. Today they can be about pretty much anything, written, shot, and edited in a variety of styles. There are comedies, dramas, horror, romance, and documentary films. Films have political significance, can be morally strengthening or repugnant, influence the course we take in life and how we treat those around us, or just make us laugh, cry, or be silent. Movies would be said to be the cultural lynchpin of the majority of Westerners in the last 10 to 20 years. But it wasn't always like this.

If you go back far enough, to the advent of the moving picture, movies and talkies were initally regarded as nothing more than cheap entertainment for the masses. The first stars were slapstick comedians, then pretty boys and girls. While there is indeed a lot of dross being churned out of films studios today, by and large films are a world away from their simple beginnings.

The same thing happened to pop music - initially regarded with suspicion and derision by the establishment, then becoming widely accepted and dominant in mainstream culture - as well as radio itself, and I would venture to suggest the printed word, at least so far as novels are concerned.

The printed word, radio, pop music, and the moving picture then all had inauspicious origins but came to be accepted and eventually culturlally dominant as the youth that grew up enjoying them assumed the positions of power in society. It seems likley then that the same thing will happen with games.

Where film really took off as a serious medium in the 70's and eighties with the emergence of talents like Spielberg, Lucas, Scorcese, De Palma, Pacino, De Niro, Redford, Streep, Fonda, Nicholson, and so on, I imagine we will see a similar reinvention of gaming in the next decade or so.

Right now, there is probably a teenager or group of friends at a college of polytechnic somewhere in the world with a radical idea for a game or style of play. It won't be an iteration on a current game or style. It probably won't be as simple an evolution as motion-controllers or peripheral lighting. But they will create a new game with a story or hero or style that takes everything that has been great about the games they loved as kids and presents it in a way that makes the whole world say 'Yes! I want some of that!'. Spielberg invented the Blockbuster with Jaws - what will the first real blockbuster game, the one that 'non-gamers' want to go out and buy, be?

Who will be the Raging Bulls of the games world?

I just wanted to say a few words about something I saw at the  WWI last weekend that was actually surprisingly enjoyable.

The closing night ceremony was a fairly big affair. People might have missed parts of the opening ceremony the day before because they were more interested in being amongst the first to play WotLK or Starcraft II. But noone wanted to miss the closeout.

It started off in a predictably annoying way with the 'hosts', Kavanagh and Moses, still trying to act like they knew something about modern videogames, introducing the winners of the pro-gamer tournaments. They both appeared a little tired by the illusion they were trying to project - that they were at the WWI for anything but the money, and were a little more restrained in their attempts to pass themselves off as 'one of us'. China couldn't stop herself ordering the recipients of each prize to smile though.

The real entertainment began though with the taking of the stage by everyone's favourite in-house band: Level 70 Elite Tauren Chieftain! I've never seen them live before, only the snippets of their performance that were featured on the DVD on the TBC CE. They were not a disappointment. Basically, these guys are a great band. I mean, they write songs about the stuff I like - Blizzard games, WoW in particular. But their songs are actually really well written with a variety in melodies, riffs, and pace that a lot of signed bands would kill for. In hindsight this isn't really that much of a surprise. These are the creative minds that make some of the most imaginative and beautiful games in the world. One surprise though - did you know Rob Pardo plays bass in L70ETC? Sorry, I mean L80ETC...

To close the evening out we were treated to a performance by Videogames Live. When I saw the schedule for the evening I have to say I thought there had been a mistake. 'How could they put this orchestral group on after L70ETC?' I thought. Surely this is a misguided attempt to close the weekend out in a 'respectable' fashion. Its something for the old folks to get into. So much for Rob Pardo being a rocker - Blizzard is run by old farts after all!

I'm not ashamed to say I was completely wrong. Videogames Live rocked. It started with one of the two guys behind the act introducing himself and his partner and telling us that they did not want or expect the audience to be quiet while the orchestra was playing. 'If you see something or hear something, please, shout, clap, cheer, whatever you want!' he told us. And we did - as soon as the opening war drums from the theme to Orgrimmar began to pound on the stage, then the horns, then more percussion. A great opener - take that, Alliance!

The orchestra played for maybe half an hour, a medley of pieces from WoW, Starcraft, Warcraft, and Diablo, with the videoscreens alternating between footage from the games, cinematics, and artwork. A great selection of music and artists - they even had the lead-guitarist from Wings up there at one point!

The most moving piece for my money came about halfway through the performance though. The orchestra played 'Lament of the Highborne' from the questline in Undercity, complete with a solo performance from someone who sounded very much like the actual singer they used when making the game. The videoscreens showed footage of Arthas sacking Lordaeron, Sylvanas Windrunner's death, and the newly undead queen of the city singing her lament. Even though some of the footage came from the Wow engine and was not of typical Blizzard cinematic quality, it was very moving. Something about hearing the power of the instruments, the sadness of a live voice. Incredibly well done.

As I sat there listening, applauding, cheering, I was amazed at how moved I was. It was as if I was rediscovering something about games, something I had missed for some time. It was as if the power of games to involve people and the effort that went into making them was being revealed to me again. I began to re-appreciate the effort that went into imagining the worlds we play in. The creativity it takes to come up with a story like the thousands that run through WoW, Diablo, and Starcraft. The depth it takes to make theme music that stirs up emotions when you hear it and makes your adrenaline flow.

I play WoW a lot, maybe 30 to 40 hours a week. The problem with that much immersion is you can become so used to the world around you it fades into the background. When you're leveling your third or fourth toon through STV, for example. it can be easy to switch to autopilot, just do that quests you know the locations for as quickly as possible so you can ding and move on to the next area. I like to PvP. But that can become as much an exercise in programming your macro's and going through the same battleground motions as an engaging activity.

Watching the videos and really listening to the music took me back to reason I started playing games in the first place - to have fun, to have adventures in amazing settings. It reminded me of what I loved about the games I have played - the stories, the variety, the difference to real life.

I've since realised that even though I've played WoW for years and levelled several characters, I haven't actually heard a lot of the music in the game. I usually play music, often on the PC I'm using to play the game. Or I have the TV on or a DVD playing. I actually heard the music in Shadowprey Village in Desolace for the first time this morning - I felt a little ashamed that someone had gone to all the effort of creating that funky, aboriginal, groove and I had just ignored it for years.

I'm not saying I'm going to start hard-core RP any time soon, or that I'll never listen to Mastodon while I assault Alterac Valley ever again. But I do want to start paying more attention to what's going on in the world and not be so distracted by my other entertainment or other players. I'm going to try not to be jaded by extended exposure.

So, to conclude, I highly recommend, if you have the chance, you go to Videogames Live. They use as much local talent as they can in their show, so it should  be pretty easy for them to tour near you , if you live anywhere near a major city. Hey, they might even come to your country if you ask them enough times! And in the meantime, try turning down the music or the TV in the room you play your games in. Try reading some fiction based on your favourite world. Or just take some time to stop and look around a little and appreciate how great the place you play in really is.

The first MMO I ever played was Star Wars Galaxies. Now don't  laugh - I know the game has a bad rep. But I love Star Wars and it was a natural choice when I decided to take the plunge into the MMO market.

It had been a long while coming. I had tried to start a SWG account some years earlier, just after SWG launched actually, but my PC at the time was dinosaur and could not handle the game (even years later I had to upgrade the memory in my dual-core laptop to run the game smoothly!) so I didn't even get to login. I went back to my Xbox and played that happily for a couple more years.

Eventually I had a newer, better PC though and, when I had some time on my hands, I downloaded the trial client and started my first toon. I loved the game. It was a revelation. I suddenly understood what all the fuss about MMO's was about. How liberating it was to create a character in a persistent world with a choice of characters and paths, no set end to the game to achieve. How addictive leveling was, accruing vast amounts of credits and XP, buying more equipment, building a better starship, then fleet. Starting a trading empire - learning to make the things people wanted and selling them at a profit. Wonderful stuff in this new world I had discovered. I kept on playing SWG for about a year and a half. I took a little break and then went back for a bit longer. I also discovered WoW on the way and have been playing that for the best part of three years now.

But when I look back, I realise that all the fun I have had, the things I have done, places I have seen (and money I have saved!) has possibly been consequential to me meeting one person (in much the same way as the entire Star Wars sage hinges on that one Star Destroyer gunnery commander who ordered his men to hold their fire on a certain escape pod). That person was whoever it was that invited me to my first guild.

I was asked if I wanted to join a guild by a strange toon. I  can't remember his name. It was all a bit confusing and happened fast. I had never been in a guild before. I was used to Xbox Live games of Rainbow Six where you blast the same dozen players for an hour or two, then move to another room. All I remember was he had some cool red armour. 'Why?', I asked, 'what's the point?'. New as I was to MMO's I was sensible enough to realise that reply might come across as a little unfriendly to the reader so I quickly reassured him I really didn't know what guilds were for. I was also a little insecure - 'can you get mugged in an MMO?' I wondered.  Suffice to say I did join his guild and it was the best decision I ever made in a game.

I made some good friends in that first guild. We eventually left the original group and started our own guild on another planet. We recruited new members, developed our town, and did whatever we wanted. Eventually some of us migrated from SWG to WoW to start another guild in Azeroth and continued to adventure together.

Now, all these years later, I am sadly no longer in touch with the guys I began to play SWG with. I am in a friendly guild though. We run stuff together, help each other with crafting and grinding. Even PvP together Sadly, I know I am lucky in this respect. I know that for every friendly guild like mine, with helpful, encouraging, tolerant, players, there is one full of asshats. I find them sometimes in PUGs. People who can't wait to tell you how great they are or how crappy you are. People who want to order you around or just don't know how to play as part of a team. I have even been in a couple of weak guilds in my time. I've seen leaders that don't want to lead and players that don't really play but instead use games as a kind of therapy, a way to vent their frustrations with the real world on people they will never meet face to face.

I was lucky, I think, that my first guild experience was so positive. I met a group of people that wanted to help me and that I could help in return. Oddly enough I had been playing for nearly a year before I even heard the word 'noob'. Being in that first group of friends has given me hope whenever I start a new game or join a new server that there is a decent guild out there. It may take some time to find. I may have to join and leave a few guilds to find the one that works for me, but the one I need is out there. For every fool, there's someone cool.

So if you're just starting a MMO and are finding it intimidating, or are in a guild and aren't getting any support from the other members, keep on going. There are decent guilds out there. There are nice people to play with who can make this recreational experience of ours not just a time-sink but a fun activity.

One of the interesting reveals at the WWI was Blizzard's Authenticator for World of Warcraft. This is a USB dongle you slap into your machine when you want to play WoW. It gives you a six-digit code that you must match on your keyboard before you can log in. I don't pretend to understand precisely how it works. All I knew when I read about it from the promo leaflet in my goody bag was that I wanted one.

I have kept my accounts secure for years now. I have seen friends get keylogged, see their accounts get sacked, and then be perma-banned by Blizzard because of some perception of guilt by association with the gold-thieving bastards that robbed them. I don't do porn, don't download video's, use installer programs for mods, share my account details with anyone, of click on attachments to emails. So far this has kept me safe. But you never know what devious tricks the thieves will come up with next so I jumped at the chance to get some more security for my PC.

Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to try out the Authenticator. The WWI shop sold out of everything but TCG accesories within hours of opening and I was too busy playing WotLK and Starcraft II to queue up on that first day. But then I got to thinking - why should I have to pay for this at all?

Someone on the official forums made the mistake of likening the Authenticator to security at a bank. The poster said something like you pay the bank for security, why not pay Blizzard? It was a very simplistic analogy and a poor choice too. To my mind, paying Blizzard for an authenticator is more like buying locks for the bank's front doors. Here's why:

I pay Blizzard eight or nine pounds a month to play their game. I invest a significant amount of time in the game. If I were to multiply that time by the hourly rate I get to work it would be a lot of money. The result is a stable of toons with significantly advanced gear and rep. I expect Blizzard to take care of this treasury. I expect them to provide a stable server system that means I will be able to play when I want to for as long as I want to. Its not an unreasonable contract. I also expect them to protect my goods from outside interference. This includes spammers ruining my chat window, gold-farmers ruining the economy, and thieves trying to break in and steal stuff. After all, if someone hacks my account it is the Blizzard server they actually maraud in - not my PC. Their servers should have a robust enough protection to prevent unlicensed intruders sneaking in and smashing the place up.

But Blizzard instead say I have to stop thieves. They help me by giving a login procedure that consists of two words. One is guessible on the majority of accounts - a lot of players make the mistake of using their main's name as their login. The other is another word. It is of undefined length but is essentially a brute-forceable string or obtainable through the numerous flaws in Windows products.

Eventually  they come up with a bettter system that cannot be hacked (yet). Should this not be part of the actual WoW product? I mean, if you can make your game unhackable, why wouldn't you include it as a selling-point? This isn't an upgrade - its an entirely different product - flawed versus perfect.

Its not like selling two version of a car, one with better locks than the other. Its like selling one with locks painted on the side and one that is completely burglar proof.

And what will Blizzard do when someone does crack their system? Is there a disclaimer on the side of the Authenticator that says 'may only work for a limited time - Blizzard does not accept responsibility for hackers that are cleverer than its developers'?

Sorry to be so negative for the second day in a row - I promise to write about something I liked from the WWI next time!

Please comment if you have thoughts on this topic, particularly if you bought an authenticator.