I HAS PC

Besides topics covered in this semi-rant post previously, I will give one, absolutely cardinal rule on how you will GUARANTEE I will not trial your game.

Do not ask me for my Credit Card information.

A 10 day trial is for me to see if I like your game, not tether me to a possible error and scoop up a free sub month if I get busy and forget to cancel in time.

Give me 10 days free, and then if I want to continue playing, I will give you my CC information. Simple enough.

You would think, anyway.

EQ was my first MMO girlfriend. She was a bit cranky, and demanding on my time, but looking back I wouldn’t change a thing (looking forward is another matter). Those sweet, sweet evenings spent together shaped my gaming expectations and experiences. It is true that you never forget your first.

EQ Nostalgia after the break.

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Vacation was nice, thank you for asking. Coming home from vacation is always a bad experience. The plane feels a bit more cramped and the voicemail and email inboxes are a lot more full. I actually tried working through my vacation, dilligently keeping up on my inbox every morning. IHASLAW #1 – for every email you send you get five back. Lesson learned.

Blizzard recently announced a big change to their UI/Addon policy, banning people from making money off off of their hard work created upon Blizzard’s hard work. While hardly a surprise, WoW has a gigantic Mod community. That community, for all intensive purposes, has made and shaped the game – usually for the better. “Must have” community mods become part of the vanilla UI over time. I have long been of the thought that mods shouldn’t exist in an MMO space – players shouldn’t have the ability or the right to change the basic UI (apart from cosmetic). It creates extra work for the typical player who “needs” those mods to be competitive (hello, Arena mods) or even beat unbalanced and rediculous encounters (hello, Decursive pre-Burning Crusade). Simply put – if your game requires players to provide changes to your code to make the game playable – or more enjoyable – then it is a failure of code. More after the break.

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Forgot to pop this up last week – I am away on vacation so won’t be checking here for the week. You know, just in case you missed me and stuff.

Have a great one, and we will get back to our regularly scheduled program once I return!

Thanks,

Chris F.

I was checking my lesser-used email accounts, and turns out an old WoW account had it’s password changed around 5am this morning. I hadn’t used the account in a long time. In fact, I cleaned out the account before I let it go dormant. There was no gear, no cash, nada.

Sure enough, my 70 rogue was there, plus a level 2 alt. Sure enough, whoever “hacked” the account, had about 20 level 70+ blue items for sale on the AH at an average of 75 gold each. Sure enough, I cancelled all the auctions and sent the gear to one of my alts on another account.

Now if only I could get someone to rob me in real life like that – break into my house, refurnish it with kickbutt stuff, and leave me the keys.

Lately I have had a ton of weird stuff going on with my loveable Gmail account. It all started with me getting weird emails about a “new” account I set up (although I didn’t). These messages started arriving with services I had signed up to (which I didn’t) from an email address I don’t own which is eerily similar to my real gmail address.

For example, if my gmail address is Ihaspc@gmail.com, the new address is ihasp.c@gmail.com.

The strangeness is this: I had a password reset email come to me for the address with the extra decimal in it. I did it (through google directly) and it changes the one WITHOuT the decimal in it. Indeed, when I email the mystery second account it goes to my non-decimalled account. When I try to log into the account with the decimal in it, it takes me to my non-decimal account.

I got an email saying I added the decimal account to my yahoo account (which I didn’t) and when I linked it (verified link to yahoo first) the starting account wasn’t mine – it started with a V – and I was able to unattach the decimal account to that email address.

It’s thoroughly confusing. I did virus checks et al with nothing.

It would be my guess some phisinh service signed up the email address for confusion but somehow it has become integrated with my non-decimal email address.

I am curious if this has anything to so with google’s recent gmail collapse end of February but can’t be sure.

Any ideas?

I hope that image didn’t burn your eyes out. I am wearing sunglasses.

As mentioned I am back playing WoW. My year long hiatus from the game (despite a brief respite to check out the DK starting area) while mucking around in various other MMO’s and SP games wasn’t ended because I missed the game all that much – but because I missed the people. We had (have, as I am quickly re-learning) such a great group of adult folk dedicated to each other and the game in WoW – and that was seriously missing from other ventures I tried. I decided to relevel a shaman (so starting fresh) despite having a mini arsenal of existing level 70’s. The Shaman was the class I ended with, and loved the mechanics, but as mentioned the account wasn’t mine. With my Shaman friend still playing it was time for a fresh start. After being away for so long, I noticed a lot of things. After the break.

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Tagged by good friend Tesh over at Tish Tosh Tesh, us periphery folks are now part of the fun. Like Tesh, I’m not going to follow the format as directly. Unlike Tesh, I don’t keep a lot of my screenshots so finding any was quite the effort. I have two problems with screenshots – I uninstall a lot of games when I am done (despite having enough storage capacity) to keep things tidy and organized on my PC (something I am sure my wife would appreciate me doing in real life org skills, you should see my desk) and usually when I take a screenshot it is quite by accident. This would have made for some great screenshots if only I had saved them. So, after digging through old files, here is what I managed to find.

Pics after the break.

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