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  • skuzfoz 20:38 on May 30, 2010 Permalink | Reply  

    PSA: Passwords & Profanity 

    Passwords

    Peoples’ accounts are currently being stolen by brute-force programs. This means that someone, somewhere is getting your account name and trying millions of different passwords until they figure out yours. Make sure your password is 8 letters long or more, with at least one number and a capital letter. Punctuation characters and non-dictionary words are also recommended, but since they make your password harder to put in, you don’t need to.

    Here’s an example I made up today using calculations based on some of the best brute-force software available. The example shows the password “carrot” and how it could be safer.

    password : time-to-crack

    carrot : <1 second

    Carrot : 6 seconds

    carrot85 : 16 minutes, 33 seconds

    carrot1985 : 14 days, 21 hours

    Carrot1985 : 9 years, 6 months

    &&{[Carrot]}@@ : 9861554213 years, 8 months

     

     

    Profanity

    When helping out new players on the forums, please don’t use profanity. Profanity is masked by the forums as “waffle”. This can confuse new players, and you won’t be helping out at all when you say “Magus is waffle”.

     
    • Blaq 16:23 on June 2, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      After reading this I went and changed my pass. Figured it was safe enough having 8 letters and 2 digits. Changed it to 8 letters with uppercases and 4 digits. Thanks for this. 🙂

  • skuzfoz 22:55 on May 27, 2010 Permalink | Reply  

    Skuzbat is Pink for Tink and so can you! 

    A good portion of <Old Folks> is currently Pink for Tink, so I figured I’d share how pink I am.

    Skuzbat_000

    Skuzbat_001

     
  • skuzfoz 15:43 on May 27, 2010 Permalink | Reply  

    Wut Skuz iz finkin: afta’ returnin’ 

     

    What I love about Old Folks is that I log in and instantly get invited for something I didn’t even know was happening. I’m RR48… that means I’m simply not incredibly powerful. Honestly, I’m not great at gearing up in this game. I need some serious LV runs, but have little confidence in PvE in WAR. Old Folks still seems to respect my abilities and presence.

    I’m not sure what it is about WAR. In every other MMO, I am simply the best healer you’ll get. I’m not bragging to sound good, I’m just uncontested in the other MMOs I used to enjoy. I’m nearing 5 years of nearly solid PvP healing experience. Yet I’m not incredible at WAR. Perhaps I haven’t found the perfect strategy on my Shaman, I wouldn’t be afraid to admit it. I do fumble around sometimes, wondering if I should be hotting people up, or group healing. I can often output healing very close to higher-RR players, but my confidence is still low.

    Gearing is incredibly annoying. The next few sets of gear for me have intelligence on them. I question though, should I take them? Or keep my gear from b/b?  This gear is doing me well, but I really feel as though I should be getting something new by now. In any event, I don’t have anywhere near enough tokens to really get anything meaningful.

     

    I did my first 1.3.5 City. My first time in was a PUG on both sides, and it was an easy Altdorf raid for Destruction. I got a gold bag which I had to wait 24 hours to get, it ended up being Invader boots. I got a purple bag in the final stage. It was purple boots, and while they had fantastic stats, I simply cannot lose my 5% crit bonus from my b/b set over them. Now I wish I would have taken them incase I get the b/b set hat, but we all make mistakes.

    My 2nd time through was in a Raven Host Alliance premade, although it wasn’t a full premade. I could tell because we were having some coordination issues. We managed to lose this time, but we were able to get into another almost empty instance before the city siege ended. That was fun.

    My overall impression of the city is very good, I wish I were around to test it on the PTS, I can tell a lot of testing and hard work went into making the city the way it is now.

     

    I did some Scenarios last night/this morning with Old Folks, it was very good fun, I had not done a scenario since the changes. There isn’t a whole lot to report about it, it was nice seeing Gaarawar in a couple of scenarios, I had a lot of fun running away.

     

     

    The only other news to report is that Skuzbat is now Pink for Tink.

     
  • skuzfoz 18:00 on May 24, 2010 Permalink | Reply  

    Warhammer Online: Greener Edition 

    Today marks Skuz’s return to the game.

     

    Don’t forget to send prizes.

     
  • skuzfoz 07:56 on May 6, 2010 Permalink | Reply  

    Bulletins, Blogs & Bigotry 

    My attorney is like all others a Goblin Shaman. We were on my Enslaved Manticore somewhere in the wastelands west of Praag, returning to the Inevitable City with an unreasonably sized bag of mushrooms. Red, black, spotted and striped. We were kicking up a cloud of black-grey dust behind us that was sticking to the vomit on the Manticore’s heavy tail. That was not mine, I was keeping my composure, only occasionally dodging the blue beetles in tuxedos that were attempting to enter my skull.

    We were approaching the forums now, the skyline cluttered with Player Support and General Discussion varieties. Later it would become apparent that there had been about 7 Skaven on our trail earlier, but the sound of the wind and the fires in the distant Praag had drowned out the sound. All that was left was the contents of some future soup. It seems Skaven eventually fall apart in their blind rage to eat all of your mushrooms and leave you for dead. Endurance is not their strength, but neither is calculus, or showing up to the Character Creation screen.

    I peered into the forums, and I’m not surprised at what I saw;

    Black Orcs, complaining about equality but at the same time repressing everyone else. They don’t even make a good case for themselves.

    Archmages, having considerably better burst healing than anyone else but still looking exactly like a bunch of idiots in table cloths.

    Cheaters, complaining about losing their accounts to “hackers”, when nothing more than a keylogger had been passed on. In this world, cheating is the only way you’re going to get one of those.

    What really caught my attention was the Dev Discussions section. Lack of information had caused a barrel of monkeys, seemingly on mescaline, to spill out and start spewing mislead information all over the place. “No bans yet,” I said to my attorney “these bastards don’t even understand what they’re rambling about yet.” These people almost universally had their rights taken away from them a few years back under the threat of brown people from the east… but would sooner riot over things that aren’t even finalized. Not even officially announced.

    If only the outside world worked like this. If only the only people you really ever heard from were violent and cranky.

    “We came here to explain that the Archmage is clearly better.” my attorney reminded me.  He was right as usual. My burst was not existent. My group healing was mediocre. My AP pool was horrid. My TTD was similar to that of the Kennedy family. The only thing special I could really do was to increase Toughness on players that should already have 700+ toughness. It doesn’t slow down the massive burst of… everyone. It isn’t burst – in fact, it wastes yet another GCD.

    My thinking was interrupted by a phone call from Morkquarters. Gorkquarters. Morkquarters.

     

     

    I had to report on patch 1.3.5 within 2 days, and I had to do it fax it in. It would be a True Fax. It would be the greatest thing I had reported on yet. If only they knew what was down the road from that, they might stop complaining about the little things.

     
  • skuzfoz 07:02 on May 4, 2010 Permalink | Reply  

    Fear And Loathing In 1.3.6 

    We were somewhere around 1.3.5 when the patch notes began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit left out; maybe your class got changed…” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the forums were full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and tearing apart a specific part of the April producer’s letter, which was going about a hundred miles an hour in a questionable direction. And a voice was screaming: “Holy Waffle! What are these goddamn animals crying about?!”

    This is a post to mark my transition into Gonzo WAR Blogging.

     
  • skuzfoz 00:09 on May 3, 2010 Permalink | Reply  

    TheFuture.MYP 

    I don’t mention often enough how much I love that Mythic developers leave goodies in places that we shouldn’t be looking.

    I can’t and won’t give out too much information regarding this because it just wouldn’t be good for the game if everyone knew where to look to find information on inside development. Especially things we haven’t been told about yet. Things that have barely been hinted about. It’s there, however, and it’s super neat. It’s a good insight on the development process, or at least, the basic framework of the game.

    It’s actually quite difficult to write about this, I didn’t plan this out beforehand. I don’t doubt that everything I’ve seen is beyond NDA, as nobody outside Mythic is supposed to be ABLE to see it.  I wonder sometimes if it’s against the TOS or EULA… but I was invited to the Core Tester program just hours after finding my original stockpile of information. The project I had found back then seems to have been scrapped entirely. Sad, because there’s a fair amount of asking for it among the community.

    Note to self: I hate that “note to self” business and won’t be starting this paragraph that way. No.

    I of course report what I find to Andy just in case it’s not meant to be in there. Anyone can get into this information, and we don’t need a community uproar or something started over things that are months away from being implemented. The first thing I had found, was removed from public view for a couple of builds, and then re-implemented for the Live build. I later found out that about 2 other people across the internet had seen the information, but had not said much about it.

    This, however, is a bit bigger and could be considered a large game changer. I’d call it that.

     

    The only problem I have with finding this information is: I was writing up a suggestion post with numbers and everything, all carefully planned out and such… and it was the same damn idea. Now, releasing that post would just be an NDA breach.

     

    That being said, THIS post might be too far, and might disappear.

     
    • TJKazmark 01:30 on May 3, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      You’re right about not saying anything. I’m completely in the dark on what you’re talking about, haha.

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