I first heard the story (and snagged the headline, since the story makes for a better headline than it does a story) from an excellent post at WoW.com on the matter – apparently the folks at Warcry managed to sit down with Rob Pardo of Blizzard to talk about what he thought some of World of Warcraft’s biggest mistakes have been. One of the notable mentions? Arenas:

We didn’t engineer the game and classes and balance around it, we just added it on, so it continues to be very difficult to balance. Is WoW a PvE cooperative game, or a competitive PvP game? There’s constant pressure on the class balance team, there’s pressure on the game itself, and a lot of times players who don’t PvP don’t understand why their classes are changing. I don’t think we ever foresaw how much tuning and tweaking we’d have to do to balance it in that direction.

I don’t think this is quite as controversial as WoW.com and a lot of other bloggers do, and I also don’t think it’s as huge news as everyone seems to think it is, personally. I played on an arena team for a while there in season 2 and 3, back when it was still fun, and while I agree that 2v2 matches were horribly mismatched, I thought the strategy involved with 3v3 matches and the chaos that was your average 5v5 match was fun to participate in.

The downside of course, as Pardo explains, is that Blizzard had to keep balancing classes around one another so everyone had a relatively fair shot to participate in arenas in some regard, or else classes and specs would completely get left out for them. This is a concern that a lot of players raised over the course of arena seasons, and Blizzard did a really good job of trying to make changes so the classes could match up with one another, but in the end there’s just nothing you can do about it.

Pardo points out that the dichotomy to the game – whether World of Warcraft is a cooperative PvE game or a competitive PvP game – is difficult to manage and it’s almost impossible to balance classes and encounters so they can be both at the same time without obviously tipping their hand as to which direction they think the game should lean.

Personally, I think that Blizzard could have done just as well to spend more time balancing the classes for PvE as long as that’s the majority of the player base, and allow PvP players to carve out their own niche. It might be painful at first as a number of PvP players will whine and complain, but the truly skilled players would find a way around some of the obvious class imbalances and others would simply get by playing teams of the preferred classes instead.

It’s kind of a backhanded compliment to the people I used to play arenas with to suggest that the best thing Blizzard could do for arena PvP in World of Warcraft is to ignore it: they’d probably be the happiest making the game work for them instead of being handed changes by Blizzard, and of the arena players that would whine about class imbalances, they’d eventually get shouted down by players who managed to make skill their ultimate competitive weapon, but in the end, Blizzard has a choice – they can spend more development time on the PvE elements of the game that really draw in new players, or they can spend development hours tuning classes for PvP, which is great for people who enjoy it but it’s not adding to the core elements of the game.

Can you believe it’s been five years since World of Warcraft was released? I’ve been playing since back in those wholesome vanilla days, and while I was in the beta I waited a bit before I picked up the game proper…not too long though, maybe a couple of months-so I could play with my then-roommates, and I’ve been playing ever since. A lot of people I know have come and gone in that time period, and tons more people have signed up to play with the release of Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King, but Blizzard is about to celebrate World of Warcraft’s 5 year anniversary with a massive sweepstakes event in which just about every WoW player is entered.

So what do you have to do to enter? Nothing, as long as you have an active account that’s in good standing – you’re automatically in!

And what do you win? Every week Blizzard will give away some prizes to a few lucky players. Check out the prize listings below.

A. On Wednesday, November 4, 2009, five (5) qualified entrants will be chosen by Sponsor at random from all qualified entrants who created an account on or before October 26, 2008 to receive one (1) “Charge of the Great Dragon Flights,” Stein, with an approximate retail value of $89.99;

B. On Wednesday, November 11, 2009, five (5) qualified entrants will be chosen by Sponsor at random from all qualified entrants who created an account on or before November 2, 2007 to receive one (1) set of PPK Gaming Glasses from Gunnar Optiks, with an approximate retail value of $59.00;

C. On Wednesday, November 18, 2009, seven (7) qualified entrants will be chosen by Sponsor at random from all qualified entrants who created an account on or before November 9, 2006 to receive a One ASUS ENGTS250 DK/DI/1GD3 video card with an approximate retail value of $149.99;

D. On Wednesday, November 25, 2009, five (5) qualified entrants will be chosen by Sponsor at random from all qualified entrants who created an account on or before November 16, 2005 to receive a prize package consisting of One (1) SteelSeries QcK Limited Edition Mousepad, One (1) SteelSeries World of Warcraft MMO Gaming Mouse and One (1) SteelSeries Siberia V2 Full-Size Headset retailing $79.99, with each prize package having an approximate retail value of $194.97;

E. On Wednesday, December 2, 2009:
1) Three (3) qualified entrant will be chosen by Sponsor at random from all qualified entrants who created an account on or before November 23, 2004 to receive a prize package consisting of One (1) ASUS ENGTX260/HTDI/896M Nvidia video card with an approximate retail value of $149.99, and One (1) Game Card redeemable for one (1) year of World of Warcraft game time with an approximate retail value of $155.88; and One (1) Autographed Onyxia Print with an approximate retail value of $19.99.

2) Two (2) qualified entrants will be chosen by Sponsor at random from all qualified entrants who created an account on or before November 23, 2004 to receive a prize package consisting of: One (1) ASUS Republic of Gamers 3D Vision enhanced laptop with an approximate retail value of $2,499.00, One (1) Game Card redeemable for one (1) year of World of Warcraft game time with an approximate retail value of $155.88; and One (1) Autographed Onyxia Print with an approximate retail value of $19.99.

(Emphasis mine.) How hot is that?! The full rules and eligability details are here at the official contest rules site. I’m actually pretty glad to see that some of the love will be given to old-timers who have had their accounts for ages like me, but then again, there are probably millions of us in each of those categories, so I’m not holding my breath to win anything. Even so, best of luck to all of you!

See this little guy? Isn’t he adorable? He’s Mini KT, the Littlest Lich – and he can be yours for the low low price of $10 USD. That’s right, I said $10 DOLLARS, not 10 gold, and he’s not the only pet you can get in-game for that amount of money.

Remember back when we noticed that interesting new pets were appearing in the source files of the game? I was intrigued by the Pandaren Monk pet, but WoW.com also noticed a Core Hound Pup along with Lil KT up there a while back on the PTRs. Speculation ran rampant that they were potentially collector’s edition pets for Cataclysm, but now we know their true purpose: Blizzard will sell them in-game, through their Blizzard Store online, and likely through Battle.net at some point.

If you drop the ten bucks on the Pandaren Monk, half of that purchase will go to the Make-A-Wish foundation, which is a pretty good reason to spring for it.

In any event though, this is Blizzard’s first dabblings in micro-transactions in World of Warcraft, and it’s gotten more than a few people pretty riled up. Many other MMOs that have gone before WoW (and likely those that will come after) that used micro-transactions to get more real money out of the players who are subscribed, and most free MMOs use micro-transactions to get money out of players who can sign up and play for free, but if they want the best gear or a custom avatar or better graphics, they have to shell out a little cash.

The argument on both sides of this is immense, loud, and pretty empassioned: some people herald micro-transactions as the end of World of Warcraft entirely, both as a popular game and as a professional, high-quality one, labeling micro-transactions as the mark of MMOs that are on the decline. The other side sees this as another fantastic way that players who are willing to pay for it can customize their characters, and look forward to other potential options like special RP clothes, custom avatar appearances, and more.

Personally I can see the logic of both sides of the equation, but I have to call attention to the fact that Blizzard has essentially already given players what they want for real money in-game in the form of faction changes, race changes, server transfers, and so on. Even appearance changes (which cost in-game money, not real money) came at player behest. I’m completely on-board with the thought that only MMOs that need money or are moving to a “free to play” model currently make heavy use of micro-transactions, but World of Warcraft certainly isn’t there, and it’s certainly not on the decline.

So the moral of the story? If you don’t want to spend real money for an in-game pet, don’t buy one. If there are enough people who agree with you, it’ll be unpopular and Blizzard will shut it down. If on the other hand there’s a demand for it and people love the idea, it’ll grow in popularity and more items will likely be added to the store. In any event, it’s likely not the end of World of Warcraft as we know it – that’s going to happen in Cataclysm.

Now that we have race changes, faction changes, server changes, appearance changes, and so on, one topic I’ve been thinking a lot about is whether or not Blizzard would ever allow us to copy our characters to new realms. I’m not referring to character transfers, where you take a character, uproot them from one server and then land them in their destination – I mean copy, duplicate a character that’s currently on one realm and make a copy on another realm.

It would be a paid service, of course, but I could see it being in exceptionally high demand with two classes of people, both of whom would make Blizzard a lot of money:

1. Entire high-end and raiding guilds that are focused on progression who would be more than happy to duplicate their characters on as many servers as their core raiding team has money to do in order to achieve world-firsts and titles on as many realms as they can.

Clearly this would make Blizzard a ton of money – a lot of high-end progression guilds have real money behind them, as we’ve seen with entire guilds that do faction changes or server transfers, but if you tacked a $25 or $30 USD fee to a character copy you might see some guilds do it two, three, or four times before their ranks run out of actual cash. Or alternatively, they’ll keep doing it every so often as long as they can raise the money in the interim. Blizzard could mitigate this by capping the number of copies for a character, or putting a relatively long time-limit between copies, like 3-6 months.

2. Casuals who want to try their hand at raiding or join new friends on another server in new guilds without being forced to roll alts and start leveling from scratch on those servers.

Sure, they could just roll death knights, but don’t we have enough of those already? Also, don’t we already see people rolling DKs on servers where they’ve made new friends so they don’t have to level to 55 but also don’t have to transfer their main that’s happily at home on another server, possibly in a guild where that person already has friends?

I’ve seen more DKs join my guild because they came to spend time with a friend on our server than I’ve seen character transfers, and I’m personally in the same boat – I have friends who play on two different servers than the one my main is on, and while I love my main to death, I’m bored on my server. I don’t want to leave the friends I have on my server, but I also balk at having to level up to 80 from scratch on another server. It would be great if I could copy my 80 hunter to another server, join my friends’ guild there, and just move on with life, without having the pressure of pulling my main out of my guild on my current server and leaving my friends there with alts.

Granted, this crowd of people may make Blizzard less large sums of money, but probably more money over time than the previous group. If you could copy your 80 to a new server where, for example, you just met a coworker who plays WoW and could use your class in their weekend raiding guild, wouldn’t you? Especially if you could still leave a copy of that same 80 on your current server in your current guild that raids on weeknights?

Is this a good or a bad idea?

That being said, this idea also fosters laziness that some people say is running rampant in the WoW community. No one apparently wants to level or experience the game pre-level cap anymore, so if Blizzard allowed something like this, would it just cheapen the leveling experience? Would someone level to 80 and then just copy their character around instead of rolling new classes and trying alts? Also, the disincentive to this is that you could save yourself the fee entirely by just leveling a new character on the server you’re considering playing on – it may take more time, but it at least doesn’t cost money.

Also, this just marches down the path of cheapening choices – you made a choice to play on a server, should you be held to it, and punished if you want to move, either financially, through only having one of your character on each server, or by being forced to level on any future server you choose as home?

I’m of multiple minds, obviously – I admit the example of my 80 main and the two servers I’d love to play on is real, and my personal conflict about not wanting to pull my main out of my current guild is also real. I could fix the problem easily by just rolling new characters on those servers and leveling them, but part of me wonders if I’m the only person who’s had this thought – and if I’m not, are there enough others who are willing to pay money to make this idea worthwhile to Blizzard?

What do you think? If Blizzard allowed you to, for a fee, copy a character to a new server, leaving the existing one intact and just making a duplicate, would you spring for it? How many times would you make the copy? What if there were a time limit between copies? Let us know in the comments!

Well it’s finally happened: we said they were coming, but they’re finally here! Race Changes are now live on US realms! That means if you have you’re looking to change your human to a night elf or your gnome to a draenei, you can do it now – for a fee – $25.00 USD, to be exact.

You’ll be able to change your race to any other race in your faction that supports the current character’s class, and you can change your race again to go back to the original if you don’t like what you chose, but it’ll involve buying another race change – so it’s one way: make sure you know what you’re doing before you switch! Read the full FAQ here.

That all being said, it does come down to the whole notion of whether or not choices still matter in WoW – now you can change your faction, change your race, change your server, change your appearance – the only thing you can’t do right now is change your class. I wonder what’s next!

Blizzard just hosted its first ever #Blizzchat developer chat on Twitter! The @warcraft twitter account took questions from other WoW fans on Twitter and took time to answer them all in a nice huge blue-laden forum post, posting the questions and answers as they went along!

Among some of the questions, well, there’s the one above sadly (click the image above to embiggen) – it means my hunter will never have a level 80 druid to love. But seriously, the questions are fabulous and the answers, while not always forthcoming, are entertaining to read. Of course the thread dissolves into your standard WoW-forum behavior after too long, but the blue posts are more than worth it. It’s clear that Blizzard is planning to do this again and make more use of its Warcraft Twitter account in the future, but for the time being? We have some amazing questions and answers.

Over at the World of Warcraft Livejournal Community, frequent poster zhiva_the_mage brings up a very interesting point by claiming that authenticators and migrating to Battle.net won’t necessarily add much more security to your account, mostly due to the nature of how they work: your World of Warcraft account allows you to keep both authentication factors secret (your username and password are both things that you create), whereas your Battle.net account uses your e-mail address (public) as well as a password (private). Standing on its own, that would imply that a Battle.net account is less secure than a WoW account because one of your authentication factors is now public.

Add the authenticator and now you have a third authentication factor, one that’s now private, essentially returning you to the previous model, and its security.

This is true if you were staring at it from straight ahead, but it discounts to some degree the level of security that an authenticator adds to your account as opposed to a private username. They pale in comparison when you look at levels of security. Whereas a private username relies on security through obscurity, an authenticator adds an authentication factor that is not only a numeric code with RSA encryption behind it, but it changes regularly. They’re simply orders of magnitude difference in levels of security, and the presence of an authenticator makes the privacy of a username pale in comparison.

Don’t get me wrong, ideally all three authentication factors would be private and you would be able to log in with a private username, a private password, and an RSA encrypted authenticator code, but given Blizzard’s plans for Battle.net (a la a Steam-like service where you can connect with friends and likely make game purchases) an e-mail address is another way to create unique users.

update – another LJ user, strangetwn-god, points out that I failed to mention a very important concept at this stage of the article: why a “private” username isn’t really private, and why it keeping it secret, as in the ever-present “security through obscurity” model is inherently flawed. He points out:

A dictionary, a phone book, and a perl script can discover a few million usernames over the course of an afternoon. Discovering a specific username if you have personal information likewise can be done in a minimal quantity of time. The sad thing is, a dictionary and a phonebook will also grab at least 50% of the passwords even with all the abundant warnings to not do that.

Of course, dictionary attacks are no longer really needed given browser vulnerabilities and social engineering hacks that can return hundreds of username/password combinations anyway.

He hit the important points, but it’s also worth mentioning that with username/password combinations much more security is inherently given, both by the system and by the user, to the password. Frankly, you’ll never hear anyone ever put up a MoTD when you log in to WoW that says “a Blizzard employee will never ask for your username.” Username dialogs are never starred out to avoid shoulder surfers picking up on them, and users don’t immediately rush to change their usernames when they get the feeling someone else knows it or they hear of a security threat.

It’s not an excuse for not making it as obscure as possible, but it’s definitely a legitimate point. Your username is not secret, most users don’t treat it like it’s a secret the same way they treat their passwords, and while it may not be a direct rationale for moving to a blatantly public authentication favor like an e-mail address, you’re certainly not losing any real security by going in that direction.

Livejournal user Arwenoid makes a very interesting response to the notion that Blizzard has horrible security because of the need for authenticators and the number of people who have had their accounts hacked that I think is worth re-posting:

People seem to think that blizzard has terrible security. They don’t, THEY’VE never been hacked (well, that we know of.)

This is YOUR account, and therefore, your responsibility. This isn’t victim blaming, this is about personal responsibility. The only way people are going to get your password is through your actions anyway — and don’t get me wrong, there are some damn clever ways that people use to get your passwords — but they’re not getting them from Blizzard, they’re getting them from *you*.

Seriously, authenticators are $6. They even ship to Canada now — I picked up a couple when my partner’s account got hacked. No big deal, some minor inconvenience, one missed raid, and he got everything back. It’s just a warcraft account.

What surprises me is that more banks don’t require authenticators for their logins. You know, something that’s actually important.

She’s absolutely, completely, and positively right. The end-user will always-always be the weakest link in any information security system, simply by nature of the fact that there are always more users than operators.

To that end, let’s look at the security around the authenticator and why the direct comparison doesn’t really add up, although the original poster does have a point also:

Authenticators are essentially branded RSA keyfobs, which almost every organization that’s serious about remote access uses to secure everything from VPN and remote access accounts to internal systems that protect personally identifiable data (I work in an organization like this – I can’t tell you what we use them for, but suffice to say it’s important and personal data) – the problem is that forcing people to get RSA keyfobs for access to external services presents a significant logistical challenge to most companies that have large user-bases for their web services, and requires an infrastructure upgrade to suppport RSA-authenticated login at all times.

However, all of those things are do-able, and because of the nature of RSA encryption and the fact that your keyfob is essentially changing your password every 30 seconds or so, makes it a very very attractive option for banks and credit unions and such, companies who probably already use them internally for their own employees to protect data security on the inside.

There are a number of companies who are actually closely watching Blizzard’s use of of RSA keyfobs with their playerbase to see if it’s feasible for them and their users. The other mindset with a number of these services is that the cost of the added security simply doesn’t outweigh the support and logistical requirements on the organization, or alternatively they — directly to your point — would rather spend their information assurance budgets to make sure they don’t screw up internally than worry about their users screwing up and getting themselves hacked, thus exposing a lot of data to the individual, but nothing of consequence to the organization.

It’s an order of magnitude issue: does the company spend security dollars making sure all of their users, each with access to a small amount of data but collectively make up a lot of data, are each as secure as they can be (which may not be much), or do they spend the money on their own internal employees and processes? Which is the bigger bang for their buck? Blizzard – and most companies – agree it’s the latter.

A tip of the hat to WoW.com, who broke the news that Blizzard has unveiled its own YouTube channel, already stuffed full of the animations and cinematics that we’ve already seen up to this point. If you’ve been following the trailers for Cataclysm and fondly remember the opening cinematics for Burning Crusade and vanilla WoW, and if you’ve experienced some of the machinima trailers for different in and out of game events, you’ve seen everything posted right now.

Still, the fact that they’re all on a custom YouTube channel implies that Blizzard is planning to release more videos in the future that won’t necessarily live on the World of Warcraft site, and we’ll likely see videos and trailers for other games in Blizzard’s portfolio as well. We’ll just have to wait and see what else they put up.

I didn’t think it was going to happen, but I suppose that the fact that faction changes became a reality means anything is possible: Blizzard did say they were contemplating giving you the option to change your character’s race among the choices in your faction, but according to the WoW Account Management page (I screenshotted mine above) the button is already there, just marked with “coming soon.”

It kind of makes sense: faction changes were probably harder to implement and included a lot of the mechanics needed for race changes. But it goes to push the point I mentioned in my post: Factions, Classes, Genders, Haircuts: Do Choices Matter Anymore in Azeroth?

As soon as this is live, I don’t think there’ll be anything about your character that you can’t change if you’re willing to drop the cash. Do you think this dilutes the choices you make at the beginning of the game? Are you willing to drop what will probably be $20 or $25 dollars to change your character’s race? Shout it out in the comments!

The beauty of my post, Additional Instances Cannot Be Launched: A Technical Perspective, is that it appeared to come right on the heels of Blizzard completing its datacenter upgrade to add capacity and rid themselves and their players of the dreaded “Additional Instances Cannot Be Launched” error forever.

In a blue post on the official forums, Crygil announces that you all shouldn’t see this error ever again and that the upgrades should all be complete. Seeing is believing of course, but so far so good in my experience, and I haven’t heard people complaining about it recently, which means there must have been an impact. Blizzard’s done good by their customers on this one, especially if the errors really are gone – people have been complaining about this for a good long time, half of them demanding Blizzard keep them updated daily on the status of the changes and requesting way more vision into the back end of World of Warcraft than I think any company gives its users, but we should see that furor die down now that the upgrades are complete – assuming the upgrades have managed to rid us of the error.

Personally, I’m curious if the strategy I laid out in my article turned out to be true, but more importantly, I’m just glad I don’t have to sit outside an instance for a half-hour waiting to get in. What about you? Have you been able to get into all of your instances now that the server upgrades are finished?