So there’s this new contest that Blizzard is running. Maybe you’ve seen it. They’re given away a computer. A Dell. Big deal. They have lots of contests, but this one is a little unusual.

You enter it by completing 25 quests in 5 weeks. Any 25 quests. Repeatables, whatever. Those who complete 25 quests will be entered in the drawing. As with many contests, there are catches, usually what is done with your personal information. Usually, that’s cool. You send in a thing or whatever. You actively enter the contest. In this, you can be entered into the contest without being aware of it. Maybe there’ll be a patch where you agree to it in updated TOS, but my server is down for like 36 hours for upgrades, so I dunno.

Now, with this contest, one of the points in the rules is that your information will be used to sell you stuff. Not just Blizzard stuff. Dell stuff. Dell can start spamming you with the email that Blizzard gave them because you entered the contest (whether you knew you did or not).

Is there an opt out? I suppose there is. Don’t do 25 quests in 5 weeks. You have to hamstring your WoW play in order to to protect your personal information. After the jump is a portion of the official rules as pertain to this concern. There is no segment of those rules for opting out.
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There I was, ripping it up in Alterac Valley like it was my job. We were marching on Stormpike Graveyard when I got railed by a monster crit. Dead as a doornail. Except, this was that very special kind of dead that doesn’t let me resurrect. That’s right, someone managed to kill me deader than dead. It seems to happen to me daily in AV, like some form of cruel karmic revenge for some imagined slight against the Alliance.

Sadly, no matter what I do, I just can’t rez. There’s no point in putting in a GM ticket since even the longest AV battle in Eitrigg is shorter than the pitiful response times for GM tickets. I walk back to my corpse, hanging out by my body, looking at the “Resurrect now?” dialog like a cruel joke at my expense. Sitting in game, I earn rep for the kills, but no HKs. /afk’ing out and I’m stuck with a 15 minute deserter buff that even a GM ticket won’t cure.

This sucks, Blizz, fix this, soon.

Looks like the first thing the leopard bit was WoW.

I guess it’s based on popularity but to me it seems to be in poor taste to bash one of the few gaming companies that develops cross-platform, and always has, in the promo page for your new OS.

•The Looking For Group channel is now defaulted off. Players will need to join the channel to access it. (/join LFG)

ROFLMAO

OK maybe it’s just me but I’m laughin’

EB games site has listed a ship date for the burning crusade.

Pre-Release
Ships 10/2/06

Merry Xmas.

I can’t get it to work very well though.

Maybe I should use this in game MP3 player instead.

So for some reason (read laziness) I have left the startup tip on since it’s introduction. There are some funny ones like “There is no Cow level” but usually it’s stuff like shift click this for that…. BUT since the patch the startup tip has been turned over to MOM. No i’m getting tips like go OUTSIDE to play. And eat your vegetables. WTF? I guess this falls under the same category as the beer companies telling me not to drink and drive. But really…outside? Where the heck is that?
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I didn’t get a screenshot, but the humor highpoint of the day on Demon Soul was this message over chat:

“To whoever decided to report my guild name ‘Sapped Girls Can’t Say No’ as being offensive, thanks sooooo much, they’re forcing me to disband it.”

The guild name is a bit too much on the silly side in my mind to be construed as being truly offensive, but I don’t think anyone should be surprised that it was taken down. Of course, to echo an earlier post, This guild-disbanding is brought to you buy the makers of the “How Big is Your Sack?” T-shirt. This makes me want to start an experiment of starting questionably-named guilds and advertising recruitment, and seeing what gets through the filters.

Now forming: “Michael Jackson Day Care”. Only taking characters level 14 and lower.

I’m not sure when this happened, but it’s pretty cool. US$39.99 is the equivalent of 60% of the price of a retail box here in Australia, and you still get the 30 days subscription. Now, the phrasing does look like you need to have a trial account to upgrade, rather than just being able to buy an account from scratch on-line, but did I mention that all current players can hand out trial accounts at the moment? This would have been handy back at the beginning when supplies of the retail product were a little low.

Blizzard have started up another “refer-a-friend” promotion for WoW. You can email up to five friends at a time with a 10-day trial code. If they convert to a normal paying account, you get a free 30 days. Or to put it another way, if anyone you know already intends to buy WoW (or has bought it but is yet to register) you can score 10 free days for them and 30 free days for yourself by using this system first.
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