The post RPG Nostalgia: What Got You Into RPGs? was inspired by a shared topic post at the Blog Azeroth forums. The beauty of the shared topics is that several other amazing bloggers from the World of Warcraft community weigh in on those topics as well and share their experiences.

I shared mine, now go read theirs!

• Triv, of the blog Raid Naked, and the one who originally suggested this amazing shared topic, whipped up an excellent post, and reading it I see he is totally right there with my love of MUDs of all shapes and stripes. But perhaps most importantly? We share a mutual love of Dungeons and Dragons! Thanks for dropping in and commenting on my post, Triv!
• Naithin of Tank N’ Tree shares an excellent post about his history in MMOs heading all the way back to the original Asheron’s Call! Prior to that, he was known to play games that I loved just as much, like Descent and Mechwarrior 2!
• Kirei, of A Gamer of Sorts, has a love of RPGs that’s deep seated and rooted in some truly amazing games that may sound old school, but maybe it just feels that way because I’m getting old: Mario World and Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. I have to admit, Mario World has some amazingly RPG-esque elements in addition to the classic platforming action we all know about – the whole opening up zones and moving between them, saving up special items and then going back to areas you’ve been through in order to get more goodies – nice call!
• Rajjs of The Angry Alt had some choice words describing her gaming history, most notably that she picked up a love of RPGs from her mother, who was an avid MUD player! Way to go, mom! It was all downhill from there, eh Rajjs?
• Ophelie from The Bossy Pally dropped in on my RPG nostalgia post to point out that couples that WoW together may not always stay together, but they at least have some fun when they play! Her RPG first loves are games like Final Fantasy VII and the venerable, amazing, glorious Might and Magic – a game that I remember loving when I played it as well.

What a great run around the WoW community on this one, and an amazing shared topic! Head over to the posts linked to read the perspectives of the other bloggers!

This is an amazing question for me, because multi-player role-playing games and table top RPGs and I have a long, rich, and mixed history. What about you? What’s your history and love affair with role-playing games? Shout it out in the comments!

And yes, I’ll bare all, don’t worry, just behind the jump:

I’ve been a tabletop gamer for a long time, although I can’t say I’ve always enjoyed it. Back in high school some of my friends and I tried to play a Dungeons and Dragons Dark Sun campaign, with me as a 6-foot tall preying mantis called a Thri-Kreen. (You can see what artists imagine them to look like at Google Images.) I thought the playable race was fun, until in our campaign we kind of exploited it to make me hear something no one else could and I slowly went insane and went on a killing spree over it. Kind of put a damper on the campaign. Potential, but we just didn’t keep it up.

At the time I was more engrossed in Magic: The Gathering, which I still love and while technically isn’t an RPG in the strictest sense, I think it’s arguable that it would fit into the topic. When I got to college, it was all about MUDs and MUSHes and other text-based games on the Web like Legend of the Green Dragon, which were playable in quick bursts from computer labs or class.

I dabbled in other tabletop games, but it wasn’t until my roommates and I started playing Warhammer Quest (probably the only Games Workshop game that didn’t require a billion figures and was relatively forgiving) that I really really got into tabletops. We would throw on the soundtrack to .hack // SIGN and play a couple of dungeons, invite a few friends over, and completely dork out for a few hours. It was a lot of fun, and I still love the game.

Around the same time, I started getting into MMOs – I don’t remember which one was first, but I picked up Final Fantasy XI at the behest of the same roommates, and while I loved the game visually and gameplay-wise, I was about to get my first taste of the social drawbacks of MMOs. Everyone I played with – all of my roommates – stayed up later than I did and at the time didn’t work as long hours as I did or commute as far as I did, so they had plenty of time to play while I was working or out with friends and such. I wound up falling behind level-wise, and as anyone who’s played FFXI knows, grouping with people who aren’t of approximate level in that game results in a pretty hefty experience penalty for everyone involved.

Eventually interest in FFXI waned even though the game lived on, and my friends started dropping off of the game. I did the same, and even though I still haven’t found another game that encourages people to stay logged in the way that FFXI did with its Bazaar system (where players sat and AFK’d outside of the auction house and sold their own wares that they didn’t want or couldn’t put on the auction house) – I mean, I’d leave for work in the morning with bags full of items to bazaar, and come home at night after having been logged in for 9 to 11 hours to find empty bags and tons of gil.

I will consider The Adventures of Fisternis and Prufrock the everliving testament to how awesome that game was.

Shortly thereafter – and probably through the entire time, I was seeing my first MMO love. A little game that not a lot of people may have played, but was rich with experience, depth, roleplay options, and amazing design and graphics: a space-based MMORPG called Earth and Beyond. Seriously, check out the trailer: it’s epic:

Of course Earth and Beyond got completely rolled over because it wasn’t making enough money to keep EA happy, and they were worried about the looming threat of the still popular but wildly more complicated and more massive space MMO EVE Online. That being said though, I played a Jen’quai Explorer named Laithe – a proud Sha’ha’dem intent on following his explorer heart as a member of the explorer caste but without sacrificing the teeth that he had earned from training with the Shin’wa warrior monks of the Jenquai people. Yeah, I know that’s all gibberish to you, especially if you’ve never played the game, but it was a lot of fun, and when I wasn’t exploring vast sectors of space, responding to distress signals and jumpstarting ships, or mixing it up with alien baddies out in the depths of space, I did a little reporting for Net 7, the in-game fan-contributed news and community portal.

I probably played Earth and Beyond for a couple of years, almost right up until Sunset, when EA and Westwood decided to shut the game down. I wasn’t there for that, but I’m glad to see that a couple of Google searches for the game prove that the idea still lives in the form of emulators and fans trying to recreate the in-game galaxy on their own servers for other fans who miss the game as much as I do.

I went without playing MMOs for a long time until I got accepted into the beta of this new game that my friends told me would change the face of MMOs forever. I didn’t really believe it, although I admitted that the company behind it had some strong lore, amazing storytelling power, and so far the screens I had seen looked interesting. A little game called World of Warcraft.

I signed up for the beta and fell in love – the game was immersive, beautiful, fluid, and had tons of different character classes and races, as well as factions that opposed each other – it didn’t take long for me to decide I had to play it when it came out. The closed beta became open beta, and the open beta went live, and I dropped off for a few months. At the behest of my friends who had run out on launch day to pick it up, I snagged it too, and well…the rest is history. Haven’t stopped playing since.

So what about you? What got you into RPGs? Did you start with tabletop games back in the day, or is World of Warcraft your first RPG love? Was WoW your gateway drug into a new world of role playing, or would you say WoW is pretty much the only RPG you could ever see yourself playing?

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.

So Windows 7 has been out for a couple of weeks now, and most enthusiasts who are really familiar with Microsoft’s new OS have been running the beta and the release candidate for months now to get a feel for it and shake out any issues the new OS may have. But there is one community that’s been somewhat absent from the discussion: the World of Warcraft community!

Granted, Windows 7 isn’t really fundamentally different from Windows Vista, although I think everyone would agree that it’s an improvement – so there’s no reason to believe that if you’re running WoW under Windows Vista that it won’t run just as well in Windows 7. Players making the leap from Windows XP to Windows 7 who are forced to wipe and do a full install may have a little more heartburn though, but it should still work without issue.

How about you, dear readers? Any of you upgraded to Windows 7 full-time and have any stories to share? Was getting World of Warcraft running, patched, and your favorite add-ons installed a breeze or was it a horrific trial that you’re just waiting to tell everyone about? Shout it out in the comments.

I’ll follow this post up shortly with more experiences with Windows 7 and World of Warcraft as I hear more from you and the rest of the community, and get hands on myself!

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!

So progress on the PTRs marches forward, and the next major set of updates to the PTR imply that Icecrown Citadel will be open for testing soon…which also means that Arthas’ day of reckoning is close at hand. We know that 3.3 is going to be Wrath of the Lich King’s last major content patch, with maybe a only a few other minor events between 3.3 and Cataclysm.

Between that and the reports from Blizzcon earlier this year that the next expansion looks remarkably polished, and you just have to wonder: is Cataclysm closer than we think? Admittedly, to counter that argument there’s the fact that PTR testing is taking its sweet time, and we don’t have even the slightest indication that we’ll see 3.3 live in the immediate or near future. This and the fact that we know Blizzard hasn’t announced an alpha, much less a beta of Cataclysm, so as much as it might seem that it may be closer than we think, there are other signs that it’s pretty far off.

My guess? We’ll see it around the beginning of the holiday season next year – that would be about a year from now we’ll be eagerly placing our pre-orders and wondering if Collector’s Editions are sold out at major retailers, ahead of a November 2010 release. What about you? When are you betting Cataclysm will be hitting store shelves? Am I on the money or am I way too late?

A great topic came up over at the World of Warcraft LiveJournal Community: today is the corresponding maintenance day that gives us a year after patch 3.0.2, after Wrath, and after a number of new changes that we now take for granted were introduced into the game.

Achievements and achievement points, the currency tab for badges and other things that were cluttering up our bags, Barber Shops and the ability to change your in-game appearance for gold, Dalaran vanishing and leaving behind a crater, Stormwind Harbor and new Zepplin flight paths, mounts and pets being “learnable” and not taking up bag space, the in-game calendar, all of them came with 3.0.2, and it was a pretty monumental patch.

So without changing this into a “How’s that 3.0.2 working out for you” kind of post, I think it’s safe to admit that WoW has come a long way even in the past year. What are some of your favorite changes we’ve seen in the past year?

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.

If you’ve been reading closely, you’ll notice that there’s something special about that Icecrown Citadel preview that Blizzard posted: that at the end, even in the 5-man, players will ascend to the Frozen Throne and stand toe-to-toe with Arthas himself.

This has sparked a pretty big discussion that I’ve heard on a couple of sites and perhaps most notably on the WoW.com podcast, the WoW Insider Show, about whether or not Arthas should die when we face him. Do we smite him down like we did with Illidan, or do we redeem him somehow? Does he flee to return later somehow? What should happen when we face him?

There are a lot of mixed feelings about this, actually – some people feel very strongly that there isn’t anything left in Arthas to redeem, and that he should pay for his immeasurable crimes against Azeroth. They also point out, rightly, that Arthas has voluntarily allowed himself to be partially posessed by Ner’zhul, who was inside of Frostmourne before Arthas took posession of it, and that Ner’zhul the Lich also needs to pay for his crimes.

Finally, the other evidence that Arthas may not be able to be redeemed is the Icecrown quest line where the player finds Arthas’ human heart deep, deep, deep under Icecrown Citadel where Arthas discarded it long ago – and the fact that at the end of the quest chain Arthas’ heart is destroyed even though the player and Tirion Fordring had initially planned to use it to redeem him in the first place.

However, all of those events may not mean the end of Arthas, and it may not mean that players who face him won’t be able to redeem him somehow. The going theory is that in the 5-man, Arthas will battle the players and then retreat somewhere else that can only be accessed via the 25-man heroic version, and that’s where we’ll really see some action. He’s done it in a number of cases; he did it at the Wrathgate, where it was clear he was at least injured by the new plague that Putress and his ilk launched against everyone assembled to do battle there. We may even see more from the Forsaken faction that betrayed Sylvanas in the end, we just don’t know.

In any event, there are just as many arguments on the other side – that if Arthas can be redeemed that it could put an end to the scourge right then and there, and that a redeemed Arthas could be a valuable ally in the future, lore figure going forward, and even a major player in Cataclysm.

What do you guys think? Should we kill Arthas where he stands when we enter Icecrown Citadel, or should we find some way to return his humanity to him? Shout it out in the comments!

So the word is out that in patch 3.3, Emblems of Triumph will be the new emblem to have, and that everything that drops Emblems of Conquest now will drop Emblems of Triumph instead. You can still trade down if you want to pick up items from previous tiers, but you won’t be able to get Emblems of Conquest going forward.

The goal here is clearly accessibility, and Blizzard is solidifying its stance that they would rather more people be able to get access to more of the endgame gear and content than they would stratify it and only allow the highest-tier players have access to the badges that get the best gear in the game. What do you think? Is this trend towards making the endgame content and high-tier gear accessible even for casual players the right direction and a boost towards making the game more enjoyable for all players, or is this just another example of Blizzard dumbing down the game and diluting the achievements of its most hardcore players and devotees?