Wow Comics

As you may have noticed, we've got a nice big list of wow comics up for your amusement. The list will expand when I find (or am given) new links. A few recent additions to this list are Cru the Dwarf(Mature content warning) and Noobz. Be sure to check those out if you haven't already.

Chidori of the Flaming Ruby is also back in action. They're now up and running on their very own website.


Links

* Blanc
* Cascade Faillure
* Chidori of the Flaming Ruby
* Comic Azeroth
* Cru the Dwarf (Mature Warning)
* The Blade order
* Dark Legacy
* Dragontouched
* gg molecule
* Hammer of Grammar
* Looking for Group
* Noobz
* Shakes and Fidget
* Sunforge
* Teh Gladiators
* The Noob, a mix of wow, everquest, and other MMOGs.
* World of Zach
* The wow.com Community comics


Disclaimer

RRVS guarantees you'll be spending a lot of time reading the above comics. I take no responsibility toward any results thereafter such as wasting time at work, neglecting your wife and family, or strange laughing fits which cause the people around you to look over. Make sure you spend some time in the sun, continue to use the toilet at regular times, eat when it's time to do so and sleep when it's suddenly pretty damn dark outside.

EntreCard

Earlier I posted that i'd give entrecard a try. And well, it seems to work quite alright.

Over on the Blog Azeroth forums there was some worry about recent changes to the EntreCard pricing system. But I really don't notice much issues as those reported.

So, now you may be wondering :
- What is EntreCard, and why should you find it interesting?

Well in answer to that, it's a blog / site advertising system. And you probably won't find it very interesting unless you have a blog yourself. The point being however, is that a good number of blog readers have a blog of their own. And another number of visitors are either considering or may consider making a blog at a later point in time. So, in the end the following information might actually be useful to you. If not, well, just skip the text and head for the juicy pictures at the end.


Signing up

If you want to give it a try, you simply head over to the Sign up page and follow the steps. Add a 125x125 image that describes your blog and add the code that will display the widget. Nothing to it.


The System

Once you got your account and widget in place your blog should show up in their listings, and pretty soon you'll start receiving advertisement requests. More on that later.

EntreCard's base assumes a sort of virtual economy, you gain credits by clicking other people's banners, having your own banner clicked on, or even showing their banner in your widget. You can also buy or trade credits, but you'd be crazy to do so.

All users on EC have to have the widget active. The widget allows people to "drop" a card into it. When you drop a card you receive 1 credit, and the person that receives the drop also gains 1 credit. If that person is nice, they'll track back the person who dropped a card on theirs and return the favor which will effectively give you 2 credits in total. The limit to this is 300 card drops per day.

When you drop a card into their widget, your 125x125 card will be visible in their card in-box. Thus you are basically spreading your flyer around other people's blogs. If you're smart you drop it on relevant blogs (such as other warcraft related sites) first. This will tell other wow blog owners that you exist and allow them to drop cards on you as well. You'll start building up credits pretty fast.

These credits you can then use to buy advertising space on other people's blogs (widget). Your blog should be getting a lot of attention and familiarity pretty soon.

Too much text? OK, here's the short version :
* Make account.
* Place widget.
* Click other widgets or sell advertisements to gain credits.
* Use credits to buy advertisements.

Quite easy see?


It ain't perfect

As I said, you'll be getting advertisement requests pretty fast, and in plenty of numbers. The problem that EntreCard suffers from becomes quite clear within less than a day. A lot of the big players on EC are sites that sell credits, or offer games in which you can win credits. Then there's a bundle of sites that are completely irrelevant to your own blog but who love the cheap advertisement price of new blogs.

What can you do about it? Simple enough, you decline their advertisement requests. Don't be alarmed to see your "% of advert requests declined" steadily going up. Most wow blogs will suffer from this, but it's a small price to pay to offer relevant, or at least interesting links to other blogs. There's only 3 things in your statistics that are more relevant for others to know :

* Popularity rating. Popularity rating goes up depending on how many cards are dropped on your widget by others. If your site is popular, you'll receive more requests for advertisements, and your advertisement value should go up as well.

* Average advert is approved in x hours. Lower is better. When people buy an advertisement from you they'll have immediately paid the price. If you keep them waiting 2-3 days for a response.... That's quite rude, and it artificially inflates your advertisement cost. Something that's likely to keep interested parties away from your site.

* % of approved requests declined, Never cancel advertisements, it's bad for you. Keep this value at 0%


Cost to advertise

EC's advertisement cost is weird to say the least. If a site has zero advertisements on it, or in the queue, the cost is 1 credit. Each additional ad in the queue then doubles the cost for the next one. Thus you'll see values going 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 etc. Popular sites will end up quite expensive depending how many advertisements they have in the queue. As such there was a worry and outrage on Blog Azeroth about popular sites such as Big Red Kitty and Big Bear Butt going skyhigh across the 1024 ec cost to advertise.

Advertisement costs will fluctuate however. If you accept or decline new requests fast (as stated earlier) and don't keep too many advertisements lined up and waiting then your cost for other people will easily be within acceptable levels. Currently BRK and BBB are around 32-64 credits. If a site you wish to advertise on is outside of your budget, just wait for a day to allow existing advertisements to run their course and the price will halve.

For the most part, WoW blogs cost between 8-32 credits. Paying this fee will put your banner on that target site for 24 hours. The owner of that blog will receive 25% of the credits you paid once those 24 hours are finished. The other 75% is deleted to reduce inflation of ec credits.


What to expect

Once you start, things can seem to pick up really fast. I started by simply dropping some cards around which gave me a few credits. Soon i started receiving drops as return clicks. The more cards you drop, the more you can expect to see in return. You can't drop more than 300 per day however, but this should be more than fine for most people.

EC encourages people to read the latest blog post before dropping a card, however this isn't often the case. A lot of people simply visit the blog, drop their card and run off to the next blog to drop their card. While this may give your blog counters a heart attack, the actual visitors to your site will be fairly limited. Unless you have an amazing and relevant blog obviously. This is also why you should firstly focus on dropping cards on blogs that are relevant to your own. At least you can expect most of the visitors to have a chance at understanding your posts, and possibly coming back more often or subscribing to your RSS.

When you have enough credits (64 or so) go ahead and buy a bunch of advertisements at the same time. Pay 8 or 16 credits for sites that you know. And drop your card while you're at it so they know who you are. When people regularly see your card you'll become better known, and more likely to be accepted. If the blog owner is taking 4-5 days to accept or decline your request (and thus is holding your credits hostage), try sending them a message to please make up their mind. If this still fails i recommend just canceling the request yourself and find another blog to advertise on.


Tips n Tricks

Get "known", you won't accomplish much by saving up 128 credits and using it on a single advertisement. You want as many people as possible to see you exist, clicks don't matter.


Getting credits

You need credits to advertise, if you're willing to put some effort into it you can expect a lot in return. Now, you could just drop on random people and hope for the best, or drop cards where you know they're likely to receive a return drop. Browse trough the categories to see which ones are most relevant to yours or check the category browser to see the most popular blogs.

When looking trough those categories, try to focus on the people with a high drop rank. The more cards a person drops, the higher his drop ranking becomes. Such people are more likely to return your drops.

These are the different ranks for dropping :
* Deeply committed, Deadly serious, Drop masters
* Takes dropping Very Very Seriously
* Dedicated droppers with a hint of addiction
* Consistent, regular droppers
* Casual and relaxed
* Just here for the view

Casual, or just for the view, you can probably just ignore unless you wish to make a point out of letting them know about your blog. Don't bother dropping a card if you are expecting a return drop.


You can also visit the forums and see the Promotions and events section. Here you can perform actions and receive credits in return. Some examples would be stumbling a page, digg, or writing a review.

And finally, there's also a "you drop i follow" thing going on, which would improve your chances at getting a return drop.

As said before, quantity over quality seems to be a popular way to get yourself known. That doesn't take away the fact that quality sites will probably generate more traffic to your own blog. If you're short on credits however, use them wisely.

Slots, no not sluts like in the image slightly higher up on this page... Slots, if you like a daily gamble, would get you a few bonus credits. Chances are low, but it never hurts to take a shot at it.


Behavior

Spam is bad, but harassment is worse. If you try to post your advertisement on a non relevant blog, and it gets declined then don't keep trying. It's annoying.

Keep your advertisement queue short and clean. Nothing is more annoying than waiting for 6 days for a response on an advertisement you pair 128 credits for, only to have it declined. If you're going to decline or accept something, do it fast. Check your queue on a daily basis.


In the end

A lovely dark haired lady in a tiny string bikini!! OK, she has a face like a horse, but were you really paying attention to that, eh? No wait,,, i'm straying from the subject again. You're almost at the end of this post, just hold on to your focus a tiny bit longer, you made it this far after all.

EC isn't bad. And it's free, but as with most free things there's positives and negatives. As also said by TJ.


The good

* Extremely simple to register, install and use.
* Free advertising is always good if you are not interested in spending actual money.
* You get to pick where to advertise yourself, and who can advertise on your site.
* Discovering new and interesting blogs trough following other entrecards.

The bad

* A large part of the EC system is dominated by blog games, and people who are here to tell you how to make money.
* A lot of EC users simply fly by to drop their card and run off to the next site.
* A lot of high traffic blogs are artificially kept high by blogs running contests or selling RSS subscriptions for ec credits. Actually good blogs will tend to be around the middle of the actual popularity list.


Reading

If you're still reading this far down, good job! I know it's a lot of text, but hopefully you found it an interesting read.

Personally, i can only encourage you to give EntreCard a try. If after a month of time you aren't satisfied with it, just dump it. If you don't care about your % accept and decline ratio for advertisements then EntreCard is a good way to allow lesser known blogs to advertise on your own and expand the warcraft blogging community.

If you're suddenly inspired to make a blog of your very own, have a poke at Blogger or WordPress. Let me know when you have a few posts up and i'll come over and take a look :)

If you already have EntreCard on your blog, what are your experiences with it so far?

Dutchies do it with style

This wednesday it's queen's day in holland. National holidays ftw! Thursday is another holiday, tuesday i got stuff to do, and friday i took a day off. So it's a LONG weekend.

Alt number 5 is now level 65 and has barely touched Terrokar. Still 4.5 zones of quests (and money) available to do. It'll be fun to have an aoe class. And, the bank alt has already made another 2K last week, putting the balance to a total of 27K. I could easily buy that 6th guild bank slot.... but she's fine on space for now.


Hot selling items the last few weeks

* Primal Shadow, i'd guess because BT and HY are now open to all. New guilds will need a lot of shadow resist gear, and thus primal shadow.
* Relentless Earthstorm diamond, not sure why, but i'm selling these for 225g a piece currently. Probably has something to do with the lack of green gems on the AH.
* Large prismatic shard, these always sell well.
* Large Brilliant shard, sell these 2 at a time for people who want to enchant their chest with 150 health.


Can i Join?

Do you ever get whispered by people who want to join your guild? Do "you" ever whisper players in a higher ranking guild than you own? More often than not i'd rather ignore people than bother to respond, as the first impression is already so horrible that i just know it's some 12 year old kid who just wants to join in the hope of getting free epics.

Nobody is perfect, but in less than a minute I can see whether you're either horrible at english or just plain retarded. And then there's the whispers for groups, gold whispers, gold spam, pugs looking for healers, there's really no end to it.

You want some examples? All good! Enjoy.

PS: I've been informed by certain people that their school has a language filter, and will block sites if the word "fuck" is used on a website. So i shall be using the word in this article, just because i can! Don't worry, I'm not going to do it every time I post, but you should probably be spending your time with more important things while at school.


Australians

Q: Hello mate!
A: What the fuck do you want ? Get to the point.

Q: Hey m8?!
Q: Sup m8?
A: I don't recommend hailing a person who has no fucking clue who the fuck you are, nor ever spoken to you before a "mate", I don't drink and i certainly wouldn't be doing it with you if i were, aside of which I'm pretty sure neither you or me are from Australia, so get to the fucking point.


Straight to the point

Q: Can i join your guild?
A: No. Get better gear.

Q: You need a rogue?
A: Sure, whisper (Insert person who's on "blame X" duty today - comedy gold). Make sure to tell him I sent you.

Q: You need a warrior?
A: http://www.rampageguild.eu, application forum is over there. Have fun writing an application like everyone else.


Gold beggars

Q: g plz
A: (Just, ignore these guys)

Q: plz (opens trade)
A: Sure! I'm in a good mood today, just trade me. (put 1000g in the trade window, then go afk for 15 minutes. When you come back, laugh at the fool for still being there then walk away)

Q: 1g?
A: Go outside Orgrimmar, kill 2 boars, sell the tusks, buy a mining pick and go farm copper. Sell the copper on the AH and you'll be rich in no time. Now piss off and get to work.


Letters or words?

Q: KZ?
A: I have plenty of Khorazine already thanks ! (No that's not an actual drug, yet...)

Q: MGT?
A: That would be "MTG", and i quit that game ages ago.

Q: SL?
A: Use bloody words man! English isn't a difficult language but if you insist on using sign language nobody but some random 12 year old is doing to have the slightest clue what the fuck you're talking about.

Q: DM plz????
A: DM? You should know Dire maul is intended for level 60 players
Q: no DM!
A: Dire maul, ye

Q: WC?
A: I just went. It was pretty messy but thank you for noticing.

Yeah i know i can be a complete ass when i want to. But there's so many retards in Orgrimmar, it's a miracle people still go there at all. Really, it surprises me a lot.

Seriously though, if you're trying to communicate with people it really won't hurt you to actually type words and sentences to get your point across. Sadly most of them are barely old enough to have seen their balls drop and won't know what the hell you're talking about. One can only hope they learn eventually, or it's a grim future for the next generation of gamers. Perhaps you could send some of them to HKO to get rid of them?

If you're looking for some more funny whispers go check out wow-bash or Wow quotes. There's a few good ones in there.

2.4.2 & Season 4 underway

Two posts today! how about that eh?

MMOC lists that the 2.4.2 is on the PTR, and oh so surely there's some new things you'll be interested in. I think it's a viable assumption that 2.4.2 will be on the PTR for a couple of weeks, and coincide with the activation of arena season 4. Perhaps not though, but it's always fun to speculate.


Some highlights

Professions

* All 23-hour profession cooldowns are now 20-hour cooldowns.
* All 4-day cooldowns are now 3 days, 20 hours.
* The Cooldown on the Void Crystal > 2 x Large Prismatic Shard transmutation has been removed.
* Brilliant Glass now have a small chance to contain an epic gem, and no longer requires a forge to craft. And the market price of green gems skyrockets even more...
* Haste gems added to the Quel’danas vendor.


Items

* Goblin Jumper Cables are no longer a trinket item. Weird, i could swear this is already the case.
* Most Main-Hand weapons are now One-Hand weapons, not sure whether this applies to healing weapons however. blizzard did a similar thing when TBC was released, but proceeded to add restricted weapons afterwards.


Bugs

* The hunter pet ability Growl will no longer scale with pet Attack Power. This makes a sad day for boar pet tanks.
* A number of skill and sound fixes.

Again, nothing about the chat panel saving it's settings properly >_< bloody annoying!


Arena S4 prices

The new arena prices have also been listed.

When Season 4 begins, Season 3 items will be reduced in personal and team arena rating requirement to:
* Shoulders: 1950
* Weapon: 1800
(Only 50 points, how bloody pointless is that?)

The new Season 4 items will have the below personal and team arena rating requirements:
* Shoulders: 2200
* Weapon: 2050
* Head: 1700
* Chest: 1600
* Legs: 1550
* Gloves: none
* Off-hand: none (such as shields and orbs)

In addition, some of the Season 4 quality items that will be purchasable with honor will also carry a personal and team arena rating requirement:
* Boots: 1700
* Ring: 1650
* Bracers: 1575
* Belt: none
* Necklace: none
* Trinket: none


And some linkbacks

RRVS is obviously not the only wow related blog in the world, heck i'd be surprised if it was in the top-1000 english blogs out there. Though as most we are constantly working to become bigger and more badass!

Either way, if my two posts today don't satisfy all of your reading needs, here's some more to keep you busy :
* 4Haelz has reached the suggestive number of 69 posts.
* Banana shoulders, there is no such thing as "too much" wow.
* Backstab looks at Vashj after formatting his computer
* Birdfall when alliance and Horde are friends
* Evil sheep is back in action.
* Fulltime wow addict writes about agressive guild recruitment.
* Just a wow girl on (shape) shifting into character.
* Kestrel found a nice firefox plug-in called ScribeFire
* Matticus gives you 10 answes for the clueless raiding (holy) priest.
* Petopia has recently done a site redesign.
* Pugnacious priest shows you how to make a quick n dirty guild banner.

Bored in KZ?

So, it's the weekend, and your guild decides to do a quick clear of Karazhan.

You've only done this a hundred times, don't need badges, seen about every alt in the guild get his helm and glove token. Basically, you're bored of the place and haven't got much to keep your mind occupied other than watching porn in split screen modus or whispering that lvl 10 blood elf who claims he's a girl.


Here's some ideas

* Karazhan bingo! (See pic on the right)
* Texas hold 'em poker
* Musical chairs at Moroes' room.
* Play Turret wars.
* Check out the giant list of other internet games at the wow forums.
* Watch some Anime online.
* Read some Comics.
* Do some classic Nintendo games.
* Make odd sounds on Teamspeak and try to blame others.
* Cause a horrible raid wipe in a most original fashion and try to blame others.
* See how long you can play an alt before you're kicked from the raid or found out.
* See how much mobs you can pull "without" wiping the raid.
* See how much mobs you can pull in 1 go. (my record was about every mob from maiden to moroes)
* Set a speed record on clearing KZ.
* Play "dodge the infernal" at prince malchezaar by stopping all DPS at 30%
* Chat in /1 with other raid groups.
* Convince the raid to pull 2 bosses at the same time.
* Clear KZ with weird group setups, such as 10 druids or 10 paladins.
* Ironman KZ with 3-5 players rather than 10.

What do you do when you're trying to keep yourself busy in a boring KZ run?

Illi-done?

We got the council down last night, which finally opens the path to Big-I.



If you are wondering where in that picture my ugly troll face is at... well i'm sorting out the heavy task of masterlooting in the corner (yes master LOOT-ing, not the other thing.. ffs perv) while the rest of them slackers are jumping around striking poses.

It's going to take some time, but we're confident he's quite doable. It didn't take too long to get him into phase 2 at least, but as our offtanks *cough*slack*cough* didn't have the required fire resistance yet we ended up calling the night. Next week they should be more prepared.

Illidan won't be easy, far from it, but we killed Kael'thas!! Surely Illidan is easier to learn than that bastard and his decrepit council. We already killed the Illidari council after all. Can't wait to see how our luck will be on the warglaives....

PS: We're looking for a warrior tank & a warlock to complement our raid team.


DPS

As some of your rogues may know, the spreadsheet which you're probably using to calculate your optimal DPS is being redesigned a bit. Head over to the thread and add your opinion or suggestions. I added some of mine as well, hopefully you'll be seeing some of them in action soon.


Entrecard

I figured why not, so i'm giving Entrecard a little test. Drop your card into the box, you know how it works. I dropped a couple of cards around myself but haven't got a clue how this works yet. Also, i need to make an image.... *grumble*

Oh, and only about 1800 pageviews until the blog hits the big 100k! We hit 50k unique visitors this morning it seems.


Poll

Added another poll.

What's your main email address? Hotmail, Burntmail, Gmail, Yahoo, An ISP based mail service, some other free mail service? I'm curious. Personally I got about 3 different mail addresses, but burntmail i've used the longest. Fool proof spam protection, you can't go wrong there. And then there's Yahoo which is being threatened by a hostile takeover by Microsoft. Who knows yahoo may well disappear sometime, but currently yahoo is almost begging google to put in an offer to take them over, it's funny. Search the news for it. And then there's AOL (scum) and Live mail which is the replacement for hotmail apparently.... Ah well.

Why i'm wondering? Well apparently Microsoft is going to "kill" (terminate indefinitely) the dav-protocol, which is responsible for allowing outlook-express to communicate with your hotmail account. Basically you'll have to use another email program, or stick to webmail from the browser. It's nothing too dramatic, but little annoyances do add up. Source, Dutch version.

Chuck vs Saurfang

So it turns out you lot think Chuck norris will beat High overlord Saurfang.

Chuck Norris : 81 (59%)
Overlord Saurfang : 44 (32%)
Neither / Both : 12 (8%)

Poor old saurfang had to beat the dus at only 32%, while 8% of the votes say that they can't beat each other, or would both die in a fight to the death. But what if High overlord Saurfang is actually Chuck Norris' ingame toon? Ever considered that eh? A man can't beat himself.

And so we put up a new poll.


DPS or Healing

What's your role in raids, or how do you perform your every day playtime. Are you DPS all the way? Do you heal others, or do you fulfill both tasks? Hit multitask if you're a tank.

Short on badges?

With the progress of the European realms to getting the anvil, people will be able to buy a large number of new items. These aren't cheap however. 150 badges for the weapons, 60 for a ring, 100 for a chest or legs, 75 for belts and gloves. You'll be wanting more and more badges quite soon.

Depending on how good or bad your guild is, there are a few places you can get badges from. Karazhan is an obvious favourite. Zul'Aman a close second.

Karazhan, 3-4 hours of work, 22 badges
Zul'Aman, 1-2 hours of work, 13 badges + 10 from quest item if you're lucky.
Gruul's lair, ~1 hour of work, 5 badges
Magtheridon's lair, ~1 hour of work, 3 badges
Serpentshrine, 3-4 hours of work, 12 badges
Tempest Keep, 3-4 hours of work, 8 badges
Black Temple, ~1-2 nights of work, 18 badges
Hyjal, 3-4 hours of work, 10 badges

There are also several new daily quests relating to the sunwell offensive. These will give you a bag of Shattered Sun Supplies which have a 10% chance to contain a badge. The quests also give 250 reputation.

Alternatively you could farm heroics (don't forget to pick up the heroic daily quest). Most heroic dungeons give 3-4 badges, and if you have time for it you can do each heroic instance once a day.


Profit?

If you don't need any of the new gear, it can still be profitable to get badges.
Primal Nether is available for 10 badges, Nether Vortex is available for 15. These can sell for 60-300g depending on your server. 300/15 = 20g per badge. You could do worse things with your time, if you consider that you can clear Karazhan in 3-4 hours and receive 22 badges. Sure it's not as effective as doing Scholomance on your own, but still, not everyone can stealth.

Once the anvil is active, you can also buy uncut epic gems (which normally only drop in BT and HY) for 15 badges each. What the price for these on the open market will become remains to be seen, but expect to sell them for at least 100-200g.

Keylogger proof

I laugh at people like this.

Quote:
write password and/or user name im word/wordpad and before starting wow copy it, when u see loggin screen of wow just click in password field and pres ctr+v... there you go..

Retarded. Simple as that.

What? Don't say you are surprised. I hope for your sake that you're not as stupid as that.


The longer explanation

Most good keyloggers will track everything you do on your screen, some even go as far as taking screen captures while you are doing it. For example you click your mouse, and the keylogger takes a 50x50 pixel (or more) screenshot centered around the area you clicked, registers the exact coordinates you clicked on the screen as well as the relative coordinates to the current window you clicked in. Any button on your keyboard that you press: a-z, 0-9, special characters, ctrl, shift, enter, arrows, everything. It will also keep track of anything you put into, or read from your copybuffer, check what applications you currently have loaded in memory or start. Some even go as far as blocking off certain applications, or loading new programs that will enable them to update themselves and communicate with their creator.

Keyloggers are nasty shit.


An example

Let's say we just logged into WoW, and your username is already filled in. A tool targetted specifically to hacking wow accounts could disable the "remember username" checkbox and force you to enter it again when you least expect it.

Let's say your password is "test"
You have stored this password in a text file on your desktop, not encrypted, and less than a few bytes on your HD. A keylogger would totally not notice you opened a 1Kb file and would absolutely for sure never ever send any files smaller than 10K to it's creator.
Totally.. right? Yes that was sarcasm.

Anyway, the file contains this string: This is just another piece of text which is an innocent long string.
You select the letters "te" and press Ctrl+C to copy this. Alternatively you could right click and select copy or cut, or use the menu option. The result would be the same. "te" would be placed in your system's copy buffer.
The keylogger of which you were not aware then sees something like "^c'te'"
You Alt tab back to wow, and paste that text into the password field. "^v'te'"
Then you repeat this for the letters "st" - "^c'st'" - "^v'st'"

You could even do "st" first, then press the leftarrow twice and paste "te", but obviously keyloggers notice this too. (We'll assume %3C for leftarrow)

It doesn't take rocket science to figure out your password when the keylogger gives your hacker this log :
* Application started : "c:\program files\messenger\msn.exe"
* Application started : "c:\games\world of warcraft\launcher.exe"
* File opened : "c:\users\desktop\obviouspasswordfile.txt"
* Keylog : "^c'st'^v'st'%3C%3C^c'e'^v'e%3Ct'/r"
* File closed : "c:\users\desktop\obviouspasswordfile.txt"


This might work

The best protection against keyloggers, is simply not getting one. Common sense will get you a long way, don't click flashy weird popups or banners. Don't click any www.hotsexgirl.cn/girls/tiffany234.jpg when it's posted on the official WoW forums. Don't accept .exe files trough your MSN, Don't open .scr files trough email, etc, etc.

Get Firefox, it won't protect you from much, but it certainly won't hurt to use instead of Internet Explorer either.

As a point to note, there's the odd little application called Anti keylogger shield, but i have not tested, nor do i guarantee it works, nor do i guarantee that it'd not a keylogger in itself. Just do some research before you install anything. Supposedly it protects you from most keyloggers. Just don't take my word for it.


And remember, just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not out to get you.

Guild motto

Does your guild have a "motto"?

Ours is "Rampage is a Mature raiding guild", frequently repeated by the guild leader.
And we gladly (dis)prove him of this on a daily basis with random comments during the raid. I'd post some here but they're very much NSFW.

It's hilarious at times, so much that TeamSpeak just degenerates into a drunken party. But still, we manage good progress and everyone is having fun. That's all that matters. Our TS is not for the faint of heart though, that's for sure.

Our age requirement on recruits is 16+, though it should probably be at least 18+ for some of the language used on TS. Don't tell your mother, or she'll forbid you to make an application.


Your computer place

Do you have anything weird or out of place lying around your computer? Do you pet your mouse, or frantically clean it after every raid? Are there any weird rituals you perform before logging on, like a sequence, start computer, log IE, check mail for love letters and latest viagra prices, delete spam, check guild forum, log wow.

Without really thinking about it, a lot of your actions might be automatic. When my computer has booted the first few things i do :
* Start winamp
* Launch FF, check guild forum.
* Start p2p
* Start wow
* Start task manager and lower wow priority

As for weird stuff around the computer, how about 3 kilograms of small galvanized flat rings? Bet you won't see those at an average computer work place. Also a powerball, another computer, 2 sets of pliers (for the rings eh). So i've made some chain mail, it's quite interesting. Fun to see the reaction of people when you flash our a stainless steel sheet of rings. I'll post a picture of some stuff later. Busy busy n all.

Maybe you got a miniature of your wow characters eh? Or perhaps a Frostmourne. Your computer place might be a mess, but it's probably quite unique.

Monday monday

Busy busy, muscles aching that don't usually do and still plenty of work to keep with the house left to do. Ps: Sanding doors sucks!

Also have about 6 posts partially finished and i can't really post them until they are finished. Everything in due time.

Blocked another 3 dirty goldsellers. Those pests are active with ingame whispers as well again. Sigh.

Added a new wow comic.

Chidori is back in business!

LFG comic has also updated, but needs some more fire.

What do you mean it's not April fools today?

The guild wiped at 1% on Mother Shaz.. hate it when that happens. She should go down today, then we'll be playing with the council proper.

Greens will replace epic items when WotLK is released, much like TBC did. But that's hardly surprising is it?

Anyone notice lag with the "Linkback list" loading? It works ok-ish, but seems to have loading speed issues.

Are you prepared?

Are you prepared? How much money do you put into raiding, is all your gear enchanted, do you carry consumables, have enough cash to repair all your armor four times over?

Sadly, not everyone who frequently raids does.

In most every raid group you'll have the extreme addicts and farmers, and people who don't bother to prepare and expect the guild bank to sort them out. Lame, i know. But not everyone can spend an equal amount of time playing a game. Perhaps they are insanely good healers, or amazing DPS, invaluable tanks or whatever, you name it. The fact remains, you'll always have some people in your raid that are more willing to put an effort into it than others.

Some guilds crack down on such slacking, while others are less caring and simply look at the end result even if this means having to use guild bank funds to keep going.


The extreme

* 3-20k gold in the bank
* Online 15-30 minutes before the raid, and all weekend.
* Knowns which items he needs, and will have enchants and gems ready for when they drop.
* Buffs raid in 20 seconds, knows which buff you need, and will be ready before you ask.
* Read boss strategies before coming to the raid, has all the needed addons and will gladly tell you what went wrong.
* Plenty of reagents, food buffs, potions etc to go all night long.
* Farms in the weekend or before raids for materials and gold.


The slackers

* ~50 gold in the bank
* Online several minutes after the raid was "supposed" to start, and usually leaves early.
* Will roll on anything that looks like an upgrade, or sidegrade just because he can.
* Buffs? Right, let's drink water first. Could somebody make a table?
* Waits for Raid Leader to explain tactics, uses addons over a month old, and wait to be rezzed by somebody else rather than run back after a wipe.
* Generally doesn't carry food buffs, uses potions only when mana is completely empty, doesn't carry more than a few reagents and if others can buff, why should he?
* Frequently asks for guild bank donations to pay his repairs, and usually isn't seen farming. You suspect he buys gold from ebay or his little brother.


Familiar?

Any of this sound familiar? I'm sure it will.
So, how much effort do you put into raiding? Are you more extreme, or more of a slacker?

Our guild has killed Archimonde and the Reliquary of Souls this week. This means indeed, that we can now get to Mother (Check out those melons) Shahraz. For the past month we've been telling people to start farming Primal Shadow, Primal Life, metal, cloth, leather and whatever to make their resistance gear sets.

We managed to fill a raid with 25 people, among which 10 healers. Everyone with ~313 Buffed shadow resistance. Only 1-2 people less. We got her down to 17 or 19% on the last attempt of the evening. She won't be long, and the thread on our forum about her is blooming with ideas how to improve the strategies we tried last night.

But still, 5 out of the 33 people that we expected to be available that night didn't have even a single Primal Shadow yet... Half the raid didn't have their new Shadow Gear enchanted yet when we actually started the fight. Obviously they were left outside, with the intention that these are fixed before the next raid. Even something as simple as Boar's speed can help trivialize the fight. When two players are running away from each other at 8% increased speed, that means their relative speed is 16% faster and are much more likely to survive a fatal attraction.

Good preparation makes half the work, but there will always be some people that wait until the very last minute to finish up. How's your guild doing?

Dice hacks

Ok, some of you might already know, but MMOC just posted something rather curious. A dice hack. Or more accurately an advanced LUA algorithm which can calculate and predict when to roll your dice so that you get a predictable result.

In other words, a guaranteed 100 roll anytime and every time you want it.

I highly discourage the usage of this sort of addon, though it's considered legal for being pure LUA code, you won't be making any friends by using it. Also, i wouldn't hold it against blizzard if they decide to ban anyone that's found abusing the addon.

Obviously, using an addon such as this to win every single roll on a KZ run, or pug will make you suspect to GM report by your fellow players. If you absolutely feel the need to abuse it, roll 80-90 only for 1-2 items that you need.




PS: Don't forget what day it is. ;)

Also check out blizzard's posts: Molten Core, Tauren Marine, WotLK Bard Class, Diablo Loot pinata