Finally!!!

This just in…

My account has been fully restored today. 2 weeks later and all is finally right in the world.

That is all for now….

More Random Thoughts

Well here we are a week and a half later after getting hacked, and I finally have some good news. I have, at long last, been partially restored.. That’s right half way there and working on the rest. Everyone’s gear has been restored, but I’m  still waiting on their gold, badges and nonbound items. I did get a good laugh out of all of this though, I was offered Blizz’s compensation package.

If you haven’t heard of it yet, here’s what’s inside:

2500 Gold
16 Badges of Frost
80 Badges of Triumph

That’s right you get all of that, for each level 80 toon, in exchange for not waiting to have the rest of your account restored. Now if you’re a freshly dinged 80 with little or no money, and few if any badges, then its a great offer. However, if you had a lot of gold and badges, its a joke.
On a lighter note, I’ve been working on a couple of different posts at the same time. The biggest one is definitely my first piece of fiction based upon Duranub. So, when I finally get it up and going, please be gentle. 🙂
So, now its just a matter of time. I’m hoping to get back my stuff in the next week or so. I’m also trying to get the short story up and posted also. So until next time, don’t forget to reload so you don’t run out of ammo.

What I Learned The Hard Way This Week…

Well it’s been a crappy week for me in Azeroth. As you might have read, I was hacked on Saturday. I called customer service when I got home from work, to make sure that my account had been re-secured. Well after spending over an hour on hold, I spoke to a gentleman who went through the process and then informed me I would need to submit a ticket to a GM in game to get my account restored.

Well let’s just say its been a nightmare since then.I submitted my first ticket Saturday night, and never received a response back from it. Come Sunday, I was tired of waiting and ended up submitting a second ticket. Lo and behold, over 8 hours later I finally received an answer, kinda, sorta more like a form letter. Wanna know a way you can tell you just received a form letter from a lazy GM? Well in the letter there’s a part where they tell you it will be”[X] days” and your account was created on “[DATE]”. Yep, that’s right. Those are exact quotes from the letter I received. Wow, when the GM is so lazy that he can’t even take the time to clear the brackets and put anything in there at all… Well it doesn’t leave you feeling all that confident about them fixing your issue does it. Anyways towards the end of the form letter it said that I would be receiving an email about this in a few hours.

Well come Monday I still hadn’t heard back from anyone or received the the magic email about this. So,I waited all day on Monday without hearing anything. I waited until around 4 a.m. on Tuesday and nothing. Tuesday night came and went, still no new information. Now it’s Wednesday, and nothing yet. Belghast was restored in 12 hours when he was hacked. My daughter was restored in 4 days. I’m finishing up day 5, and I still haven’t even received an email updating me about jackshit. Wow…Just wow…

I practice safe surfing. I don’t click on gold ads. I run AVG religiously. I run CCleaner and Malwarebytes every 2 weeks. Nothing starts or stops without me knowing. I use a complex password. All of this wasn’t enough to keep me from getting hacked. The only thing I didn’t use was the authenticator. I was planning on picking one up on that Saturday. I wish I had gotten one sooner. Kids get one, me the $6.50 is worth it.

So now I wait dreading the restore process. Wow.com has an excellent series of articles, here, about what I’m about to go through. All of this makes me a sad panda. So until next time don’t forget to reload, so you don’t run out of ammo.

Hacked

Well it happened today… I got the word from Wife who in an email asked me if I was spamming WoW from work, cause if I wasn’t then I’d been….HACKED! Sigh…yep new computer, no add ons yet, no torrents, nothing. Somehow, I picked up a key logger I guess. Yep nothing quiet like getting that news at work, when you’re powerless to do anything. But you want to know what the real kicker is, we were just talking about how I should pick up an authenticator. I know, I know I should have had one a long time ago, I’ve known too many people who have been hacked, and it looks like I might be the latest victim. Keep an eye out for updates….

Update

Yep I got hacked. One toon naked, no money at all, no ammo at all if it was BoA or couldn’t be sold they got it. At least Gwen still had all of her gear. Now it’s just a matter of waiting on hold to talk to Blizz to start the restore process.

Update

Logging on right now, I hope that I’ll hear from a GM soon so the restoration can begin.

Update

Well over 24 hours later and I received a form letter from the GMs in-game stating that my issue is being looked into and I should be receiving an email from them in a few hours to get the process going. I know the GMs are busy and all, but they couldn’t even take the brackets out of “[X] days” or “[DATE] of creation”. So now I wait.

On the plus side though I was able to get enough gold scraped together to get ammo, food, drink and flight path money, so I was able to run some random heroics today to raise some cash.

Taking A Second Look At Badges

Ok, ok, I have confession to make back in June I wrote an article called Badge of Dishonor.

Recently I’ve had an epiphany about badges and badge gear. As you might have noticed, I’ve been leveling a DK, and hit 80 not to long ago. After leveling another toon to 80, I’m experiencing something completely new. The gear grind that comes with not being a raiding main. I have always raided, from way back in the days of MC and before when Start, UBRS, and LBRS were 10 and 15 man runs. I would hit the level cap and then start raiding. Higher level raids meant better gear, better gear meant higher level raids.

In Wrath I hit 80 on Gwen in about a week, and then I started gearing up for Naxx. I didn’t have to run 5 mans over and over again to try to get tons of badges for gear, because I was working through content that I was geared for.

Flash forward to today, and I’ve hit 80 on my DK who isn’t geared up yet. DRC is working on tier 10 and getting geared up with it. No one runs Naxx any more, and there are few if any Ulduar runs to be found. I’ve been trying to run the random 5 mans as much as I can, the sheer amount of badges are a huge boost in covering the gear gap that a new 80 has to cover to be able to compete with older 80s. Slowly but surely he’s getting the gear he’s going to need to be able to start raiding if I want him to. Now that I’m in a position where I can use the badges, I see why Blizz did what they did. So I guess looking through the perfection of hind sight,yeah that was an elitist jackass post that I wrote. So please accept my humble apologies and bask in the glory of badges for one and all. So until next time, don’t forget to reload, so you don’t run out of ammo.

So The Wait For It Is Finally Over…

 

It finally came this week. After months of waiting the Warcraft magazine has finally arrived. What do I think of it? Is it worth the $40 subscription fee? Lets take a look and see what we see.

First thing I noticed was the artwork on the cover. A beautiful wraparound cover depicting the battle between Sylvanas and Arthas from the HoR battle. As always nicely detailed and showing off their best.

Now what’s inside of it you might ask? Lots and lots of articles. Most of them are short, only 2 or 3 pages long, but they cover a nice spread of it all. It covers everything from a history of WoW to 12 things to expect from Cataclysm. There are several PvP articles which I found interesting as I suck at PvP, and I did pick up a thing or two from them. All in all I like the articles, but they all felt rushed, well that is all but one. The interview with Mike Morhaime seemed to be one of the most in depth and thought out articles. Don’t get me wrong, I know some of the raid information is a little… well… stale, but they do do a very good job of giving good advise on what to do if you’ve never been in any of the Coliseum 5 mans or raids. The 3 articles they have on the different party roles was interesting, and gave a small glimpse of what it’s like to tank, or heal or DPS if you’ve never played that role before.

All in all it’s not a bad magazine at all. They even touched on the new 5 mans in 3.3, and give a little bit of the background history between Arthas and Sylvanas. Now is it worth $40 a year for 4 issues? Well… ummm…. I think that at $10 an issue, and with the huge delay to the first issue, it’s over priced. But, who am I kidding I still would have picked it up. I’m hoping that in the coming issues they clue us in more with what’s going to be happening in game, with Blizzcon and other upcoming events. You know, to make us feel like it was worth it to get the subscription.

So until next time, don’t forget to reload, so you don’t run out of ammo.

Pugs? Ugh…

Remember how I said I was having great luck with pugs using the new LFG tool? Well scratch that. I have had nothing but bad luck over the past few days. Tanks that cant hold aggro, healer that have trouble healing, people afking for free badges, and other such jackassery…

I swear I am sick and tired of not being able to finish Occulus. Every single time I get a group for that damn instance, either the tank or healer bails on that group. That starts the chain, and soon it’s back to waiting another 15 minutes before I can queue up again. I swear, if you don’t want to take a chance on getting in there for the love of god, don’t freaking queue up for a random heroic. That’s the reason that they give you the option to sign up for specific instances. Use that damn option and quit fucking around ya jackass.

Then there’s the AFKers who will do nothing but sponge up badges. I was in one today with 3 members from a high end guild, and they were geared out the ass. My DK’s gear is getting better, slowly but surely, but he’s still way under geared. He actually was out DPSing the mage,who said I’m going AFK for a while guys. Then there was the tank. I have never seen a pally tank that was that sloppy. We kept wiping in CoS for god’s sake. The only instance easier is Nexus. Damn, seriously.

Out of the 6 pugs I ran today 3 of them were complete epic fails, more in one day then the entire time 3.3 has been out. Sigh, well maybe things will be better tomorrow. So until next time don’t forget to reload, so you don’t run out of ammo.

Please Stand By…

Sigh I love computers… especially when they work. Right now I am in the process of reinstalling WoW again. See Wife got me a laptop for Christmas this year. Of course the first thing I did before I even had an antivirus on was to install WoW, and of course all of my add ons. Now here it is just over 2 weeks later and once again I am watching the install bar move at a snail’s pace, hoping that after it is all said and done this will be the last time I need to do this. I’ve been having a problem where the whole system freezes up. When it locks up, the 3 finger salute will not even let it go. I’m forced at that point to do a hard shut down. So it’s been slowly getting worse, and I finally broke down and called tech support…shudder… So here I sit reinstalling everything after they had me do a factory restore, a good old fashion disk wiping. Now hopefully this will be done soon and I can hop back on and work on getting more badges and gear for everyone. So until next time, don’t forget to reload so you don’t run out of ammo.