The Stack

Having learned my lesson about difficulty settings back in Conquest of the Underworld, I’m keeping things set to the default for the moment. Progress is nonetheless slow, owing to my insistence on getting every last crumb of permanent upgrade on the map before continuing. There are obelisks that grant experience, enchanted trees that instantly raise any visiting hero’s experience level (subject to the maximum imposed by the map), towers where you can improve defense strength and shrines where you can raise your maximum spell points, and so forth, all usable once by each hero. Furthermore, the tooltip for such things helpfully tells you whether the currently-selected hero has visited them or not, making perfectionism all the more tempting.

I’ll probably stop being so obsessive about it at some point as the maps grow larger, at least with my lesser heroes. At the point I’m at, I can take three in addition to Tarnum from one map to the next, but this might not last for the whole episode: I recall reaching a point in Conquest of the Underworld where suddenly everyone but Tarnum was taken away, and I think this may have happened in Warlords of the Wasteland as well (at the point when Tarnum had everyone who he felt was a threat to his power killed). So this may be one of the series’ repeated plot points/gameplay mechanics, and if it is, there will come a point when buffing anyone but Tarnum isn’t worth it.

As for Tarnum himself, there’s already some indication that we’re heading for him becoming an invincible superhero again by the time we’re through. This being the episode that focuses on wizards, this means improving his spellcasting. There’s a set of four artifacts, elemental orbs, found on different maps: as with the Angelic Alliance, they remain with you from level to level. Now, the whole spell system in this game is linked to the four elements: every spell has an associated element, and each element has a “mastery” skill (Air Mastery, Water Mastery, etc.) that improves the effects of spells in that element and makes them cheaper to cast. I’m being careful to make sure Tarnum keeps enough open skill slots for all the masteries as they become available, because eventually he’s going to have all the spells. Every single one, including all of the rarest and most powerful ones. That’s what the orbs do: each gives its bearer access to all the spells in its associated element. Knowing how this game works, there may even be some additional synergy effect for holding them all.

The orbs are significant to the story as well: they’re the heroes’ only way home. I’ll go into more detail about this later, when I’ve seen more plot.

So, on into Tarnum’s third adventure. The story so far: In Warlords of the Wasteland, Tarnum was a Barbarian in a land conquered and enslaved by evil wizards. He led a successful rebellion, then became a conquerer and enslaver himself, slaughtering his own people when he considered them counterrevolutionary, murdering his advisers when they told him he was going too far. Episode 1 ended with his star still in the ascendant, but when you’re the best gunslinger in town, everyone starts gunning for you, and it’s only a matter of time before one of them gets lucky. And so somewhere between episodes 1 and 2, Tarnum went and got himself killed.

But instead of just going to Hell like you’d expect, he somehow wound up staying in the mortal world as a servant of the “Ancestors”, apparently working off his bad karma. At least, until Episode 2, Conquest of the Underworld, which had him actually invading Hell, but not to take up permanent residence. He was there on a mission to rescue the abducted soul of one Rion Gryphonheart, the former king of the Knights who took over after Tarnum’s Barbarian empire fell — and the person who killed Tarnum in battle. Tarnum didn’t much like the idea of helping his mortal enemies, and considered the possibility that it was all some kind of immense joke at his expense on the part of the Ancestors, but it turned out that they chose him for the task to teach him a lesson, that the Knights and the Barbarians aren’t so different, that in fact he should be calling them family.

Masters of the Elements takes this a step further. One of the defining properties of the Heroes Chronicles series is that each episode focuses on a different subset of the various playable sides from Heroes of Might and Magic, giving Tarnum himself a different character class from episode to episode. This time around, he’s a Wizard. The one thing he despises the most. The thing he led a continent-spanning crusade to wipe out during his mortal life. I’m only a little way into the story, but he’s already made plenty of disparaging comments (via triggered text pop-ups) about the people he’s forced to work with here. I think he’s already gradually coming to appreciate their point of view, though. The entire mission here would be impossible without magic.

The essential idea is that a ten-thousand-year truce between the Ancestors and the Elemental Lords is ending, and rather than wait for them to attack the prime material plane, Tarnum is heading to their home turf to forcibly convince them that renewing the truce is in their best interests. The whole idea of visiting the Elemental Planes, similar to the Underworld back in episode 2, is essentially just a coat of paint on standard HOMM3-engine dungeons, but those dungeons are themselves essentially just a texture swap on the above-ground bits, so I suppose it all evens out.

The differences between Barbarian, Knight, and Wizard, on the other hand, have distinct gameplay effects. It’s been a while since I played any of the other classes, but nonetheless, I’m getting a very strong sense that using spells in combat is a more viable and indeed essential option than previously. Also, playing with the types of creatures generated by wizard towers gives you access to some very powerful ranged attacks. Every type of town has some kind of low-level unit, like gobins or imps or skeletons, that can be produced very cheaply or picked up for free from outbuildings, and that you can wind up with hundreds of in a stack. The low-level unit for Towers is the gremlin, which can be upgraded (still pretty cheaply) into the master gremlin, which is, I think, unique among the cheapo creatures for having a ranged attack. They die by the dozens if the enemy can close with them, but the ranged attacks are pretty good at preventing this from happening. It’s the “glass cannon” approach, traditional role of wizard-types since D&D.

As promised, a random pick today. The first roll of the dice got me Arthur’s Knights: Tales of Chivalry, a Cryo adventure from 2000, but I wasn’t able to get it working. I remember initially shelving it because of the GeForce bug that made the background render partially on top of sprites, but now it doesn’t even get far enough for that to manifest. Putting it into Windows 95 compatibility mode gets me as far as the main menu, where I can tweak the options to my heart’s content, but actually starting a game from there makes it crash to the desktop. The only concrete advice I’ve found online was a suggestion to turn off DirectX sound acceleration, which is already on my list of things to try when Windows games prove recalcitrant; apparently it worked for someone here, but not for me. If anyone reading this has better suggestions, I’d like to hear them, but for the moment, this is going back on the shelf once more.

So, having given up on that, my next random pick was the final episode of Heroes Chronicles, the episodic series of Heroes of Might and Magic III scenarios. My usual practice for random picks is to treat anything from a series as representing the series as a whole, so what I’ve actually picked is episode 3, Masters of the Elements. Yes, this practice means that my random picks are more likely to hit things with many sequels on the Stack. I consider this a good thing. Those are the games that really need playing.

Moreover, the Heroes Chronicles series as a whole became a wider target quite recently. You may recall that, in addition to the episodes that were published on CD-ROM, there were a couple of extra episodes available only online — one that you needed two registered episodes to download, and another that you needed three. Two more episodes besides those were added later in a collection package, making the extra episodes equal in number to the original retail ones. And that collection package was recently made available (and temporarily put on sale for five bucks) at GOG. So now the series occupies six remaining slots in the Stack instead of just two.

Even though I have Masters of the Elements on CD-ROM, I chose to install the GOG download, just to eliminate the inconvenience of physical media. Oddly enough, given my retrogaming habit, this is my first real experience with GOG. I’ve had an account with them for a while now — I registered when I was having difficulty getting Tex Murphy: Overseer working and I noticed that they had a version rejiggered to work with modern machines, but I changed my mind about buying it from them when I saw that it wasn’t the DVD-quality version. I do like their curatorial approach, though, and even though I don’t recall having incompatibility issues the last time I played a Heroes Chronicles episode, I appreciate knowing that the likelihood of running into them has been minimized, especially after my troubles with Arthur’s Knights. (I wish they’d pick up the Cryo games. I always seem to have problems with them.) And now that I’ve used their custom downloader and front end — something that’s completely optional, by the way — I have to say the experience is positive, nicely practical and minimal and unobtrusive.

Next post, I’ll try to talk a little about the Master of the Elements content.

One errand I left incomplete when I left for PAX last week: getting Oleari up to level 70, the Burning Crusade level cap. She was only about a dungeon and a half away from that milestone, and it didn’t seem right to just stop playing until I reached it. I have done this now, and a fair bit more: there’s a sort of dungeon nexus in the ruins in Terokkar Forest, with multiple dungeon questgivers in easy walking distance of each other, and that pulled me in for longer than I had intended. I came away from PAX with a refreshed enthusiasm for all the nifty new indie games out there and a determination to play them, but after a few hours of WoW, all I wanted to play is more WoW. This game is dangerous.

Of course, having reached the level cap, and not being willing to buy another expansion until I’ve explored Outland more thoroughly, I’m no longer getting experience for completing quests. But I’m getting guild reputation, which is more of a concern for me right now, and getting it much faster than previously: high-level quests seem to yield a lot more rep than low-level ones. Whether the guild is worth it is open to question: it’s shrunk to a mere 10 members since I joined, less than half its peak size. I don’t know why this is, or whether it’s normal. I tried asking on the guild chat, but no one replied. Maybe it’s a sore point right now. At any rate, I’ll assume this happens to every new guild until someone tells me otherwise.

Looking back, I see that WoW basically ate this blog for the entire month of August. I’m forcing myself away for at least as long as it takes to complete one randomly-chosen game from the Stack. I’ve got a whole bunch of half-completed games that I started blogging and mean to get around to — you can see them listed on my Backloggery page as “Now Playing”, inaccurate though that description is — but I really think I need something fresh. Next post, we’ll find out what.

It’s been a busy week. And PAX was the start of it. And of all the games available for play or merely on display, there was one that I felt I needed to post about here: this year’s iteration of the PAX XP challenge.

PAX XP was introduced at last year’s PAX Prime as a way to encourage people to participate in every aspect of the convention, rather than just ensconce themselves in one area, as is very easy to do. It accomplishes this through what’s come to be called “gamification” — yes, even gaming conventions are being gamified. I suppose it’s the audience most likely to be receptive to such things. Here’s how it worked last year: Ten people, stationed at specific locations listed on the PAX XP card you got with your program, held special hole-punches, and would punch the appropriate slot on your card either on request or, in some cases, after you performed a simple quest, such as getting up from a beanbag chair or reciting the Konami Code from memory. Once you got all ten holes punched, you could “level up” by turning the card in for a PAX XP keychain fob — a good choice of prize, it seems to me, because it provides an undeniable physical recognition of your accomplishment while at the same time being valueless enough that it doesn’t inspire cheating.

It should be noted that PAX XP wasn’t even the only such activity running at PAX. There was a similar set of simple activities run by a group of indie developers this year as an enticement to visit all their booths. Both this year and last, Magic: the Gathering people had people stationed throughout the grounds running puzzles that got you an invitation to some kind of M:tG event. (Last year, I finished all their puzzles simply because I liked puzzles, but had no interest in the event.) The thing is, these other activities were blatantly geared entirely towards publicizing their particular products. PAX XP 2010 had a little bit of that — one of the hole-punch-carriers was stationed inside a Plants vs Zombies exhibit — but mostly it was about calling your attention to attractions that you had already paid for, and that made it somehow feel more legitimate.

This year’s PAX XP challenge was a bit different from last year’s. ¹Apparently the version described here was also used at this year’s PAX East, with a different solution. Instead of tying up 10 people with hole punches, they posted throughout the grounds 38 laminated sheets of paper bearing QR codes, each decodable to a letter ²Actually, one “letter” was an apostrophe. Other punctuation was not included in the codes. and a clue. (So, already it’s more like a real game.) The letters were to be unscrambled to form a phrase which you could say at the main desk to get this year’s keychain (which is larger and more impressive than last year’s). The clues were mostly things like “Word 2 has one more letter than the final word” and “The letter O appears in four words straight”, but a few of them gave the location of other QR codes. One QR code prominently posted at the entrance yielded “Defeat my puzzle and become the hero of PAX!”, which seemed useless at first, but turned out to be a strong hint about the whole sentence, if you had the necessary cultural references.

Notably, finding all the clues wasn’t necessary. I managed to figure out the sentence from only 24 of the 38 — and this was despite a couple of inaccuracies in the clues. (Two QR codes gave L as their letter, even though one of the clues directly stated that there was only one L in the sentence. One clue incorrectly stated that the letter T only appeared at the beginning of words.)

The really clever thing about using QR codes is that by now most of us automatically filter them out, like banner ads. Consequently, they’re unobtrusive, and easily ignored by people who don’t want to participate in the riddle-hunt. But at the same time, they give the people who are participating a reason to pay attention to QR codes. A few of the commercial exhibits had codes posted that looked like they could be PAX XP clues but turned out to be their company URLs. I’m not sure if my confusion there was deliberate on their part or not; if it was, it didn’t work very well, because I didn’t actually open the URLs after decoding them, but I suppose someone with a different decoder app might have opened them automatically.

I can’t say for sure how popular the whole thing was, but I managed to win an additional “speed demon” award for being one of the first solvers, and that was on the second day of the convention. Also, only once in the entire three days did I see someone else pointing a phone at one of the codes, and he turned out to have no idea what it was about, having not read his program yet. But I suppose that in most cases taking a snapshot of the code is a quick procedure that you wouldn’t notice happening; in this one fellow’s case, it was rendered difficult by glare on the lamination. But hunting for scattered clues is a very adventure-gameish idea, and most gamers aren’t adventure gamers. I suppose there must be enough people participating for the organizers to think it’s worthwhile to keep doing it, at least. It’s not like everyone has to do everything, even if that sentiment goes against the original point of the exercise.

I’ve done significant amounts of exploration and questing in three Outland zones now — Hellfire Peninsula, Zangarmarsh, and Terokkar Forest — and so I think it’s time to post some more possibly-misguided generalizations about what Outland is like and how it differs from Azeroth.

One way the zones of Outland emphasize that you’re not at home: color. A lot of zones in Azeroth use color themes and ambient light to suggest the quality of the atmosphere, making everything redder where the sun is fierce, or greyer where the ruins are foggy and desolate. Transitioning between zones with extreme color differences, you can actually watch the sky change. But none of the color schemes I’ve seen in Azeroth are as extreme as what I’ve seen in Outland. Zangarmarsh in particular is absurdly blue.

Outland, also known as Draenor, is the home of the Draeni, the first playable race in the game that isn’t either Tolkien-standard or animal-based. (I find them a little reminiscent of Githzerai, but I think that’s mostly because of their role in the story.) Blue of skin and blank of eye, they look a little bit Orcish and a little bit Elvish, but with the less human aspects exaggerated. The beards on the males turn out on closer inspection to be some sort of facial tentacles, and their cloven hooves remind us that they’re ultimately of the same stock as the so-called demons that lead the Burning Crusade.

Speaking of demons, remember how Warlock characters get to summon demons to fight for them? There are various sorts of summonable, including both traditional sorts like imps and succubi and less familiar things like the cloud-like Voidwalker and the weirdly spiky Felguard. In a nice touch, you can see all of these creatures roaming free for the first time in the Hellfire Peninsula. Voidwalkers don’t even seem to be affiliated with the Burning Crusade at all; they just roam the more dimensionally-unstable places going about their own business.

In short, despite being definitely in the fantasy genre, it’s still an alien planet, with alien life forms. The fact that Draeni tend to wear robes and carry swords does not change the fact that they are basically kind of sci-fi. (It’s kind of like the Marvel Comics version of Asgard sometimes.) Some of Azeroth’s monsters are pretty alien too, mind you — there are buglike creatures called Silithid that are pretty plainly modeled after the Zerg from Starcraft. But in Outland, even the plants are a bit otherworldly. The trees of Terokkar are tufted and spiky and twisted, not quite like anything on Earth. The ones in Zangarmarsh are actually enormous mushrooms, with caps large enough to land a flying mount on.

One side effect of getting hacked seems to be that I lost my guild membership. Presumably this happened as a result of Oleari being deleted. At first, my reaction was that I had to get back in. I mean, I was almost halfway to raising my guild reputation from Neutral to Friendly! And that took a very long time, due to my inability to participate in guild activities. Guild rep works more or less like any NPC faction reputation, which is to say, it’s completely automatic and has nothing to do with what your guildmates actually think of you. Nonetheless, it’s significant: to some extent, it governs perk access. There are special tabards you can wear that increase the rate at which you gain guild rep, but your rep has to already be at least Friendly for you to buy them, a sort of semi-permeable catch 22.

There was some evidence that I still had my accumulated guild rep in some kind of dormant state, and could recover it by rejoining. But in order to rejoin, I would have to contact someone in the guild, and the only person in it I actually know had been inactive for over a month. Which in itself was perhaps a sign to let it go.

There’s also the fact that the guild had reached its level cap. I think I mentioned guild levels once before. They’re a concept that came in with Cataclysm. Various activities, including just completing quests, give experience to the guild as a whole. As a guild levels up, its members get perks like increased riding speed and diminished wear-and-tear on equipment and the like. Some of the perks help members gain reputations faster, but it’s not clear to me if this applies to reputation with the guild itself. I suppose that a powergamer would want to be in a level 25 guild all the time in order to have all the perks, but to me, the whole point of having a system of levels is to level up. I actually felt a little cheated when I logged on after three months and found that my guild had managed to reach level 25 without me. There’s no sense of accomplishment in reaping the benefits of what other people have done.

And there, I perhaps show why I’m not ideal MMO material. I mean, a lot of people do take pride in other people’s accomplishments, in simply being associated with the group that accomplished them. Consider fans of sports teams. Or consider Alternate-Reality Games. I like the concept of ARGs, but they’re really designed as team efforts, things that can only be solved by people sharing information, which always feels to me like spoiling the puzzles. I’d rather figure things out on my own, you know? Or if I’m going to be part of a team effort, I want to know that my own efforts were significant to the result. One of the most satisfying MMO experiences I’ve ever had was participating in the construction of the first Megalopolis in A Tale in the Desert, an undertaking that required no fewer than 49 participants, because it was made of 49 segments, and each segment had to be slotted into place by a different person. But as well, all of the 49 people were working together on the materials needed for those pieces — mixing cement, cutting gems, etc. — because no one got credit for their part until everyone did. (When the final piece was put into place, most of the participants gathered in front of the structure to watch. Then we all gained a rank in Architecture simultaneously, and the resulting pyrotechnics were enough to crash the client.)

So clearly, if I was going to be in a guild again (and really, it’s something of a waste to not be in one), it was going to have to be a new, small one that I could actively participate in growing.

Finding a guild to join is not hard. The mere fact that Oleari was nearly level 70 and not in a guild meant that she was getting frequent invitations from strangers. (Possibly the fact that she’s a healer helped.) But I wanted to make sure I was joining a guild where I could make a difference. Fortunately, there’s a newish built-in tool for this: the Guild Finder. I had never seen this before, because it was added after I joined my previous guild. The button for it sits in the same slot that, when you’re in a guild, brings up the guild details. It’s not really adequately documented: the list of actively-recuiting guilds lists a few numbers without explaining what they mean. One was clearly the guild level (as it never rose above 25), and another seemed to be the membership count, but the third took me a while to puzzle out: it’s the number of guild Achievement points it has. Achievements are another area where getting them is more appealing to me than already having them, so I wanted to find guilds with low level and Achievement points, but more than just a couple of members: I don’t want it to fizzle out underneath me.

Finding such a thing could have been made simpler with a better UI, one capable of sorting by different fields, like a Windows directory listing, but no, the UI designer here decided to go with pretty rather than functional. But I did find a few, and even got a reply from one, a new one that had just been created the day before. We’ll see how it goes. The membership was about 20 strong when I last checked, and an encouragingly large fraction of them were below level 85.

So, one of the responses to my post about my WoW account getting hacked suggested getting an “Authenticator”. I remember seeing these devices in the Blizzard store, and basically dismissing them as akin to the identity-theft protection plans sold by credit card companies: an attempt to scare you into paying extra money for something that’s really supposed to be part of the vendor’s job anyway. But this impression was, it turns out, way off. For one thing, you can get an Authenticator free of charge. Blizzard will sell you a hardware device if you need it, a little LCD-display device that fits on a keychain, but they also provide a free app for various mobile platforms (including, but not limited to, iOS and Android), as well as an option to do your authentication through a toll-free telephone number. Basically, they just want you to use an Authenticator of some sort, and try to make it as accessible as possible. In fact, they go so far as to give a special thank-you in the form of a vanity pet — a “core hound pup” — to anyone who links an Authenticator of any kind to their account. As chance would have it, I had exactly 14 pets before I set up my Authenticator, and there’s an Achievement for acquiring 15. So already I think it’s worth the time it took to download the app.

And what does an Authenticator do? It generates eight-digit numbers, which are then required to log onto your account, both in the game and on the web. These numbers are apparently only good for 30 seconds — at least, that’s how often the mobile app version spits out a fresh one. When I saw how it all worked, my first reaction was that there should really be some way to link the authentication to a particular machine instead, like Steam can do, so that you don’t have this extra step every time you log in. But apparently it does that too: once the server recognizes that you log in consistently from the same machine, it stops asking for the Authenticator code there. And, having wished for that, I now hope that there’s a way to stop it if necessary.

Now, there can only be one Authenticator paired with an account at a time. This seems reasonable to me: if there were a way to register a second Authenticator, you wouldn’t be able to be sure that no one else can access your account. But it does raise an issue: if you don’t have an authenticator, the attackers can link your account to an Authenticator of their own, thereby locking you out. Mind you, they’d have to also have access to your email in order to confirm the link, but that’s a possibility: if they can get access to your Battle.net password, there’s a reasonable chance that they can get your email password as well (especially if they’re the same). And being locked out would make it difficult to submit a support ticket, or even to cancel your subscription. So to that extent, the existence of Authenticators actually makes things a little less secure for the people who don’t have them.

I’d complain about this if there were any good reason not to have an Authenticator, but as far as I can tell, there isn’t. The only downside is the extra step in the login process, and that’s nothing next to the worry and inconvenience of being hacked, even if (as in my case) it’s a temporary condition. I don’t really like the fact that an Authenticator is a must-have, but that’s genuinely the way it is. I only wish someone had convinced me of this sooner.

Today, before heading back to Outland, I tried out something that has been on my WoW to-do list for some time: the weekly fishing contest in Stranglethorn Vale. This is an activity that’s thrust before your face as soon as you get your first point in fishing skill, by NPCs handing out flyers in Orgrimmar (and presumably in the Alliance capital as well), but what chance does a rank amateur have of winning? My fishing skill is over 300 now, close to the maximum I can get before buying more expansions, so it seemed worth at least trying out. Mind you, people who have Cataclysm can get a fishing skill over 500, but I figured that at this late date most such people had won the contest before, and gotten bored with it, and quit. Which may in fact be the case, for all I know, but the competition isn’t abandoned. I saw maybe four other people fishing, and there were probably a few others that I didn’t see. The competition was won in less than a half an hour, and at that point I was only about halfway to the goal.

The way the derby works is this: At 2:00 PM every Sunday, schools of Speckled Tastyfish suddenly appear all along the Stranglethorn coast. Schools of fish are a mechanic seen wherever there’s fishable water: they’re spots where some particular sort of fish is much more likely to be caught, visible as a circular ripple on the surface of the water. You can even make schools show up on your mini-map if you want. After a certain number of fish have been pulled out of a school, it fades away. (There are also pools of debris in some places that look similar to schools, but with bits of board and crates floating in them. Fishing in one of these yields strongboxes and other salvage.) Speckled Tastyfish are a special sort of fish that can only be caught during the derby, and apparently they disappear a few hours after being caught, so you can’t stockpile them for next week. The first person to turn in 40 of them wins the prize: a special fishing item, the title of “Master Angler”, and an Achievement. Apparently there are a few kinds of rare fish that can also only be caught in Tastyfish schools, and which can be turned in for their own special rewards regardless of whether you win. This strikes me as a clever bit of design: it gives people a motivation to try their luck even if they have no chance of winning.

Surprisingly, having a high fishing skill apparently isn’t the advantage that I assumed it would be: you can catch Tastyfish with a fishing skill of 1. The winners are, rather, the ones who can find fresh schools efficiently. Each school only yields maybe 3 Tastyfish before it’s tapped out. Mind, this doesn’t mean noobs have an equal chance. The real fishing champs are high-enough level to have fast flying mounts. (My flying mount is slow, and can only fly in Outland.)

And that’s before we get to the one really decisive factor that I wasn’t anticipating, but probably should have been: violence. On a PVP server, violence really is all-pervasive wherever Horde and Alliance players mingle, and a nice friendly fishing competition is no exception. If you’re level 85, and you see a sub-70 enemy near a Tastyfish school you want, you better believe you’re going to take a half a second out of your busy fishing schedule to kill them. It’s absurd, but that’s how little life means when everyone just respawns at the nearest graveyard.

So, here we are at the end of my 6-month subscription. Despite my badmouthing the game in these posts, I’ve basically been thinking for the last few days that my desire to see more of WoW‘s content, including the rest of Outland, was strong enough that I actually would be extending my subscription after all — making this, all told, the most expensive game I’ve played in years — and presumably, in due course, get the remaining expansions. What I do when I hit the level cap, I don’t know. It depends somewhat on whether there’s a new expansion out yet by then, and also on whether it looks like the game’s decline in membership is continuing. (I suppose I’m one of the few people who would be more likely to keep the subscription if it is. I kind of regret not being there at the end of A Tale in the Desert‘s first telling, and being on hand at the fall of another MMO, especially an epochal one like WoW, is not something I’d pass up.) In last night’s session, I even bought some new high-capacity luggage at auction (including a 36-slot fishing box), in expectation of great things to come.

But I started seriously reconsidering when I checked my email this morning. I had a message from Blizzard stating that my account was suspended for three hours, and my password reset, due to abuse of the terms of use. Apparently someone had hacked my account while I was asleep and spammed commercial messages over the chat channels.

That much was demoralizing, but not catastrophic. Blizzard’s abuse team at least understands that one day of spam after six months of good behavior is likely a hack job and doesn’t really hold it against you; the three-hour lockout was as much for my own protection as to keep the chat spam-free. Unfortunately, it seemed to have come too late. When I logged on, Oleari was missing. The only character on her server was a level-1 Human priest.

Oleari, gone? Without her, there wasn’t much point in continuing. I really don’t feel like starting over from scratch (or even from level 27, the highest level of my other characters). The really enraging thing about this wasn’t the loss of wealth and equipment, mind you. I can understand stealing a character’s stuff. I once got hacked and looted in Kingdom of Loathing, but the most valuable things there are unlootable — character experience, permanent skills — and to some extent, the same applies here. Oleari’s an herbalist; she could rebuild her material fortune pretty quickly by selling Outland herbs at auction. (Most of her 1000+ gold was acquired this way in the last two weeks, and that’s after buying a bunch of expensive bags.) But she can only do this if she exists.

No, the enraging thing was that scrapping the character herself seemed so pointless. How did it benefit anyone? It just seemed like a sign that we live in a bad world, where people do bad things to each other for no reason. I actually think I have a better explanation now: it turns out that the hacker created a great many characters on different servers, all Human. Perhaps the spammer deleted Oleari in order to keep within the limit on the number of characters per account.

At any rate, my thoughts were basically that I don’t need to play a game where this sort of thing happens. And so I removed my payment information from the account, giving Blizzard no way to charge me further. But then they impressed me with their responsiveness to my support ticket: despite an estimated 48 hour turnaround (by which point my subscription would have expired), they restored Oleari and all her belongings in just over 12. I can’t think of another online game I’ve played where loss due to hackage has been rectified so swiftly and thoroughly; my usual experience is that what’s done is done and the GMs either can’t or don’t like to undo anything. But WoW is a class act. I suppose the fact that Oleari was simply deleted rather than looted makes it simpler, but still, they deserve some kudos for making wrongfully-deleted characters so easily recoverable.

So, I’m inclined at this point to write this off as just another crucial part of the WoW experience, something that my journeys through Azeroth and Outland would be incomplete without, and keep going. But I was kind of looking forward to putting it behind me and throwing myself into a different game tonight. Maybe I’ll take another break soon. Well, level 70 shouldn’t be that far off.