Teen princess tantrum? Not cute even when Betty Draper does it. And she's way sexier than you are.

So you make a WoW guild. You figure you’ll be reasonable and give teens a shot – you figure if they start making their own rules and invoke the mystic Drama-Llama, you can pull them aside, tell them this is unacceptable, and eventually they will either start behaving or get your boot in their ass. And it shouldn’t be a problem, since you’ll be screening them anyway.

But age limit 16-plus? If you try that, make sure all your mods or officers or whatever are on the same page about what’s kosher. Make sure your other membership is on board with the “no drama, no exceptions” policy. 16 means 2-4 whole years of the age bracket whose biggest problem is whether daddy will pay their WoW bill and if their new school will be hard – and because their lives are so simple, they have silly amounts of time to spend on convincing themselves it’s the exact opposite. Like the ghost told Betty in Mad Men: “You’re a housecat, baby. You’re highly valued, and don’t have a lot to do.”

The thing is, I like cats. They’re adaptable. I’ve never met a kitty that can’t be taught that it should piss in the litter box, not claw shit when it’s upset, and never ever jump on my keyboard demanding attention RIGHT NOW, because the possible destruction of work in progress will be met with loud noise and an immediate introduction to unassisted flight. Cats and teens, both are completely educable. They just need consistent rules.

The other thing my perfect next guild will not have is well-intentioned busybodies who listen to the upset teen kitty yowling when it doesn’t get it’s way – and then ride in on the whaambulance to tut on how naughty it is, making poor kitties cry like that. Seriously, if the kitty makes a pest of itself and then tries to claw my eyes out when I tell it no, it ain’t cruel to lock it up till it cools down and starts behaving again. Auntie Empathy is not helping by being all sympathetic and demonstrating that yes, in fact, all adult humans DO exist to make kitty’s existence comfier.

…in retrospect, I should have locked the kitty out, though, not walked out and left it loose in the house. If I want my guild back from that pair now, there will probably be violence – and I’m not sure I’ll be able to get the smell out of the couch even then.

Anyone know how to remove unsolicited drama stains?

So, the mate of a mate got his WoW account hacked. Made me think of a minor server blowout last Christmas, when Blizzard was trying to educate it’s customers on how to keep their accounts safe – and the rant I had back then in my old blog. Translated and updated here for the benefit of foreign devils. You’re welcome.

Blizzard’s anti-hacker advice was good enough, as far as it went. Never share your account information. Change passwords regularly. Buy an Authenticator, if you play at net cafes – that sort of thing. They just completely skipped the most fundamental problem:

The vast majority of MMO gamers are complete muppets when it comes to basic computer security.

This was made painfully clear when Blizzard’s warnings were discussed on the server forum. Before we knew it the page was filling up with tales of woe, people proclaiming their sympathy for the victims of hacking, and otherwise completely rational people nodding sagely and explaining that it is, of course, impossible to build a hacker-proof computer, so anyone at any time can fall victim to vicious hackers. The fact that banks, international corporations and entire damn nations succeed in keeping their data traffic secure  every day of the week doesn’t seem to matter to these people. No, really, securing your WoW account, that’s voodoo beyond the grasp of us mere mortals.

Hacked accounts are a favourite tool for gold sellers. They can also be ripped off for more merchandise.

The thing is, they’re technically right. With determined enough effort anything connected to the net can be hacked – but if you just want a few thousand WoW-keys, you don’t need to go to the trouble. Why should you, when gamers will line up to just GIVE away their accounts?

“Well of course I clicked the link, it was from a friend.”
“No I could see it installs something, but I thought it would be something funny.”
“But configuring IE is hard, and I don’t want to use another browser. ”
“I can’t use this stupid antivirus software, it kills my framerate.”
“I don’t use a firewall, I don’t have anything worth stealing anyway.”
“I can’t be arsed to reinstall to get rid of one virus, I’m buying a new PC next month anyway.”

The depressing part isn’t that those are actual quotes from actual hacking victims. It’s that each and every one of them was an educated and otherwise very sensible person, who honestly believed even afterward that they hadn’t screwed up even a little bit.

What should they have done?

The same thing everyone else who cares about data security and uses Windows should be doing.

1) Make sure that Windows Automatic Update is running. Install the newest updates immediately. No exceptions, ever.

2) Install a fully featured security suite and make sure auto-update is on. Never turn off any part of the software – it will only protect you if it’s running. Your security suite should have anti-virus, anti-malware, phishing protection, a two-way firewall and ideally also rootkit detection.  Unless you’re completely broke (and if you can afford WoW, you obviously aren’t), buy a commercial license. Free security suites will work in a pinch, but are generally better for experienced users who know how to configure them properly. Norton, Panda, F-Secure and ZoneAlarm come to mind.

3) Get rid of Internet Explorer. Yeah yeah, it can be configured to be safe – but is that easier for a net newbie than just changing browsers? Even if you do make IE secure, it’s still the most common browser on the net, which automatically makes it the favourite target for hackers. Many key loggers are countered simply by having Firefox, Google Chrome or Opera, which are immune to malware exploiting known vulnerabilities in IE. If you just can’t bare to lose IE, install Google Chrome Frame – it introduces a few potential new risks (more code means more things can go wrong), but it also closes a lot of old ones. Alternate browsers don’t have perfect default security either, but at least they get targeted less frequently.

4) Do not click strange links. Not even if a friend sent them, not even “just to see what it is” – this is exactly how a lot of viruses get passed around. Ask if they meant to send it first, and don’t click until you’re sure the link really was sent by your mate, not malware on their computer. If you’re still worried about accidentally clicking the wrong thing, install WinPatrol. It’s a security program that takes a snapshot of your system and then smacks you with a popup warning every time something tries to change it. Bloody annoying if you’re a veteran user who tweaks and changes stuff regularly, but a good line of defence for casual users who just want to surf, chat and play MMO’s in peace.

5) Read the alerts your security software gives you. If you don’t know what the process that is asking permission to run or change the registry or connect to the internet is, google it. That should give you multiple hits to help you decide if it’s safe to allow it. If you’re still not sure, deny permission just in case.

When it doubt, google it. The more links you get saying that the process is part of some safe program, the more likely it is no disaster will come of approving it.

None of the steps on this list will give you a mystical hackerproof PC – but they would have saved the accounts of every last friend, acquaintance and random internet contact who’s ever cried about their hacked account within earshot of me. Online gamers are muppets about their security, and this is exactly what WoW-hackers rely on. Even basic security will keep hackers off your back, because the vast multitudes of suckers who don’t even do that much can be ripped off with a fraction of the effort.

Why should anyone care?

The thing is, you can’t just laugh it off as idiots getting their dues. If your security sucks enough to get your account hacked, your epixx should be the least of your worries. Symantec’s bi-yearly Internet Security Threat Report and other reputable experts have long been laying it out: computer crime isn’t geeky pranking, it’s a whole new kind of underground economy. Viruses and malware, the basic tools of e-criminals, will hardly ever inconvenience the host PC in any way. Their goal is to stay invisible, and to hijack the computer for data theft and criminal activity.

Do you ever shop online? The virus just nicked your credit card number and PayPal codes. Do you pay bills or use social networks? Personal data gleaned from them is the corner stone of identity theft. And that’s not even counting all the nastiness that a criminal with a few thousand infected computers at their fingertips can do. Most spam and viruses are spread by the remotely controlled computers of ordinary people who screwed up with their security. Even worse, hijacked computers are also how e-criminals spread child pornography or execute web-blocking denial of service -attacks, most commonly used for extortion.

Even hacking game accounts isn’t as petty as it seems. Though gold selling is against the terms of service in most games, it’s been estimated that in China alone the market was worth hundreds of millions of euros in 2007 – and was declared taxable income in 2008. For us gamers, it just means annoying gold spam. For law enforcement it’s a genuine concern, because the lack of a paper trail attached to virtual currency trades makes it a perfect money laundering channel for organised crime. Nevermind “cheating at the game”, or whatever morally righteous crap gamers usually spout when they denounce gold selling – the real dirt is that gold trade exists on hacked accounts and at least some of it serves organised crime.

So no, your computer’s security is not a personal choice. Hacking is not a calamity you get to cry about. Would you feel anything less than stupid if you left your car unlocked and joyriders ran someone over with it, or used it to rob a bank? An unprotected PC getting hacked is much more likely, just a matter of time. I have no sympathy for gamers who don’t realise the damage they do, neglecting basic computer security. They’re not “just” hapless victims who should be hugged and comforted and given free pants for their newly nekkid paladin. If they can’t be arsed to do the five easy things listed above, they’re also part of the problem.

When the World of Warcraft: Cataclysm announcement landed, I quit WoW. Not for that reason alone, but the final straw was Blizzard confirming class restrictions would be relaxed. Most dedicated RP’ers right now are praying there’s some in-world story explanation to this that hasn’t been revealed yet. Because for us, changing who can be a druid or a paladin, let alone having Night Elves abandon the bane on using Arcane magic, is sort of a a big deal.

The pure gamer in me says it shouldn’t be. Players have been clamouring for certain gameplay/class restrictions to be changed for ages, and accommodating them is just good customer service. I’m only shocked here because after years of on/off roleplay in WoW, I finally realised an old friend was right. For all it’s genius in gameplay and design, in storytelling WoW delivers the exact same bullshit quality as any lesser franchise. It tells the same half-arsed stories using the same two-dimensional characters as every other Generic Fantasy Game (TM) out there – and it’s doing it’s damnest to achieve more, not less, genericness.

This also isn’t a big deal. In the world of gaming, only BioWare and Peter Molyneux routinely make story their primary selling point. To the rest “compelling story” is the same sort of non-information press release spin as “action-packed adventure”, “thrilling gaming experience” and “exclusive title”. WoW has never claimed it’s story is all that special, and it’s never claimed to be a RPG, so perhaps it’s unfair to judge it on those grounds (though it does have dedicated RP servers, so they do try to snag that audience too). It was just a shock to realise that though Blizzard does allow for roleplay in WoW, on closer reflection their approach to story seems handcrafted to drive all but the most casual roleplayers clinically insane.

Much fluff, less meat

The root of the problem roleplayers face in WoW is that there is story, but it establishes almost nothing useful about the setting. The games and novels and comics only tell their own isolated bit of epic history, generally involving dashing teenagers (or adults, ancients and demigods who act remarkably like teenagers), who basically go about solving dramatic situations with ill-advised but dramatic action, and then evade all responsibility by doing something even more dramatic. There’s very little about normal culture or less epic times – and even the epic bits read like the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie, which shares WoW’s remarkable ability to drown all its cool ideas in metric fucktons of embarrassing posturing by uninspired protagonists. Which is a shame, because under the goop the Warcraft setting does get around to some pretty neat fantasy themes – noble and intelligent orcs and trolls, savage and magic-hating elves, a religion that’s evolved past the need for God and a matriarchal society that isn’t all about peace and hugs, to mention a few. In spite of Blizzard’s best efforts to produce a homogenized fantasy MMO, some of that variation still survives in WoW.

For those bits or originality, I made a lot of excuses for Blizzard’s storytelling over my WoW roleplaying career.  “Play along with the setting, not against it” is a direct quote from the roleplay section of the official World of Warcraft player’s guide, and I used it a lot. The thing is, to do that there has to be a setting. The game itself isn’t enough – roleplay in any narrative way requires an underlying, predictable idea of how things work in the world, and that idea should not retroactively change with the latest bugfixes, class revamps, raid content and expansions to the mechanical game. I’m not even thinking about the genuinely heavy-handed game mechanical stuff, like phased areas — speed questers like me will usually have finished anything that could put us out of phase soon after it came out, nailing story-related quests to “some point in the recentish past” (or if it’s a secret revelation, to “we suspect, but can’t prove it until Blizzard advances the story to make this common knowledge and fact”). I’m talking about the basic world information that give the story its context.

Where Blizzard deserts roleplayers

Sitting and talking about stuff - the backbone of roleplay. Easy, as long as you have a setting that actually knows how it works day to day.

To have sensible roleplay, I need to know if my 500-year old elf is an ancient or a teen among her people. I need to know if my character’s culture considers torture ok or a crappy thing to do. I need to know if my character’s religion thinks God is a code of conduct, an actual creature or that big blobby sun-thing up there. And if this can change on the fly – by switching elven age maximums from 700 to “several thousand” years, or by turning Blood Knights from evil leaches into redeemed servants of the Naaru, or by having Night Elves pick up Arcane Magic again, or by declaring that Tauren can be paladins because they worship the Sun, which is now exactly the same thing as serving Vorlon-wannabe aliens or studying a warrior monk philosophy that has long since done away with the concept of ‘God’ in favour for something semi-Zen…

…this is where roleplay starts coming apart. Changes like that aren’t “just” furthering the plot, or adding to the setting in the same way as opening up previously inaccessible places like Quel’thalas or Dalaran does. They’re not a pure gameplay change, like rebuilding the paladin class from skills to talent trees. They’re rewriting the underlying logic that governs what is normal and possible in the setting – it’s like saying, ‘in this expansion, gravity will work sideways, and it possibly always has’. At the very least roleplayers need some way to rationalise the change. What bugs me is, I’m pretty sure Blizzard knows this, and doesn’t care. Why should they? Roleplayers are a minority of paying customers, 5% or less by common estimates. There are probably more Italian-speaking WoW-players than there are RP’ers across all the language areas. Italian localisation would be a better investment for Blizzard’s money than catering to us whiny roleplaying geeks.

I can respect the logic. As a gamer, I can admit Cataclysm implements stuff I’ve wanted (flying mounts in old Azeroth and an update of the badly dated classic zones), and I have to admit that Blizzard does, rarely, make an effort to cater to us with a more storied experience. The irony is that when they do this – by dungeon encounters, or phased quests, or by having Silvermoon NPC’s blithely praise Kael’thas while Outland NPC’s revile him as a Legion lackey – they just succeed in exposing how generic their idea of story is, and how primitive and ham-handed MMO tools for handling narratives actually are. How many times a day did the Alliance see Onyxia exposed before Blizzard finally freed us from that terrible /yell-spam?

But mostly they don’t seem to bother. The message seems to be that story is fine when you’re levelling and bored, but the purpose of WoW is to reach the endgame. If the Argent Tournament is anything to go by, after that we’re only expected to want a graphical button mashing exercise whose sole point is to reach the next loot lotteries and/or PvP leaderboard update. Success will be rewarded only with gear that lets you do the same exact thing a tiny bit more efficiently. This is what WoW is about now – the story is padding at best.

It’s built for raiding

Even the tram in Ulduar looks cool. Raiders are used to scale - take it away and the whole thing collapses.

I don’t mind flimsy or even no story if it’s logical. An underground gladiator ring, Arena-style and run by greedy and immoral goblins, works fine. But the Argent Tournament? We’ve fought an epic campaign to Arthas’s doorstep, we’re ready to smite the greatest traitor of the generation in his undead unmentionables, and we … set up a tourney on his porch so he can laugh himself silly while Tirion Fordring’s valiant knights beat up on each other? Or worse, watch while Tirion obligingly decimates his own army by feeding them to random raid-bosses?

Ulduar was the allout showcase of Blizzard’s current raid-building prowess. The scenery was beautiful, the story stuck together, progression was nicely modularised to let raids vary their routines, and even the trash fights were challenging enough to wipe overly cocky raids. The Tournament instances, Trial of the Champion and Trial of the Crusader, are the plain lazy antithesis of that design. One ugly arena, and nothing else except a lone NPC to click. When you do, you get a boss to fight, without even the thinnest clue why Tirion is playing last days of Rome on the Lich King’s front lawn. Couldn’t they at least have added some nominal mechanic where a failed raid is rescued from the beasts and patched back up – so it would seem like Tirion is training his army and not just butchering chunks of it for giggles?

I’m hoping the hyperefficient boss-o-matic is a design they’ll back away from. In other raids, gameplaywise, WoW is still unbeaten, and I’d like to return to nostalgise, once the sting of disappointment has worn off. But if I ever roleplay in the game again, I’ll be doing it with a big “whatever” to the setting – because anything else simply isn’t worth the effort.

Newbies get sabotaged by the epic

Blizzard has never honoured the terms it offered to RP’ers. “Play with the world, not against it” simply doesn’t work when they retcon established facts about the game world regularly. It’s the roleplay equivalent of a spouse who demands you do EXACTLY as they want, and then without warning decides they want something else instead. No-one wants to be the poor sucker being jerked around like that. Especially when each change of heart breaks suspension of disbelief and reminds you that even the bits that aren’t annoying you right now are still very tired and very teenage. And Blizzard’s own lore characters are only the start of it.

When these guys are given buddy-dialog, can you blame roleplay newbies for getting swelled heads?

Take Tyrande who somehow gets called a wise and loving leader even after murdering her own people to free a known menace. Or Sylvanas, who apparently is queen of the Forsaken largely by virtue of being powerful enough to stay pretty and stand straight while dead. Or Rhonin, who might seem a match for demigods if his best mate Krasus wasn’t married to one – which should be cringe-worthy in and of itself. When the official gold standard for viable characters is like that (and a very sincere “like that”, not an ironic Quentin Tarantino “like that”), it’s no wonder so very many WoW-taught roleplayers create Mary Sue after Mary-fucking-Sue and proceed to enact their own personal soap operas as if the world revolved around their dramatic and luridly described navels. Sometimes as players as well as characters.

The one thing about Cataclysm that makes me happy is that Blizzard finally broke my back. Since I’m not taking intravenous bullshit-for-story from the source anymore, I can finally take a breath and quit taking it from players as well. No more drama that would make daytime TV writers cringe with the frequency of life-altering disasters. No more roleplay where ‘mature’ consists of playing a female character (though really you’re male) and only having cybersex some of the time. Yes that second one is a cliche, dammit – because in seven years online I’ve met a total of four men who don’t publicly admit to doing both, “but it doesn’t count because…”.

Yes it bloody does count. Could you punks at least exploit your own gender and sexual orientation for a change? You’re embarrassing the actual women and lesbians/bis – I’ve lost count of how many people have told me I play “a really convincing woman” because of you.

Bad Blizzard. Bad WoW roleplayers. No cookie for either of you.