The worst quest in WoW?

Topless Robot has The 10 Most Legitimate Gripes Players Have About World of Warcraft.

I have to chuckle at the memory of one of the worst quests in WoW because it offers a deadly combination of two of the gripes: nonsensically low drop rates and Murlocs. Called The Star, the Hand and the Heart, it's available to both factions; Alliance picks it up in Badlands. It involves travel to three widely-separated locations on two continents. But here's the clincher -- on an island off the coast of Dustwallow Marsh, one must grind Murlocs for a low drop rate item called Enchanted Sea Kelp. This can take anywhere from twenty minutes to two hours! The comments on this item are a hoot; my favorite:

This part of the chain can take hours and hours of mindless grinding. The droprate is so low that you can even outlevel the quest before this actually drops.

On Murlocs!

Guild Wars product confusion

In a comment at Syp's When Is It Too Late To Begin A MMO?, Brian 'Psychochild' Green mentions that the complex Guild Wars product line leads to confusion:

With so many expansions, I’m not sure what to buy, exactly.

I ran into this myself. No wonder:

...NCSoft published at least two dozen different editions of Guild Wars...

After examining GuildWiki and the NCsoft Store I decided to get them all, which means buying Guild Wars: The Complete Collection, but it's a Europe-only product and the best one can do in North America is Guild Wars Trilogy, purchasing Eye of the North separately.

In contrast, Firaxis has always done this well. It's now offering Sid Meier's Civilization IV: The Complete Edition which bundles everything: Civilization IV and the expansions Warlords amd Beyond the Sword, along with Civilization IV: Colonization.

Did WoW contribute to the demise of Ensemble Studios?

Like many, I was shocked when Microsoft announced the closure of Ensemble Studios. But I began to understand when Dusty Monk blogged about the effect World of Warcraft had on the folks at Ensemble Studios (Lessons from Titan – 2 Years on a cancelled MMO):

In 2005, pretty much all of Ensemble Studios was enthralled with World of Warcraft. We all were playing it pretty much every night. We were talking about it all day. And we were, to a man, convinced we could build that game and more. And therein lay the key. We wanted to build that game.

Microsoft has devoted most of its gaming efforts of late to the console market, and on PC, it has canceled or sold off its MMO projects. Apparently it wasn't good for Ensemble to be enamored of a type of project with little appeal to its owner, Microsoft.

I ran across this back in April or so, but Syp's recent item about NCsoft's modest goal for Aion to be the number two MMO after WoW prompted me to post this. Like Microsoft in the 1990s, WoW is the 900 pound gorilla whose MMO market share has attracted numerous competitors who haven't succeeded in grabbing its share. Unlike Microsoft, though, Blizzard hasn't used underhanded tactics, and has thus far maintained its share legitimately.

The example of Ensemble Studios may prove that NCsoft has the correct goal for Aion.

Wallace & Gromit: A great series marred by horrid controls on the PC

Telltale's Wallace & Gromit series is great but for one thing: the controls.

It's shocking that Telltale made a point and click adventure game where you can't point and click. That's right, on PC, you have to steer your character around using the keyboard!

Another issue is the flakiness of the brackets that show up when mousing over an interactable object; sometimes the brackets show, and sometimes they don't. They're a bit slow to pop up which means you can miss an important object entirely if you move the cursor too fast. Finally, the area that triggers the display of the brackets is sometimes just a portion of the area they enclose.

And finally, Wallace & Gromit suffers from the constrained camera that plagues all of Telltale's releases to date. All camera positions and angles are preset; you have no control over the camera or when cameras change. This interferes with exploring and understanding the game environment, and the sudden camera switches can be frustrating. Games aren't television, and Telltale should stop trying to make them like television. At the very least, allow a free camera option for more advanced players.

But don't let these issues stop you from enjoying this delightful series, particularly anyone who is a fan of adventure games or Wallace & Gromit.

[Image © Telltale Games. Used without permission.]

Empire: Total War quick take

I picked Empire: Total War up recently and while slowly working through the Road to Independence campaign got to my first sea battle. Some quick reactions to sea combat:

1. What is up with the controls? They're terrible! When you order a ship to turn you can barely see the turn indicator unless you are zoomed in close. At one point I had two ships grouped and instructed them to turn right, but they both turned left.

2. I won the battle but elected to hunt down the routing French sloop to practice a bit more. The damaged sloop could make speed while sailing directly into the wind! It should not have had headway at all. My sloop had to tack, of course, and with sails at battle level could not keep up, needing full sail to stay with the routing French sloop.

3. I was appalled when I saw and heard the tutorial instructions that spoke of "zig-zagging" instead of tacking. However, now that I've seen that the sailing simulation is crap I understand why the term wasn't used.

This title is my first exposure to this series. I bought it because of the high metacritic score and good reviews. It's not a bad game, but so far I don't feel it's living up to the scores and reviews.

Except for the graphics (which are of course dated now) Rise of Nations is still unmatched in the category of historical RTS games. In particular, the UI and controls (both land and sea) in RoN are far superior to E:TW.

[This was also posted to GameFAQs.]

TMZ.com ads are spreading PDF exploits too!

On Monday I posted about a PDF trojan downloaded from an ad server.

Tonight I saw another one, this time from TMZ.com.

Like last time, I took a look:

% ls -l 710.pdf
-rw-r--r-- 1 uid gid 14720 2009-06-26 02:44 710.pdf
% file 710.pdf
710.pdf: PDF document, version 1.1
% cksum 710.pdf
279936831 14720 710.pdf
% strings -a 710.pdf | less
var bd = "10%32%118%97%114%32%86%121%103%76%78%100%106%32%61%32%110%101%119...etc.

It looks very much like the last one (which I deleted), even being the same size. The var bd stuff is the payload, which is a (Javascript?) text string containing what appear to be the encoded binary exploit code.

Firefox history contained two URLs, with path components of /kn/in.php and /kn/pdf.php, both from the same server.

> host s.hhxzao.info
s.hhxzao.info has address 64.34.162.71
s.hhxzao.info has address 64.34.172.142
s.hhxzao.info has address 66.135.37.21

> host 64.34.162.71
71.162.34.64.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer sever3.adv-basesrv.net.
> host 64.34.172.142
142.172.34.64.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer server2.advert-base.net.
> host 66.135.37.21
21.37.135.66.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer server1.advert-base.net.

Look familiar? It should, it's the same outfit as last time!

Wikipedia's entry for TMZ.com say it "has major corporate backing" and names AOL/Time Warner. As I cited from Another virus infection, courtesy of Yahoo News in the prior post:

Major web sites like Yahoo.com and Boston.com are infecting thousands, if not hundred thousands of computers with trojans, back doors, and other viruses, through some of their ad service providers.

The scope and breadth of this is startling, and it's been going on for months!

What gives? Why aren't people up in arms? If the Internet trade press has covered this, please let me know; I haven't seen anything. Is scandalous news being covered up?

Update: I moved the 710.pdf file to a Windows machine and scanned it with both Trend Micro HouseCall and AVG Free and neither one found a thing.

Update 2: See Steps To Prevent Gumblar / Martuz / Nine-Ball for things you can do to stay safe.

Ad servers being used to spread exploits

Tonight I went to look at Blue's News to see what's up in gaming today. Firefox popped up a dialog wanting to save a file called 941.pdf. It's not the first time this has happened, but this time I decided, sure, since I'm on Ubuntu, let's have a look at the thing.

> ls -l 941.pdf
-rw-r--r-- 1 uid gid 14720 2009-06-22 20:14 941.pdf
> file 941.pdf
941.pdf: PDF document, version 1.1
> evince 941.pdf
Error: PDF file is damaged - attempting to reconstruct xref table...
>

Sure looks fishy.

Running 'strings -a' showed some Javascript that included a long string containing the payload. Next I looked into the machine that served up the file.

> host w.eaaxra.info
w.eaaxra.info has address 64.34.162.71
w.eaaxra.info has address 64.34.172.142
w.eaaxra.info has address 66.135.37.21
> host 64.34.162.71
71.162.34.64.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer sever3.adv-basesrv.net.
> host 64.34.172.142
142.172.34.64.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer server2.advert-base.net.
> host 66.135.37.21
21.37.135.66.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer server1.advert-base.net.

Searching on adv-basesrv.net didn't turn up much, but a search on advert-base.net led to this blog from April 9th, Another virus infection, courtesy of Yahoo News which opens:

Major web sites like Yahoo.com and Boston.com are infecting thousands, if not hundred thousands of computers with trojans, back doors, and other viruses, through some of their ad service providers. When will the people in charge of these web sites wake up and start screening the ads that they are serving?

Apparently the blogger over there was infected, and after cleaning up he traced his infection back to good old advert-base.net.

So after two and a half months, this advertising outfit is still spreading exploits in addition to the ads. Why is such an irresponsible company still in business?