T w e n t y S i d e d

Oh no! Shamus is turning this site into a WoW blog! The rage!

Well, I turned it into a Mass Effect 2 blog and a Fable 2 blog at various times. This too shall pass.

Anyway, round & about the World O’ Warcraft:

A spammer. Yes, I know that posting images of his shenanigans is helping him to achieve his goal and thus rewards the little bastard, etc. But this is an interesting case because he’s revealing some interesting holes in the WoW servers.

What you’re looking at is a group of level one human Warlocks, who all start in red robes. They are no doubt in the game on trial accounts. They have assembled themselves into positions in mid-air to spell the name of the spammer site.

Onlookers assumed this was a group of goldfarmers, but it was clear to me that these avatars were controlled by homemade scripts and not real people. I’m guessing the spammer didn’t have the WoW client running. He was probably running his own software that posed as the client and allowed him to control many avatars at once from the same computer. The entire group moved with extreme mechanical precision. They went from the standing upright configuration to the sitting one at exactly the same time. They moved to their new positions instantly without needing to walk there. Oh, and they were floating in the air, which is not possible using legitimate game mechanics.

What I can’t understand is why Blizzard allows this. It’s not difficult to analyze incoming positional data and perform sanity checks on it. If someone playing WoW suddenly seems to have moved 10 meters in half a second, the server should be able to spot the rule-violating behavior. Some goes for standing in mid-air.

Moving on. Thanks to those who donated to the “help Shamus score a mount” fund:

Also thanks for the advice from fellow players on how to work the auction house. I’ve managed to find a few key items that I’m willing to part with and that sell for a fortune. Also thanks for all the bags. This game is so much more fun when you can carry all the crap you need for cooking, fishing, first aid, and your profession tools.

And now for something completely juvenile:

It looks like my lizard is giving my a lapdance, but really he’s* just standing there. Pets always do this. If you sit in a chair, they sort of climb onto your lap.

* I actually think Eddie is a female. The game doesn’t normally tell you the gender of animals. But! There is this group of ghosts in the game that put a curse on you and turn you into an undead human for a couple of minutes. When this happened to Eddie, she was a female avatar. This happened on two different occasions. I should go back with a different pet and see if it ends up a different gender.

I just dinged level 30. This is an important level in the game, where you get new powers and access to the next tier of gear. But I didn’t care about any of that. The moment I leveled I ran out and got this:

You can’t tame a pet above your own level, and this was the first turtle I could reach on the Alliance side. (Blood Elves get Turtles in their starting location. I actually considered trying to get there and grab one when I was 25 and tired of waiting, but I figured the trip would be suicide. I’d have to pass through hostile country, high-level areas, and Horde-side cities to get there.)

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

So I’m playing WoW again, and mucking around trying to remember all my old macros and get the interface just so. Sometimes in my googling about I’ll come across images like this one:

Of course, the game doesn’t look like this until you get to the endgame, and I understand that not all classes turn into giant control panels, but it’s still an amazing thing to behold. I can’t think of anything else in gaming that gets to be this complex. Not X-com. Not the number-crunchy sports management games. Not the turn-based war sims. No RTS game expects you to digest this much input and I’ve never seen this many buttons onscreen at once in any of them.

There are probably games with more strategic depth, but in terms of interface density, WoW (and similar games) are playthings of tremendous complexity.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.