Day: January 22, 2010

Fallen Earth/ Lord of the Rings Online: Welcome Back!


Lord of the Rings Online uses this room as well...

Hey there ex-Fallen Earth and Lord of the Rings Online players! I know what you’ve been thinking, “I’d like to get back into [insert game here], but I just don’t have the cash right now to foot the fee for a game I don’t even know I will still enjoy!” Boy do I have a surprise for you. Both Fallen Earth and Lord of the Rings Online are running welcome back campaigns!

Fallen Earth players should have received an invitation through email by now. The offer is for ten free days to check out all the new updates, from graphics enhancements to the new construction skill, optimizations, and more! All you have to do is log into your Fallen Earth account on Fallen Earth’s website and follow the instructions to activate your free ten days.

Lord of the Rings Online, on the other hand, is giving you a free weekend. Second to Valve for free weekends, Turbine is offering the game from today until Monday for absolutely free, plus benefits! Players who partake in this offering will find that stable-masters have lowered their price to absolutely free, not to mention a 5% experience buff that will stack on top of your rest experience.

I’m mentioning both Fallen Earth and Lord of the Rings Online not just because both happen to be running this offer concurrently, but because both companies are well known for treating their customers well. Fallen Earth continues to grow in subscribers, and Lord of the Rings Online is one of the sleepy giants of the MMO World. Anyone looking to get some free time with the updated version of either game should dive into it.

Unless you’re in Europe, in which case you can’t partake in the LOTRO free weekend. Sorry! Consider complaining to Codemasters, assuming you aren’t already.

NCsoft Confirms "Character Hack" Via Packet Manipulation.


The saga of NCsoft account security continues with the confirmation that an existent exploit in NCsoft’s systems. Not too long ago, I reported on Scayth, an Aion player whose account was compromised while it was inactive. The account was looted, and one or more of the characters may have been used for gold farming purposes.

Thanks to Scayth’s ongoing updates over at Aionsource, he was able to procure a reply (finally) from NCsoft over the account issues. The full image is below, but I will summarize:

  1. The majority of accounts compromised have been through social engineering, viruses, fansites, and keyloggers.
  2. The account was never hacked, the individual characters were. The account itself was not in any danger.
  3. The hacker was able to use packet manipulation to access different characters at whim. The process is “very complicated” and did not give them full access.
  4. Few characters can be accessed in this fashion, Scayth just happened to be one of the unlucky few, among 10 others who were also restored.
  5. The process tricked the system into believing that the character belonged to that account.
  6. The servers were hotfixed to prevent this that same day.
This will explain it all.

What will come next in the NCsoft security saga? MMO Fallout will certainly be here to cover the events.

New WoW Armory Sparks Privacy Outrage


Because you didn't look enough like a nerd before.

Ask someone who strays away from MMOs what their biggest fear about the genre is, and chances are one of those answers will be along the lines of “looking like a nerd.” Despite World of Warcraft, among other games, bringing MMOs into the mainstream audience, many MMOers (alongside video games as a whole) still fear the age old stereotype that we are all basement dwelling nerds with pale skin who live with our parents at the age of 30, dress up as female characters, and participate in LARPing. Now, I may not have a basement, and my Irish/Croatian/German mixture does leave me with mayonnaise-esque skin, and I am under all consideration a nerd, however I am at least ten years off of 30, and still in college.

But I’m getting off track here. Blizzard’s recent update (as with all updates) is causing quite an outrage among privacy advocates. The update to the Armory now broadcasts all of the player’s feats in real time, with the option to subscribe via RSS. Players are also unable to opt out of this feed, or keep it protected to friends and family, making it the bane of players who either shouldn’t be playing World of Warcraft, or those who happen to boot the game up at work.

Now, these players may just be wearing their +10 armor tinfoil hat, but there is something to be said about not wanting your activities broadcast for all to see. Chances are, most of you have had marathons that you wouldn’t want broadcast, staying up that extra half hour that turned into a 3am raid, and by the time you got to sleep the sun was coming back up. But I digress.

One of the MMO Fallout Scouters in WoW reported that this is in fact a useful tool to guilds. Using the RSS feed for raids, Guild Leaders could consolidate the members of the raid to a feed, where they could monitor what the players are looting to ensure that no one is breaking the guild’s rules secretly.

I’m not going to bother going into the legality that people are bringing up, because the move is legal. Blizzard does still have full ownership over everyone’s account, and this is in the terms of service and EULA. Whether or not Blizzard adds an opt-out for this feature comes down to how many players are willing to vote with their wallets and leave over this. Other than that, this all comes down to player’s prerogative.