Have you noticed your gear getting better and better lately? Have you been logging in at almost any time of the day or night only to jump into a RAID or Heroic run?

Guild activity has been great lately and certainly enjoy logging in and jumping right to a dungeon run of some sort.

Remember that you can schedule your own runs in the Forum under Parties / Raids / Events and even get a calendar item for your Heroic / 10-25 Person run.

Send Gilthian or I a PM on the forums or in game and we'll help you out.

Bradlee
- I only hide behind my shield as an off spec

Fellow Guildies,

We have made yet another milestone. It's now 2009 and we are still playing games together, as friends, and guild-mates. While we sometimes drift in and out or even play other games we are still having a great time and a positive social experience. Unless, of course, you aren't!

With many members into 80 and starting to gear up we have announced our first WOTLK raid. It's tonight and the signups are here:

http://spiritsofvengeance.guildomatic.com/raid_calendar

I look forward to reading about your exploits tonight.

Bradlee
- still working up to 80

If you haven't already pre-ordered your expansion then now is a good time to think about it. I'm sure that we'll all be online late nights when WoTLK releases and you won't want to miss a moment of it.

Here are some suggested links - we make no money on these links.

Amazon: WoTLK Collector's Edition
Amazon: WoTLK
Gamestop Preorders and in-store pickup

Where will you get yours?

Bradlee

If you have not ordered your Blizzard Authenticator yet then you might be out of luck for a while. The page shows that they are sold out. Here is my experience so far.

The token arrived in the mail and appears to be exactly the same as the pay-pal verisign authenticator with a rectangular case that says "blizzard" on it. Once you have your token in hand you log in to your WoW account page and link it to your account. There is a menu item there for this purpose. Immediately after linking the token and the account I logged into WoW and was prompted for my token's code. Awesome!

So what is it doing? The token has a display of six numbers. The first number is incremental and changes every minute and the other numbers are generated by a hash that the back-end server knows. This second factor of authentication makes an attacker on your account have to know your login name, password, and the current incremental number and then guess 99,999 possible combinations within the one minute interval in order to hack into your account.

If Blizzard is using the same Verisign back-end that Pay-pal uses then this is a rock-solid and highly effective system. I am very glad to have purchased one.

What about multiple accounts? It seems that we are able to link multiple accounts to one token. So when you dual box you don't have to two tokens in your pocket or leave one account unsecured.

Check out the token FAQs for more info.

Bradlee

P.S. I heard a brief mention of the authenticator on Security Now Episode #152 - link

Quoted from Security Now #152 Transcripts:

STEVE: In another bit of interesting news, and you may - you're clued into all of what's going on enough, you may have heard this. Blizzard, who makes World of Warcraft, has now adopted a bizarrely painted PayPal football for World of Warcraft authentication.

LEO: Yeah, somebody mentioned that to me, and I thought, that's - so when you play World of Warcraft now you can use your football to say this is me.

STEVE: Now, I don't know if you can register an existing PayPal token. What I found interesting was that they are offering this at a very low price. Just like PayPal, they're trying to encourage people to use this for authentication. $6.50.

LEO: Great deal.

STEVE: Unfortunately, they're all sold out.

LEO: Already.

STEVE: You go to their website, it's like $6.50. Oops, sorry, sold out.

LEO: Wow.

STEVE: So I don't know how many they had, how quickly they sold out, or any of the stats for that. But if we have World of Warcraft listeners, you should know that there is a way to increase the strength of your authentication using the technologies that we've talked about here many times. And it may well be, I mean, it does, it looks like the same technology that PayPal is using. I don't know, but it's worth exploring, whether an existing PayPal football might be transportable so that you'd be able to register that and wouldn't need to set up another one. I would think, I don't know, whether Blizzard is using, like, a VeriSign backend or whether they've implemented their own backend servers. It's impossible to say.

As a reminder, the 25 man sign ups are over here:
http://spiritsofvengeance.guildomatic.com/forums/viewforum.php?f=17
Then find the latest date posted and sign up on that thread

The 10 man sign ups are on the calendar.

Gilthian