We recently got rid of our Dish Network.  We decided that we didn’t watch enough TV for what we were paying for.  I started to turn to the internet to catch the few shows that I like to watch.  This was the first time I ever used Hulu.com.  I knew of it but never took the time to check it out.  That was exactly what I was looking for.  At the same time we picked up NetFlix streaming (using the Wii).  This will meet our TV viewing needs.

We found that we only watched a few shows and those we did watch were all on DVR.  To making the jump to on demand content is going smooth.  I am now in the process of connecting Hulu to my TV.  I think I have everything I need now. I just have to run the cords.

I have also discovered a little problem.  I am now watching more TV.  I can go back and catch episodes in previous seasons that I missed before.  I am also getting attached to new shows that I never took the time to watch before.  The really cool thing about is the ability to start from the first season and first episode.  We just made this change last weekend and I am about to finish the first season of Lost.  A show that I never thought about watching before.

I was looking at the popular list of shows and decided to give Lost a try.  Jumped back to the pilot episode and have continued to watch it almost non-stop. 20 episodes in 4-5 days.  I started out with it on hulu but my laptop can only do one thing at a time.  So no hulu and Wow or hulu and SCII.  When my netflix disk showed up for my wii I could then watch TV and do my computer stuff at the same time.  Except now I am too much into the show to do other stuff.  Yeh I can post auctions and check mailbox.  But SCII takes to much attention.

I think Hulu and Netflix will be a good complement to each other once I get both on the TV.  Hulu still has a few adds in it.  Not as many as Dish/Cable shows but it still has them.  I think Hulu gets more current network shows than Netflix.  Netflix has a series that went to DVD and a good deal of movies.  There are no commercial interruptions.  But I don’t know if they will have network shows as current as hulu.  I could have picked bad examples when I was checking shows.  So someone that has used both services for longer than 4 days may have a better idea.  This is more my initial impressions of the things I see.

GTFOOFT had a post yesterday about all the fishing attempts people are getting.  I did the same check on my mail box and I have to thank Google for doing a good job of catching them for me.  In the last 30 days, I had 39 fake messages from Blizzard.  If I didn’t know any better, I would think that someone was hacking my Warcraft account.

All the messages indicate that I either changed something and should verify it or my account was stolen and I need to verify I am the owner.  The big problem I see now is that they are trying too hard to phish me.  1 – 2 messages a day is not a phishing attempt any more.  It is a shotgun attempt to get someone to miss click something.  You can’t send the same thing day in and day out hoping that one day someone will think that “I know all that other crap is fake, but this one looks real so it must be from Blizzard”.

They could be trying to get past various email filters.  Some filters are trained based on the content.  If they send enough messages they can attempt to train the filter that its legit.  This works if people have blizzard.com on the allow list.  If enough people are allowing this then it must be wanted by someone, right?

Either way, its just one of those things we need to learn how to deal with if we are on the internet.

Don’t be fooled into thinking this is just a problem with WoW.  I had 39 spam messages with the term Warcraft in them.  I had 7 fake messages for AION. 68 messages with the work account.  I had 19 messages that used my first name and none that used my last.

Is anyone having issues getting KTQ to work? Every once and a while I get someone posting me a message that they cannot get it to work. Part of my motivation to work on KTQ was to get it to work for these people. Then I ran into an interesting situation. I did a full fresh install and everything just worked.

I deleted every addon I had and removed my WTF folder. This took me as close to a fresh install that I wanted to do. I started the curse client and it auto downloaded all my addons. Thats not exactly what I wanted but it got everything I needed. I logged into wow and saw the WotLK intro. I don’t remember seeing it before so that was kind of cool. Once I got into the game I enabled all out of date addons. Logged into my inscriptionist. I opened up Skillet and typed “/KTQ Craft 14 Glyphs”. 14 of everything was queued into skillet.

It still has that refresh bug where adding new items does not refresh the visible list, but once you click a pattern in skillet they all show.

I may need to revisit my install instructions but as far as I can tell, things just work. So if anyone is having issues getting KTQ to work, let me know. I need to figure out where people are having these issues.

Something I did just for fun.

Botters can be very frustrating.  I have even seen people that I know bot get frustrated with them.  We all have our reasons to hate them.  When it feels like there is nothing we can do, it gets even more frustrating.   I have had several encounters with bots like I am sure many of you have.  Greedy Goblin just went into detail of one such encounter with a botter and the lack of action by Blizzard.  I want to take a moment to look at the other side of the situation.   There could be several valid reasons why you would hold off on banning a botter.

*Disclaimer: This is not me supporting the way Blizzard does it.  I do not work for Blizzard or have internal information. I just want to give a justification for what I see other than Blizzard supports botting.  *

The first thing that jumps out to me is for verification.  They need something more on record that the word of the players.  It can be very easy for the untrained eye to mistake a bot for a player.  I know a bot when I see one, but not everyone does.  Screenshots and videos can help but that can also be faked.  How dangerous would it be if you could get someone baned with a fake screen shot.  It turns out to be a lot of work to fake a screen shot that any competent GM could verify in a matter of seconds.

Some people can grind very efficiently.  During a long grinding session in a small area every thing you do will start to look the same.  The path you take, the way you target a mob, the cast sequence you use, and possibly even the timing of the attacks.  Some people do this while watching TV or even half asleep.  This is a big reason they would have a verification process.

I have ran into botters that just stood out as botting.  I once saw a mage grind by not moving.  Any time a mob would wonder into or span into fireball range, he would instantly target it and start casting.  Every mob outside that range was left alone.  I could verify the botting by bringing mobs into his range.  Letting him kill them after I taped them so I got the XP.

I had one other botter that made me wonder.  He had a very large and smooth grind path.  That made it hard to judge if the path was exact.  He did some human like movements that were introduced when he set up the path.  The thing that gave him away was where he stopped and started his path.  He did a very unnatural tick with his movement every time in that exact spot.  His grinding path was 5 min long so it was hard to catch if you didn’t watch.

I reported that guy over and over.  I only got a few GM mails from those reports.  I would see them close my ticket and this guy would still be there.  Each ticket I opened I became more and more furious.  After bout the 7th day a GM contacted me to let me know my report for this guy went to the investigation team.  He let me know they have a team that investigates legit claims like this and that I didn’t need to report him any more.  We didn’t go into many more details after that.  The bot was still going several days later so I just stopped watching him.

So not every claim can be taken at face value.  The claims need to be verified.  Why is this important? The legal team need official documentation.  They need the logs, the paths, the stats.  Every account they close could end up in court.  It is just one of those things you can not take lightly.  Someone paid for a month of service and Blizzard stops that service.  Even if Blizzard is 100% justified and does it within the law.  It can still be taken to court where they would have to defend it.  For the most part this is too much work and when someone is botting, they know it.

Now they took the time needed to tie up all the lose ends and have 100% proof with legal documentation.  What else could possibly hold the account up?  The trail of gold.  Odds are good that the people that this person interacts with are also botting or buying/selling gold.  Casual botting runs in social circles.  Guilty by association.  But if I was looking for other botters, I would look to the people he interacts with.  But the bigger point I bring up is the trail of gold.  This gold gets moved up the chain and possibly end up in the hands of major market players.   Every in game conversation and trade this person does would get logged.  That just gives Blizzard more information to track down the gold sellers and buyers.

The fine tuning of Warden could also be a possibility.  If warden sent more data back to Blizzard on these flagged accounts, they could use this to uncover undiscovered bots in the wild.  If I had a hand into Warden, that is exactly what I would be doing.   We know warden does not work that way so I can rule this out easy enough.

One detail I did not mention is the PR of saying they banned X number of accounts and having X be very large.  I think that is something many people already know and expect from Blizzard.

They could also be paying for past mistakes.  A few to many false positives or wrong bans that ended up costing them.  Nothing adds more time and paperwork to a process than someone totally screwing it up one too many times.  They easily could have banned a child of someone important for botting and his kid would never do anything like that.  Procedures need to be put in place to protect the people not botting.

I could be way off on most of this.  But it helps me justify reporting a botter even when it feels like noting ever happens.  I would encourage everyone to report the botters and move on.  Your doing it for the greater good.  Just as in life, never walk past thinking that someone else will report it.  Step up and do your part.

I was thinking about doing a refresh on KTQ.  I wrote KTQ with a very clear goal in mind.  Automate the way I do things.  I build in to it a lot of flexibility so that others may find a use for it.  Many people have have it.  4,700 downloads on curse last time I checked.  I never intended for it to do everything for everyone.  The beauty of it was its simplicity. But I do like that so many people have been able to use it.

I have had many requests and suggestions for other features.   Before I start working on it again, I would like to give you a chance to tell me what you think of it.  What does it do well for you and what would you like it to do better.  People have requested custom groups and others to support other pricing modes or use something other than auctioneer for prices.  If you give me some solid arguments to support your request, it may sway me to include them (if it’s not too much work).

I will also update it to make sure it works with the most up to date mods.  Some people have no problems with it and other are reporting that its not going as smooth for them.  I have not used my own mod in a few months.  I expect that things will break when there are patches or the other mods get updated.

I decided to cheese a 4 player FFA match today.  Cheese is usually an all in strat at the start of a match.  If it does not work, it costs you the game.  Some people hate it because in some cases it can feel underhanded.

I decided to do a cannon rush on 2 opponents at the start as Protoss.   I sent one of my very first probes to the player next to me and hid it at the edge of his base.  I picked him first because it would let me take the high yield patch between us easier.  I got lucky.  That guy was Terran and they are known for walling in the front of the base.  The other guy missed my probe running in to his base.  Back at my base I just pumped workers and made no other units.

If anyone would have attacked me early, It would have been over very quick.  I started warping in cannons into both of those bases at the same time.  The first few I put out of sight and then pushed them closer and closer with each new one.  I walked them into the mineral line.  One quit the game shortly after that.  The Terran moved all his stuff to his natural.  I then expanded 3 times.  I took the high yield next to me, took the base of the player that quit, and my 3rd was another one out of the way.

I teched to Dark Templars and tossed down 5 warp gates.  I had 4 bases up and going before I started producing units.  Thats about as backwards as you can do it.  Any attacks would have been the end of me.  The 4th player took a good sized force and cleaned out my high yield. I had nothing there to attack with.  He made quick work of my cannons with a ground force.  It is a good thing he did not go for my main at that point.  He slipped over and killed the Terran that didn’t have much.  He cleaned out everything he had at that natural and headed up the ramp into his main and only found my cannons.   As he started to leave, I had 5 DT trap him on the ramp and clear out most of his protoss force.

I tossed down 7-8 more warpgates and sent about 10 DTs to his base.   Cleaned up everything at his natural before his carriers could get over there to help out.  Seeing carriers, I started spamming stalkers with blink.  I was on 3 bases to his 1 at this point.  I also had extra minerals from when I had the high yield.  Once I got gas production to 100% at all bases, I was pumping out 12-15 stalkers at a time.  He had his carriers outside one of my basses.  I was sending wave after wave of stalkers into his force killing one or two each time with focus fire.  Next thing I know, he is on the run.  As the waves started hitting his main again, the gave me the game.

Started out double cheese and ended up winning the match.

Having a good view of the map makes a huge difference.  Catching troop movement or when they sneak an expansion can make a huge difference.

Having a unit at every watch tower is a great starting point.  The visibility that opens up is large and I see it over looked in many games.  Sending a unit to patrol all the remaining expansions lets you know when they are looking to expand.  I love to sneak an expansion on the other side of the map so I watch for others to do the same.

Zerg has overlords early on that can be placed on high ground near common paths.  There are a few maps where you can park them outside the opponents base and have a clear picture every time units (or a stray worker) leave the base.  When you see the army head out, either run a few troops into his base or flank them while they are on the move.

I had one ZvZ game where he filled his choke with a hatch.  A zerg wall in.  It was a bit unusual.  With my scouting, I denied him every expansion he tried to take.  I went hydra and I was expecting muta.  I spoted an overlord of his near my base and was able to intercept the nydus it tried to toss down.  He tried another at the other edge of the base. I got both the nydus and the overlord.  I took a clump of overlords in my base and spread them around my quarter of the map.  He came back with another overlord and would intercept the nydus over and over again.  He finally put it behind a rock.  I quickly broke down the rock but he was able to unload  a lot of hydras and ultras.  He helped me break down the rock and my large mass tore down his units.  All of my hydras were in this nice large arch at the bottom of the ramp.  I had great positioning and his units just clumped in the choke. He gave me the game after the fight.  That is just one of many games where it felt like my scouting the map won the game more than anything else.

It is only copper league, but it was cool to see that 1st ranking.  I held it all night with several wins that put me at a 1575 ratting where 2nd is sitting behind me at 1475.  For the last 2 weeks I have played only as Zerg.  Now I feel that I am doing very well with them.  I know what upgrades to get, some basic build timings, and key strats.  I also know what they struggle with.

I started to focus on zerg because I liked the idea of quick tech shifts.  Add one building and I have several new strats that should open up to me.  But as I played them, I found that I did little of that.  I found myself sticking to hydras and banelings anyplace I could work them in.  I used roaches more as a support unit for the rest of my troops.  It never hurts to toss in a few roaches here and there.  I found most of my games as zerg where I would survive until mid game.  Once I would get my 3rd base going, I would just flood them with hydras and zerglings.  If the attack needed a little more meat to it, then I would mix in a good number of roaches.  Sometimes I would even transition into roaches for my end game.  They share the same upgrades as hydras and its a good mind game to play.

For a while it was very popular to mass roaches and run the opponent over with them.  People expect that and play counters to that early game.  I skip roaches at first so the units they built for that counter are less effective.  As the game goes on, they shift the unit composition to handle what I am throwing at them.  I find thats when I want to pull them into my mix.

Tonight I shifted back to playing protoss for a few games.  I am still very strong with them.  I found myself a lot more comfortable dealing with zerg after playing as them for as long as I did.  I can read the build orders better with my early scouts and understand what I am looking for.  I’m thinking I should spend some time as terran while I am still ranked in copper.  I jumped into the beta as protoss and switched to zerg.  I also have some ideas for terran that I am dying to try out.

I love to find creative uses for these things.

Last night in a ZvZ, I saw him taking a 3rd expansion.  I ran about 20 zerglings close to it, morphed into banelings and burrowed them in the mineral line.  Whenever he would get several drones, I would pop 3-4 banelings and take them out.  He had no idea they were there or what was happening to his drones.  I did end up losing that match for other reasons.  But it was the first time I tried that strat and I think I can add that to my bag of tricks.

Today I was in a ZvP on Blistering Sands.  I had some idle zerglings working on his back door and they managed to break the rock without him seeing it.  I quickly ran them into a back corner of the base to hide.  I morphed them into banelings and ran 1/2 of them in to wipe out the workers.  I was watching him on the replay and the attack gave him a small alert but he over looked it.  He finished setting up cannons for his expansion and then he checked his worker line to see them all dead.  He had about 100 minerals and 4 workers. He sent his troops to check on that back door and he saw nothing.  Some of his troops did get within sight of my left over banelings.

I saw them get spotted and ran them all over to the mineral line and cleared out all his remaining workers.  He called GG on the spot saying he only had 45 minerals left.  He had no workers left and not enough minerals to make another.  So I won the game with 2 well timed Baneling attacks.  His 2nd expansion was just about done. If I would have waited any longer, he would have had workers over there.