I have updated my post about configuring Privoxy to clean up the ads on WorldOfWarcraft.com.  The new user.filter removes most of the white blocks on the wow homepage that Privoxy left behind already.  This also fixes the forum filtering so that the post pages are full width again.  Unfortunately it doesn’t block any of the flash cross-promotion of their products, but it takes care of all the external advertisements at least.

So, today Blizzard added advertising to the forums.worldofwarcraft.com webpages.  Normally I don’t mind dealing with ad revenue on websites, but I’m already paying them $15 a month for their game.   Over four years of WoW subscription, three convention tickets, and two copies of the game and two expansions means  well over $1000 that they have collected from me in the past four years.  And now this.  This… is simply beyond complete shameless greed.

The WoW forum moderators are already quick at work stiffling the forum outrage, by locking topics and moving them.  It’s ridiculous.

Here is how to not just block the advertising, but completely hide it so that the forums look like they used to.

1) First, you’ll need to install Privoxy.

Privoxy is a free open-source web proxy that will do the filtering for us.  You can get it here:

http://www.privoxy.org/

Click on ‘download recent releases’, find your OS version and install.

2) Set chrome to use privoxy as your proxy server.

• Click on the wrench icon, select options.
• Click on ‘under the hood‘ tab.
• Scroll down, and press the ‘Change Proxy Settings‘ button.

This will bring up your windows Internet Properties control panel.

• On the ‘Connections’ tab, click the LAN Settings button.
• Checkmark ‘Use a proxy server…‘
• Put 127.0.0.1 into the Address field.
• Put 8118 into the Port field.
• Hit Ok, and then Ok to close the Internet Properties window.

Chrome will now be using Privoxy to block ads.

3) Create a user.filter file in your Privoxy home install directory.

Next, in your install directory (mine is: C:\Program Files (x86)\Privoxy) create a new file called user.filter and insert this in it:

FILTER: wowforums Blizzard is GREEDY

FILTER: wowforums Blizzard is GREEDY
# Crass merchandizing at it's best.
s/<div id="ad_(\d*)x(\d*)"/<div id="blizzard_is_greedy" style="display:none;"/g
s/<td width="130px" valign="top" align="center">/<td align="center" width="0" valign="top" style="display:none;">/g
s/<div style="width:160px; height:600px; padding:1px; margin:0 0 0 3px" class="advertise-horz"/<div style="display:none;"/g
s/<td width="130" valign="top" align="center">/<td width="0">/g
s/<div class="hp_w_ad">/<div class="hp_w_ad" style="display:none;">/g
s/<div class="hp_t_ad">/<div class="hp_t_ad" style="display:none;">/g
s/<div class="hp_ad_cont">/<div class="hp_ad_cont" style="display:none;">/g

This will do the ‘rewriting’ of the ad tags.  It renames all the ad tags so the ad-insertion script can’t find it, and it blocks off the 130px skyscraper space on the right side.

4) Next, edit config.txt file in the Privoxy folder.

Open config.txt and find the filterfile line. (Under section 2.5)

Uncomment the entry with user.filter in it, so that it looks like this:

filterfile default.filter

filterfile user.filter      # User customizations

This will tell Privoxy where to find our custom filter that we created in step 3.

5) Edit the user.action file in the Privoxy folder.

Finally, edit the user.action file and add this:

{ +filter{wowforums} }
.worldofwarcraft.com

This will tell Privoxy to activate our custom filter for the forums.worldofwarcraft.com website.  If you followed all the steps (and saved afterwards) you should be able to control+refresh the forums and have everything back to mostly normal.  Pass this along to your friends & guildmates!

Circus Circus

Since midnight of the 13th most of my non-sleeping, non-working hours have gone into playing ‘Wrath of the Lich King’.  On last thursday, my impression of the game was somewhat nonplussed, mainly because the quest grind brings out a jealous competition in everyone.  Everyone is racing each other for that quest kill, or trying to pick up scraps of metal as they spawn before each other.  When you’re in an area and there are more players than monsters it’s hard to feel like a hero.  In addition to the annoyance that causes, there have been some ugly server queues on Uther the first three nights of the expansion.  I would come home from work and find that I am player #600 in line to log in, with an expected wait time of around 35 minutes.  Having to sit through that and then race a million night elf hunters for the tag on a quest objective was not very fun.

Howling Fjords

That all said, once everyone is done racing through the levels the world will feel fairly population sparce outside of the capital cities and the new city of Dalaran.  It takes about 7 minutes to fly across the southern tip of Northrend.  The environment is gorgeous.  I was not that excited for the Howling Fjords starting area during beta due to low framerate problems on my older computer, but now that that is solved it is a much nicer place to start out than the somewhat bland-in-comparisson Borean Tundra.  The Howling Fjords have a very ‘braveheart’ feeling to them, with sweeping hillsides that remind me of the Midgard side of the ‘Shrouded Isles’ expansion, but to simply write them off as a the ‘viking’ area does a disservice to the massive amount of content and story packed into this zone.  On the north side of the zone dark iron dwarves enscribe stone giants with runic commands and send them northwest into the wilderness; their purpose not yet revealed to me. (But I imagine it involves going to Storm Peaks.)   On the west side of the zone the forsaken plot and scheme as usual, but this time there is something more sinister about it all.   The architecture has shifted from being a co-op of the skull-festooned ‘castle and tomb’ style of the Nerubians to a full-on Frankenstein style mad-scientist/gothic architecture.   Along the west side of the fjord, an ancient norse-looking lift ferries you down out to an island where you run through the usual ‘kill animals, collect meat’ quests for the Tuskarr.  They send you over to meet up with a goblin and two guys floating on a ridiculous looking pirate raft, where an enthusiastic cabin boy paddles you over to pirate outpost for some more quests.  Eventually the circuit of quests involves dispatching a giant killer whale and returning with it’s fat to be used to swab some decks.  When you get back to the Tuskarr, they are outraged that ‘Big Roy’ is dead and the remaining killer whales are not mating.  They were thankfully unaware that I was actually the agent of said butchering.  I quickly buried my inner shame at slaughtering yet another magnificent beast and rode the giant sea turtle over to their other town.  What happened to Big Roy wasn’t as brutal as what happened to that poor earth colossus with the cannon on that ghostly pirate ship.

Borean Tundra

On the other side of the island is the formentioned Borean Tundra, it’s a set of rolling brown hills with very little vegitation.  There are some decent quests along the coastline, and a tongue in cheek poke at the environmental movement with the D.E.H.T.A. encampment (druids for the ethical and humane treatment of animals).  Most of the D.E.H.T.A. quests involve killing trappers, killing clam divers, springing baby mammoths out of traps and other sorts of heroic things.  At the center of the druid encampment is a statue of Nessingwary, the same ‘big game hunter’ that players have been helping kill massive amounts of animals in both Stranglethorn Vale and Nagrand over the past few years.  There’s also a massive fire surrounding him, pouring toxic-looking smoke into the air.  

The worst part of Borean for me was the quests for the Taunka, a refit of the Tauren race with a new bison head tacked onto them.  The female of the species did not get the same treatment, so apparently the male Taunka mate with what appears to be normal Tauren females.  There are some steamy hot-springs which are probably the most bland looking part of the expansion so far.  The quest line here mostly deals with the Taunka fleeing before the undead scourge, and investigating an outpost of mechanized gnomes which tie into the ‘titan lore’ problem.  

The best part of Borean Tundra, is the War of the Dragonflights storyline, which involves you riding a giant badass red dragon over to what appears to be ground zero of the ‘problem with blue dragon and magic’ storyline.  There’s also some moral dilemnas to be chewed on.  One of the quests for the Dalaran magi has you capture an enemy mage, then haul him (in chains) back for questioning.  Once you get back there, they have you head to the tower with some sort of ‘mental needler’ to extract information from him.  That’s right.  The game asks you to engage in extrordinary rendition.  The Dalaran apparently have a code of ethics preventing them from torturing people, but not a code of ethics preventing them from paying people like you to torture people for information.  You are handed a magically restrained guy in heavy gothic facepaint and told to shock him with the mind needle until he tells you where the hostage red dragon/lady is.  ”It’s extremely painful, but causes no permanent damage.”  

I paused, thinking things through.   What would my character think about this?  Vulture is a orc rogue, more specifically one who has the majority of his talent points specialized into Assassination.  He’s a brute and a killer, but not a mindless sadist.  I think he probably wouldn’t have too many qualms about ‘doing what has to be done’.  There is money and experience points involved here as well…  It’s also just a game… and computers can’t feel pain (yet)…

I shock the restrained mage, and his gloating defiance slowly melts away into pleading for mercy until he tells me what I want to hear.  I hand in the needler, collect my money and leave quickly.  I am not proud of what I did in that tower overlooking the Borean Tundra.

Frostmourn Keychain

To my surprise, I apparently booked a room at the ‘Marriott SUITES Anaheim’, not the ‘Marriott Anaheim’. The suites are like a mile south of the convention center. The room is nice enough, and I met up with Thar from the Stonecutters, along with his brother. We were met by the other rogue in our guild Ikilu, and headed over to ‘The Block’ for some late dinner. I already forgot the name of the place we ate at, but at 11pm nobody is serving dinner. Shrimp and tortilla chips for dinner. Don’t have any convention hall pictures, as I’m nowhere near the convention right now. Here’s some Photos of the Swagbag, however.

BlizzCon 2008 Swagbag Pictures are up: http://picasaweb.google.com/rtfmkthx/BlizzCon2008#

And, below (without helpful captions)

I’m on my way to Anaheim, California for BlizzCon 2008! Still sitting in the PDX airport at the moment.

Loose pictures will be uploaded to http://picasaweb.google.com/rtfmkthx

Mim linked me some videos from a sci-fi game coming out this Halloween called ‘Dead Space‘.  I am totally not playing this game, because I am far too wuss for the survival horror genre.   I never played Doom 3 and I was traumatized as a young child by Space Hulk, but if you’re into crazy shiet jumping out of ventilation shafts with the intention of laying its brood eggs in your pancreas, well just go ahead and knock yourself out: http://forums.penny-arcade.com/showthread.php?t=58281

No matter how things get you down, as long as you have a badass looking helmet you can get through it.

The September BioWare newsletter came out yesterday, and it doesn’t have too much to read, but there is a link to some updated video on the Dragon Age website.  I had previously kind of written off Dragon Age as another overly bump-mapped single player fanatasy after the E3 video earlier this year; however the ‘Origins’ videos up on the website are worth checking out.  The three origins stories videos show you some of the gameplay as a party fights their way up a tower to light a signal beacon during a massive battle.  The particle effects are pretty stunning, and they show off some cool combos of spell interraction. 

There’s also a toolset video which looks a lot like the toolset from Neverwinter Nights.  They don’t really do anything other than place a starting waypoint on an existing map, so there’s not much meat there.  I saw a snake icon, so I’m guessing they’re using python for their programming language?

Hunting Bugs in Delta 3

Brian in #ballistic alerted me to this fun little game that is in alpha testing right now.  It’s called Armada Online.  It’s a multi-player online game where you choose a faction a name and an icon to represent yourself and then you jump into a top-down 2d style gameplay where you strafe around alien space crabs and scorpions and blow them up diablo style for fun and profit.  The graphics are all full 3d, the starfield backgrounds are gorgeous and the menus are all very simple and familiar.  Eat hot torpedos scavenger scum!  Space crabs phear my terran payload, yo.

I also rummaged up this link off the Armada forums; It has some more screenshots and some basic information for newbies: http://www.freewebtown.com/brimragenshome/

Click here to view the embedded video.

Over the weekend, the countdown timer on Cryptic Studio’s homepage turned into a launch of the new Star Trek Online website.  The gameplay plan for this seems pretty different from what Perpetual Entertainment had in mind.  Instead of serving as a crewmember aboard a ship, you will be either a Federation or Klingon captain with control over your ship which is definitely a step up.  The screenshots on the website are currently lacking crewmembers at the moment; it will be interesting to see some more of the art direction in a few weeks.

“Everything from the elegant domes of Starfleet Academy to the ancient temples of Vulcan, from the towers of Qo’noS to the Fire Caves of Bajor, from the mysterious Mutara Nebula to the unexplored voids of deep space, all will be represented in stunning 3-D graphics. Immerse yourself in the future of the Trek universe as it moves into the 25th century: a time of shifting alliances and new discoveries.”

According to the website they will be unveiling some gameplay footage on August 10th at the Star Trek Convention in Las Vegas.

The only worrisome aspect that I see about this launch is that they plan on supporting the game in console format.  Past experience with console and PC launches generally has meant limited graphics and a dumbed down UI.  It will be nice to see the gameplay video in a couple weeks to aleviate some of my fears here.  Still, the screenshots look fairly acceptable graphically.