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.

The WotlK wiki has some details on activating shadows in the beta: http://wotlkwiki.info/index.php/Graphics_Upgrade

I did some quick cruising around and took a few screenshots with the new terrain shadows activated in the beta client.  These shots are set to Medium (aka #2 of 6), which is “Full environmental and PC/NPC shadows, low-res, med-dist.”

I finally got my BlizzCon 2007 beta key Tuesday night and got the download installed Wednesday morning.

Nothing Ever Works…
Last night after getting home from work I finished patching up, and started the long annoying process of migrating all my UI settings and AddOns over to the beta install of Wrath of the Lich King. Of course, almost nothing AddOn-wise worked, and I’ve become highly dependent on bartender3+cyCircled to get most of the user interface out of my face.

I checked out the Achievements window, and it seems pretty fancy and well designed.

First thing I did was head to Orgrimmar to respec over into a poison heavy assassination/combat build with full parry/dodge/riposte talents. Essentially designed to handle soloing mobs. Next I rode the zeppelin over to Undercity, and then took the zeppelin from there to Vengeance Landing.

It turns out ‘Deadly Brew’, the rogue talent that gives you deadly poison applications when instance poison is applied is not yet implemented. Sadface.

Howling Fjord
Vengeance Landing is basically an undead encampment with lots of towers set along a coastline. The skyline has a nice aurora borealis effect going on, but other than that is pretty much your average ‘Norse’ coastline. I picked up a few quests to kill some flying crows for crow meat, and burn some dead corpses. South of town a line of archers has an alliance base under siege, and another quest sends you out to some boats to fight off an attack by marines against the coastal fleet. After dispatching some marines I was assigned to drop some smoke signals on the base cannons so that the fleet could take them out. After I did this, I rode out the front gate of the encampment, and was cut down by a massive bombardment of friendly fire from all the NPCs opening up on each other. Whoops.

Utgarde Keep
After recovering my corpse, my group was finally ready to head to Utgarde Keep. Our party was composed of two guildmates from Stonecutters; Thar (resto druid) & Cinaed (prot paladin), as well as an ex-guildmate Fallee (boomkin, who I hung out with at BlizzCon 2007) and a pickup belf mage.

At BlizzCon I had tanked the instance on a premade warrior, so at least getting to the instance was manageable. The area on the way to the dungeon is a bit more fleshed out now with a couple of quest givers for other stuff. Utgarde Keep is a lvl 70+ dungeon, and was a completely easy run for a group of pretty well raid-geared 70s. It is mostly all Valkryn, undead and proto-drakes. The proto-drakes look especially cool, and later on in the dungeon you fight spear throwing guys on them. Unlike the blood-elf mounts in Shadowmoon, you can target either the rider or the mount.
There was a cool animation for the Valkryn jumping off the dying proto-drake. The dungeon itself has a pretty good layout, its not too long and the pulls are pretty quick. There were three boss fights, all of which had some interesting gimmicks. The last boss was a fairly rough fight and at the end after we killed him some sort of undead angel shows up and starts yelling about how he had been found worthy and to rise and fight in the service of the lich king. Uh oh. Undead Valkryn boss starts throwing his weapon around and I died. I got battle-rezzed, and then immediately died in his battle shout thing. After you finish the dungeon, a door near to the boss platform unlocks, and you can jump down into some water, and drop down a ton of stories to the exit. After this our party split up to go quest individually.

Also, the new druid spell ‘Typhoon’ looks freaking awesome. Fallee was like blasting waves of water that was ripping through the low hitpoint undead trash. Cool spell.

Dragonblight Scenery

Journey West
I headed back to Vengeance Landing, turned in a few quests and then headed west. I passed through Grizzled Hills which looked fairly foresty but was not all that impressive. It wasn’t until I got to the Dragonblight that the zone became very graphically impressive. As I headed west the scenery seriously improved. Dragonblight has a bit of the EverQuest ‘scars of velious’ going on, with a massive icefield filled with a gigantic tower, patrolling shrieking dragons overhead, and all sorts of nasties fighting it out with mammoths on the icefield itself. I quickly crossed the zone, and made my way to the Borean Tundra picking up flight points as I went.

Borean Tundra
Borean Tundra looks amazing. There is a flood plain, and a real arctic tundra feel going on here, rather than the ‘Midgard’ style forest on the other side of Northrend. Water occasionally blasts out of blow holes in the grounds, some sort of fattened squat creatures frequently attacked me as I rode my horse across the flood plain, and in the distance I could see these kite-like things that they flew over their encampments which looked really cool. I then found some sort of stone quarry which was being looted by these Beryl caster guys, and spoke to a massive tiki head statue which wanted me to find some other ancestral spirits inside the overrun quarry. The Beryl guys I think are some sort of Nexxus raiders, and they arrive in
these spaceship platform things which can be seen hovering over the quarry.

Just over the hill was some sort of encampment for the Dalaran mages, with a massive dragon sleeping there. I rode down across a valley of mammoths from there, and was attacked by an 71 elite deathknight on a mount as I went through the crowd. After blowing some cooldowns I took him and his mount out and made my way to the horde base in Borean Tundra. Garrosh Hellscream and High Warlord Saurfang are running the ship, and it is an impressive fortress (in horde terms) filled with goblin war machinery and activity. Unlike most bases which are just an encampment of guys standing around surrounded by some sharpened logs, this had more of a feeling of an active war base. Garrosh is his usual emo self, suggesting that I get out of here. Saurfang on the other hand, suggested I get to work helping free the quarry from Nerubians.

I worked my way through the outdoor quarry killing Nerubians.
I busted apart an egg sac (similar to the ones in Terrokar forest) which popped out a female Tauren Shaman who followed me around casting chain lightning on the bugs I was squashing for a bit before transforming into a ghost wolf and riding off. Not being one to actually finish a quest when there is wandering to do, I made my way up out of the quarry and over the next hillside.

In the distance I could see some horde war machinery driving around a field. Later when I got down there you could see Kel’thuzad on some platform directing a massive army of undead, while some pillar looking thing floated around casting dark magic on the ground. I think the war machinery was part of some quest I hadn’t hit on yet.

Down along the coast is another area called Garrosh’s Landing or something like that, which was a bunch of undead Valykrn spirits burning horde corpses. As soon as you walk in, a heavy mist rises up, and swirls around the edges of your UI, cutting out your ‘peripheral vision’. Very very creepy mood with all sorts of ruined horde ships. I escorted a tauren lady out of hiding to her father at a small encampment at the outskirts of the cursed town. After talking with some players on general chat about the location of Dalaran, my computer hard-locked up a second time and I called it a night.