Slashdot Mirror

Gamespot has the news that the World of Warcraft expansion will be playable at BlizzCon this year. Our own ScuttleMonkey will be there, and should have some sort of first hand impressions for us when he returns from the wilds of the west. Relatedly, MMORPG.com has a lengthy look at the Battlegrounds, analyzing what works and what doesn't in Blizzard's PvP emporiums. Finally (and confusingly), Battle.net seems to indicate that some sort of announcement should be coming our way today. Update: 10/07 23:13 GMT by Z : As discussed in the comments, the "new thing" for today was a redesign of the battle.net site.

colonist writes "During the Apollo missions, astronauts explored on foot or in rovers. The next astronauts on the moon may move the entire base instead. Marc Cohen, from NASA's Ames Research Center, proposes a lunar base on wheels or legs, such as the habot (robotic habitat) or the mobitat (mobile habitat). Cohen considers mobile bases superior to rovers: 'To avoid life-threatening or other compromising situations that might occur with only one rover traveling to a remote place, a second rover might travel with the first. But what if the second rover runs into a problem, too - the same or a different problem? Well, that means a third rover. So, why not make the entire base mobile, so that all the resources, reliability and redundancy of the lunar mission move with the excursion crew?' Of course, mobile bases are nothing new. Terran buildings have been lifting off for years."

Ellen Spertus writes "Astraware is offering a special Valentine's Day version of Bejeweled (one of the most popular PDA games) with an embedded marriage proposal you can enable." Elsewhere, Warcry has a Valentine's Day gaming article, including gamer gift picks and "Gaming as a Couple: A How To Article", including advice such as "Be willing to negotiate play schedules and set time limits up front", and, most importantly, "Never choose games over your partner." Update: 02/14 18:07 GMT by S : Blizzard also has Valentine's Day fun on its official site, including a special Warcraft III map for Valentine's Day.

Thanks to RPGDot for pointing to a Battle.net forum post, in which Blizzard indicate they will ban Warcraft III teams for 'griefing'. This requires Blizzard acting on in-game tactics, rather than illicit software mods/hacks - they mention: "We have received reports and observed that certain Warcraft III players have deliberately caused their own teams to lose in team games. This goes against the spirit of fair play on Battle.net, and as such, we will take action on a case-by-case basis. In each case, if we determine that griefing is in fact occurring, the griefer's Battle.net account and access to ladder games will be subject to removal."

Thanks to RPGDot for pointing to a Battle.net forum post revealing a wealth of new detail regarding Blizzard's upcoming PC MMO title World Of Warcraft. WoW Stratics also has screenshots and brief comments on Blizzard's showing at Gen Con in Los Angeles, including comments that "Blizzard has one thing completely, undeniably wrong: they simply don't know the definition of 'alpha'. Both Anarchy Online and WWII Online were less polished and complete three months after release than WoW is right now." WoW is due out later in 2004, with a closed Beta early next year, and PlanetWarcraft also has some hands-on impressions.

DudemanX writes "Blizzard have announced: 'Yes, you're reading correctly, the day has finally come for the Diablo II 1.10 patch! This patch is the largest to date in terms of game changes and offers many new things for Diablo II players, including seasonal ladder characters, more-challenging gameplay, enhanced skills, new items, new anti-cheat measures, a new game-world event, and much much more! Simply connect to Battle.net [while playing Diablo II] to download the patch.' The stand-alone patch is also now available on Blizzard's FTP site." This follows Blizzard's 1.10 Beta release all the way back in July.

DudemanX writes "Blizzard have announced: 'Yes, you're reading correctly, the day has finally come for the Diablo II 1.10 patch! This patch is the largest to date in terms of game changes and offers many new things for Diablo II players, including seasonal ladder characters, more-challenging gameplay, enhanced skills, new items, new anti-cheat measures, a new game-world event, and much much more! Simply connect to Battle.net [while playing Diablo II] to download the patch.' The stand-alone patch is also now available on Blizzard's FTP site." This follows Blizzard's 1.10 Beta release all the way back in July.

Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to the Battle.net announcement that Blizzard has removed over 400,000 more accounts from their online gaming service, due to cheating. This comes after earlier similar action in June closed over 112,000 Diablo II accounts - this time, it's been announced: "In keeping with our aggressive stance against cheating, we have permanently closed 276,000 StarCraft accounts, 86,000 Diablo II accounts, and 41,000 Warcraft III accounts." It's also mentioned that Battle.net has "identified the Diablo II accounts with which a 'map-hack' program is being used", and banning is threatened if players don't stop, another sign of Blizzard's continuing, active anti-cheating stance.

Thanks to GamePro for their article discussing why MMORPGs charge a monthly subscription fee, discussing the "extra developer attention and player community" a monthly payment allegedly brings. It quotes a Blizzard spokesman as saying "running a massively multiplayer game like Blizzard's upcoming World of WarCraft costs about three times as much as running an online server like Battle.net, because MMO games require constant maintenance, 24/7 customer support, and an ongoing dedicated development team", and NCSoft's Robert Garriott, brother of Richard, says: "Think of it as running a small city. Many of these games have hundreds of thousands of 'citizens.' NCsoft operates the 'government' that builds new roads, puts criminals in jail, and digs new caverns for citizens to explore and enjoy. All of that costs real money."

seirui writes "Blizzard today announced the beginning of the public beta test for the Diablo II: Lord Of Destruction 1.10 patch. Conspicuously absent from the downloadable-now beta patch is Battle.net support (both open and closed), but present are a multitude of little changes, including a rollback.bat file for reverting back to 1.09 to play online. Now that hell has frozen over, the quest for items can continue! Here's a BitTorrent link for the 5mb patch." An anonymous reader also points to a hands-on account at DiabloII.net describing the changes for V1.10.

seirui writes "Blizzard today announced the beginning of the public beta test for the Diablo II: Lord Of Destruction 1.10 patch. Conspicuously absent from the downloadable-now beta patch is Battle.net support (both open and closed), but present are a multitude of little changes, including a rollback.bat file for reverting back to 1.09 to play online. Now that hell has frozen over, the quest for items can continue! Here's a BitTorrent link for the 5mb patch." An anonymous reader also points to a hands-on account at DiabloII.net describing the changes for V1.10.

pixelblur writes "An update over at fan site DiabloII.Net points out that Blizzard has deleted 112,000 Battle.net accounts for Diablo II." The official post from the Battle.net team in part reads: "Numerous.. ..accounts were tied to the use of a hack or cheat program while playing Diablo II on Battle.net. In keeping with our aggressive stance against cheating, we have permanently closed over 112,000 of these accounts and documented the CD keys with which they were used." This clean-up comes ahead of the forthcoming 1.10 patch for the seminal title.

colaco writes "After more than a year waiting for the 1.10 patch, Diablo II gamers now have an inside scoop at changes that it will implement. Most of the info on new items and gameplay rules (eg: ladder characters) have been available on Arreat Summit for the past few hours, and are now displayed on DiabloII.net. Blizzard has also offered some clarification. Sources inside Blizzard indicate that more info will be given at E3."

colaco writes "After more than a year waiting for the 1.10 patch, Diablo II gamers now have an inside scoop at changes that it will implement. Most of the info on new items and gameplay rules (eg: ladder characters) have been available on Arreat Summit for the past few hours, and are now displayed on DiabloII.net. Blizzard has also offered some clarification. Sources inside Blizzard indicate that more info will be given at E3."

colaco writes "After more than a year waiting for the 1.10 patch, Diablo II gamers now have an inside scoop at changes that it will implement. Most of the info on new items and gameplay rules (eg: ladder characters) have been available on Arreat Summit for the past few hours, and are now displayed on DiabloII.net. Blizzard has also offered some clarification. Sources inside Blizzard indicate that more info will be given at E3."

Clomer writes "Blizzard Entertainment has announced the signups for the beta testing of the upcoming expansion set to Warcraft 3 called The Frozen Throne. The beta will be online-only over battle.net, requires the full version of Warcraft 3, and is only open to US residents. Signups will be at battle.net starting on Friday, 14 February and will last a week."

Clomer writes "Blizzard Entertainment has announced the signups for the beta testing of the upcoming expansion set to Warcraft 3 called The Frozen Throne. The beta will be online-only over battle.net, requires the full version of Warcraft 3, and is only open to US residents. Signups will be at battle.net starting on Friday, 14 February and will last a week."

Slashback tonight with several updates and amplifications, starting with a nice report on the current state of the effort to put Linux into the heart of the German government, but also bits on Starcraft, cleaning up UNIX config, and Kerberos.

This deserves a hearty 'Jawohl!' DocSnyder writes: "Since the Bundestux campaign started collecting votes in favor of putting Free Software into the German parliament (Bundestag), more than 25000 people have done so. A lot of online discussions - in addition to Heise News and Linux-Community.de, even some Bundestag parties have put up their online forums - are very active to share user experience about GNU/Linux and Free Software. (Sorry for most of the linked sites speaking German, it's simply too much to translate at once.)

After several open letters and press releases have been exchanged between lobbyists and politicians, some information about a research performed by the German company Infora appeared on Heise News (english version), recommending an all-Microsoft infrastructure with the exception of some security-critical services like e-mail. The detailed paper is still not available.

An internal test (english version) between the Bundestag administration, SuSE, IBM and Microsoft confirmed that GNU/Linux and Free Software are in fact ready for the Bundestag's IT infrastructure, yet the testers don't like the copy&paste method used by KDE and recommend Windows for the desktops.

Last week, the Bundestag members (MdB) Jörg Tauss and Hans-Joachim Otto have been invited by Heise for an online chat with the community. While Jörg Tauss is a clear supporter of open standards and Free Software, Hans-Joachim Otto takes the internal test as well as Infora's research as primarily relevant for the coming decision.

On Saturday, MdB Uwe Küster summarized some details in an interview. He considered the decision - officially due Feb 28 - as almost finalized. The solution would show GNU/Linux on most servers, Windows XP and Office XP on the desktops, keeping proprietary data formats and lock-in interfaces up to the next upgrade cycle, which in fact would have been problem number one to solve.

All in all, the community has provided lots of experience, ideas and solution paths which finally seem to be largely ignored in the decision finding process towards the successor of a homogenous Microsoft Windows NT4 infrastructure, which has to be replaced until 2003 when Microsoft will no longer provide support for NT4."

That's a lot of cleaning up to do! maffew writes "A lot of feedback and ideas have been flying around since my article How to fix the Unix configuration nighmare was featured on freshmeat and slashdot. So we've created an ongoing web site and mailing list for people to continue discussing, organising, and hopefully in the end coding. It's all at unixconfig.sourceforge.net.

Meanwhile here's a link to the permanent home for the nightmare article. This is where I'm making revisions and adding links."

Raise your hand if this would mean seeing it for the 4th time ... Chris Brewer writes "In case you've been living on a different planet, The Fellowship of the Ring picked up Five Baftas, the British equivalent of the Oscars, including Best Director, Best Film, and Peoples Choice. During a live interview (Real only) after the awards, Peter Jackson announces that a preview for The Two Towers will be shown from the March 22 screenings of The Fellowship."

At long last ... something? If you've followed the strange relationship Microsoft has had with Kerberos, you may feel grateful to the anonymous coward who writes: "It would seem that Microsoft is granting the world a royalty-free, non-exclusive license to implement their Kerberos extension."

Here's some comfort for Starcraft players. An Anonymous Coward writes "As stated on Blizzard's battle.net service, the latest Starcraft patch supports UDP play, so some of the compelling reasons to use bnetd have been addressed. Whatever you may think of Blizzard and the DMCA, at least it shows Blizzard is listening to its fans."

EvilDonut writes: "Following the roar of protests following the shut down of the BnetD-project, Blizzard has posted a Battle.net emulation FAQ, citing their reasons to to search out and close any project that allows people to play Blizzard games online without using Battle.net. Their main arguments are software piracy and the ability to control and expire the WarCraft III beta." There's also a brief note from the Bnetd people, included below.

From: "Tim Jung"
Subject: bnetd.org shutdown

If you would like more information on this please feel free to contact me. I am one of the developers and the hosting ISP for www.bnetd.org. I have talked at lenght with both the Blizzard/Vivendi lawyers and with EFF lawyers about our options both as an ISP and as a developer.

As an ISP I did not force the group to do anything, but rather presented them with all the legal information I have recieved and asked them what they wanted to do. As you can imagine neither my company nor any of the developers have the money to fight the Blizzard/Vivendi lawyers at this time. So until we are able to get some legal help to fight this we felt we had no choice but to close down the site for now until the time at which we could fight this legal battle.

If you have any questions or suggestions let me know.

Tim Jung
System Admin
Internet Gateway Inc.

Over the last few months, I've had a number of AskSlashdot questions about quiet computers, what hardware to get, and other items for assembling a mega-machine that won't knock the roof off. I've put the finishing touches on my own mega machine -- if you're looking at doing the same thing, or are just curious about the hardware involved, you can find out about what I built.

My first priority was the speed and scale of the machine. I knew that I wanted to build a machine that would be able to play games very well, and look nice, but since I didn't want to totally break the bank on doing it, I decided to go with some lower-cost components in part. So, without further ado:

• The Case: This was the easiest decision to make. Thinkgeek has by far the the cooler and easiest case around to get. I went with the precut window, and put in the window, as well as ordered the blue neon light to put inside of the machine. This case frickin' rocks. Thumbscrews for everything, the drive bays, motherboard array and everything else slides out intelligently - this is the first case I've ever had where I'm *happy* to be working on the internals of the machine. However, I did replace the fans.

• The Fans: Rather then use the stock fans, I ordered the Silencer Fan from PC Power and Cooling. Three of them to be exact -- and they are as quiet as the Stereophile comment implies. Very very quiet (20 Db), and does a great job of keeping the internals cool. The fans are the standard size for an ATX case, so swapping was a breeze.
• Power Supply: In keeping with the keep-it-quiet theme, I went with the Ultraquiet 400 ATX. It's got ample power, and is incredibly quiet. Very, very nicely done.
• The Processor: Being that I was trying to be at least somewhat budget conscious, I went with the AMD Athlon. I got the 1.2 Ghz variety, as the cost difference, at the time, between that and the 1.4 were considerable, for what I saw to be very little extra additional speed. It was also at this point that I made the choice to go with a single processor machine, rather then a dual. Since I was going to be a lot of gaming on here this machine, in addition to work, and the gaming would be in a Windows 98 environment (Diablo 2, Baldur's Gate II:Throne of Bhaal, The Sims) there was very little reason to go with a dual processor machine. So, with that in mind, I ordered my single Athlon 1.2 Ghz.

• Processor Heatsink/Fan: I replaced the stock processor heatsink, and went with the ultraquiet one from PC Power and Cooling -- replacing it was no problem, and while when the case is closed, the noise difference is inaudible; when the case is open, you can definitely hear the difference between the two fans. Plus, on average, the new fan keeps the processor an average of 4 degrees Celsius cooler - from 69 C to 65 C, when running full tilt - e.g. Baldur's Gate II:Throne of Bhaal, and my little contribution to Team Slashdot, that's the temp. Running with just the OS is about 58 C. I just used the heat-sink compound that came along with the new fan to wipe down the CPU.
• The Motherboard: Originally, I was planning on going with the MSI-6380 motherboard. Tom's Hardware recommend it -- but what I quickly found out was that there was a nationwide shortage on those boards -- or at least that's what multiple vendors told me. Luckily, the folks at Teacco, who I had ended up ordering through recommend the Asus A7A266. This uses the ALi Magik 1 chipset, versus the Via KT266 Pro chipset, which the MSI board used. My assumption is that the Via chipset was in short supply. I still think the MSI was a better board, but sometimes you have to deal with shortfalls - and frankly, the Asus supported the 266 FSB, and the RAM that I wanted to use. Availability won -- and I've veen happy with the A7A266.
• The DDR RAM: Obviously, if speed is the goal, you want to get good, and a goodly amount, of RAM. Having talked the various RAM manufacturers over with ChrisD, I finally settled on the Corsair Micro CM73SD256R-2100. It had a 266 Mhz bus, and Corsair makes a good RAM chip.
• Hard Drive: My last machine had two hard drives, one SCSI and one IDE. Since the motherboard I had purchased had two ATA-100 boards onboard, I decided that rather then go through and purchase a SCSI controller, and get a SCSI drive, I would just get a ATA-100 IDE hard drive. Also based on past experiences, and knowing other people who had the same problem, I decided to go with a 5400 RPM drive, rather then 7200. Most of the 7200 RPM drives I've had, or others have had, regardless of manufacturer, or type of drive, have died after nine month or so. I also wanted to get a drive that was quiet, and reliable -- and I had been very happy with my last IBM drive, so I got the Deskstar 40GV. Heh -- good thing I didn't get the 75 GXP. With ATA 100, I'm getting around the same practical throughput as SCSI, without having an additional controller. Also, with the Deskstar, I can use my SilentDrive sleeves. More on that in a moment. But, with 40 gigs, I was making a choice not to have this be a MP3 box or anything. That's alright, because the other machine has a crapload of space, and can handle that role, easily.

• The Silent Drive: In sticking with my goal of trying to be as fast and quiet as possible, I picked up some Silent Drives from New England Digital Computer. The SilentDrive is made by Molex; it's pretty cheap, and really cuts down on hard drive noise -- and since I've used them in my other machine, I don't have much concern about them cutting the drive's life. Besides, the aim of this machine is not to be a server, but more of a gamebox, so I'm willing to live with a slight risk anyhow.
• CD-RW: Obviously, a machine is going to need some sort of CD/DVD format input device. I had already decided to forgo a floppy drive, because the motherboard will support booting from CD-ROM, and I wanted to see if it can be done. Yes, it can be done, easily. Moving files around is much easier with scp than with floppies anyway. *grin* I debated between the DVD or CD-RW, but decided to go with the latter, because I'm going to hold out for a while, and then purchase a DVD-RW for the machine. No sense in getting a DVD Drive and decoder board now, when the DVD-RW is only a few months away. I also wanted to be able to burn and rip CDs fairly fast, so I went with the Yamaha CRW2100EZ. It's a very nice, very fast drive, but has a major problem for the quiet machine: it's loud. When it's got a drive it's working on, this thing makes a huge ton of noise. So, my solution is that I don't have disks in there, and when I'm doing something with it, I just put up with the noise. Nonetheless, in the long run, this will be replaced with the DVD-RW, and thus, I'm not too concerned about it.
• Cabling: With all of these parts coming in, I had to start wiring it all up, right? The rounded EIDE cables were great. I've got two, and am happy as a clam.
• Video Card: Since this rig was being designed for gaming, my choice was pretty simple on this one -- the The GeForce 3. For all the hype out there about this card, this thing is totally worth it. I got the AGP version, of course, but one nice thing about the change in motherboards was that the Asus can handle AGP Pro, so when a good AGP Pro videocard comes out, I'll switch over, and eBay my old video card.
• Sound card: As above, with gaming in mind, as well ultimately hoping to do some home movie editing for burning to the yet-unpurchased DVD-RW drive, I went with the consumer top of the line sound card, the Creative Labs Soundblaster Platinum. This thing was a SOB to get installed, because you have to not only insert the normal sound card into the PCI slot, but also fit into the 5 & .25" drive slot the external control slot. It's pretty cool, because it comes along with a remote so that you can use the computer as a movie watching system, if you want. The front slot is also where you can a lot more inputs and outputs, versus the normal 4 inputs on the soundcard. It even has an optical in and optical out, so that you can do some PS2 gaming on the computer if you want. Very very impressive -- but getting the cable running from the external control slot to the sound card wasn't very fine, because: 1. I had a hard time getting the cables fitting together and 2. The flat grey ribbon cable ruined my esthetic of the black EDIE rounded cable. I know, an artistic argument, but dammit, this is my mega system.
• The Network Card: Nothing really exciting here -- I reused a Intel EEpro 100. Good network card; I don't use any of the remote management stuff, but it sends and receives packets. That's enough for me.
• The Mouse: CowboyNeal had been singing the praises of the Logitech Mouseman Wireless. system for a while, and I decided to take the leap. It's a remote system, but probably the first remote system that I've used that truly works. The latency between mouse and display is remarkably low, and that latency has been my major complaint of other remote keyboards/mice. I'm not sure that the mouse is appropriate for a FPS or other instant-reaction game which might expose problems at the finest levels, but it does just fine for games like BG2/The Sims. Slightly sluggish for Diablo II, but not lethally so. I recommend it, with the above reservation about FPS/faster paced games.
• Keyboard: This was one of two instances that I simply reused components from before. The keyboard that I'm using is the Microsoft Internet Keyboard. Yeah, yeah -- it's a M$ product. Whatever. The reality is that the keyboard has a good tactile feedback, comes with two built-in USB ports on the keyboard itself, supports PS/2 and USB for output, and is a full keyboard. Oh, I got it free through some promotion at CDW.
• Monitor: This is the second instance of reusing old components. In this case, I had purchased the Sony Trinitron G400 about eighteen months ago, for use on my first gaming machine. It's a great monitor -- 19", so it fits into almost any desk space, has a flat screen, and great color depth. It's been a very dependable monitor, and while other monitors have come out, I saw no reason to spend the several hundred dollars on getting a new monitor. So, I've decided to just stick with this. Maybe if flat screens or something get really cheap over the next year, I'll upgrade, but for right now, I see no compelling reason to do so.
• UPS System: We wouldn't want to be crashing in the midst of our gaming or working, now would we? I actually set up two UPS systems -- the system is on a APC BackOffice UPS, and the monitor is on a USB. I've used the BackOffice UPS's output to plug into COM2 on the system. Powerchute is APC's software hook-in. I've got the Windows version that came along with the software, and am also playing with getting the Linux version working, although it seems to be compiled against RH -- at least the version I have is.

The machine came together fairly well -- by reusing a couple components, I was able to keep the price under $2000 -- and the same system should be even cheaper now, since RAM is so cheap that we should throw away hard drives and just have RAM *grin*. Of course, then you'd better hope your UPS system works.

The point of this machine was really to create a platform for gaming and it serves that "need" admirably -- it's been a pleasure to play games on. With the prices on CPUs continuing to drop, I'll probably upgrade this to a 1.4 Athlon in the next six months, and throw in another half gig of RAM, but for the time being, I've happily created a nice, fast -- and quiet machine. Really, this thing is incredibly quiet: I don't have my decibel measuring device anymore, but my old Vaio laptop's fan is louder then this machine. Louder, and with 1/4 the computing power, and 1/4 the RAM. I consider this an improvement.

Various people sent in complaints, and good old Anonymous Coward sent a link to the Diablo II Forums, where all and sundry are complaining that sunspots, or h4xx0rs, or Blizzard's incompetence have made all their hard-earned Diablo II items disappear into the aether from whence they came. Is it just me, or is it a bit odd to be reporting on the disappearance of items that never existed in the first place?

Weyoun writes "All those who play Diablo2 know that their characters on the battle.net 'Realms' servers are supposedly secure and unhackable. This has been the case up until a few days ago, when a group of crackers discovered a method whereby they could log on as any character. Since then, they have reigned over a virtual apocalypse as hundreds of the top ladder players have seen their items stolen (including that of one well-known Blizzard employee). Even worse, beginning last night one of the hackers began systematically murdering the top hardcore ladder players, by logging in as them and getting them killed (death is PERMANENT for them). As of yet there has been no official reaction from Blizzard, but the entire community is in a state of shock over this situation." Update: 01/02 04:30 AM by T : It appears that Blizzard has now corrected the problem. See below for more.

Gaile - DiabloII.Net sent this update: "Blizzard has posted their response to the Diablo II Realm Character losses on their Realm Status Forum. The losses have been stopped (as of this morning), and characters are secure once more on the Realms. In addition, dead Hardcore Characters will be restored automatically, on January 8th, as outlined here:

[On] Monday, January 8, we will be reviving all hardcore characters who died between December 19th and January 1st. The restored hardcore characters will be revived with the experience, skills and items possessed as of Tuesday, December 19th. This restore will be automatic and players do not need to contact Blizzard to request that their character be restored. Note: Only dead hardcore characters that died between December 19th and January 1st will be revived.

In addition, a mechanism is in place for the retrieval of items, as well. The Blizzard post is on the Blizzard Site. We'll have more soon in the DiabloII.Net Bug Bytes section, which is an overview of the current game build."

GeekLife.com writes: "Blizzard announced their public beta test. This time there are 100,000 lucky winners. The sign-up is over at ZDNet's Gamespot. " Following up on the first round of beta testing in which only a lucky few got selected, this test round is for stress testing the Battle.Net servers in preparation for release. I (and almost everyone I know) couldn't get in on the last one, so I'm hoping my luck is better this time around.