Before 60: World of Warcraft Tips

This is Part One of keeping your Online Gaming Accounts safe. This entry applies to everything online that requires a password to gain access - not just games. Email accounts, Online Gambling accounts, Online Banking accounts - anything you log into over the Internet can be subject to attack by hackers. The more you know about the scams in place, the safer you and your online accounts are.

Spyware, Keylogging “trojan” programs on your computer and even your own wish to ‘fast track’ your advancement are serious threats when it comes to the privacy of your personal information, and security of your online gaming characters.

The three major ways you’ll find your online accounts ‘hacked into’ include:

• Visiting a ‘rogue’ website that exploits flaws in Internet Explorer and plants a keylogger or password sniffer on your computer without your awareness (note, anyone who uses your computer could do this unknowingly).
• Having your trust abused by unscrupulous individuals who claim to work for the company providing the online service and then demand your username and password with a threat of banishment
• Purposely giving out your account information (username and password) with the hopes of being able to “hack” the system yourself, usually to gain virtual items, money or levels without following the “usual” route.

Avoid Known Browser Exploits - Use Firefox, Not Internet Explorer

Download Firefox by clicking the Firefox/Google graphic at the top right of this blog.

Internet Explorer is the world’s most popular browser for those who use Microsoft Windows as their operating system, specifically because Internet Explorer comes installed with Windows computers, and most users (especially novice ones) won’t think to replace or even upgrade it. Unfortunately, because IE is so popular, and because so few users keep their software up-to-date, many hackers have focused their time developing programs and websites to exploit Internet Explorer’s known flaws. There are a LOT of browser exploits out there.

While all Windows users should visit WindowsUpdate.com once a month to catch up on Microsoft’s various security updates for the entire Operating System, Internet Surfers who wish to protect their online information should strongly consider moving away from Internet Explorer.

Scan For Spyware And Keyloggers Regularly

While replacing a highly-targetted-for-hacking browser with one less focused on is an important first step, it’s also important to acknowledge that hackers are constantly releasing new software and websites and trying new tricks to steal your online accounts from you. For this reason, you should be scanning your computer on a regular basis (at least once a month) to detect and remove spyware, data harvesters and keyloggers from your Windows PC.

Download Lavasoft’s Ad Aware SE (for your home computer, there’s a free version). Then, make sure all aspects of it are updated (when you first download it, there may still be updates you need to download immediately after installation) and then let it scan your drives. This may take a while if you, like me, have large drives. It’s worth the wait but you might want to let it scan overnight if you’ve never scanned before. Remove *ALL* of the things that Ad Aware SE finds. You may have to right-click the list and choose “select all” before proceeding if you have a long list. I had a friend with over 700 items in this list the first time we cleaned his computer up, and once they were all removed, his browsing sped up tremendously again.

Download Spyware Search & Destroy (these can both be found in Tucows directory) and do the same things as were done for Ad Aware in the previous paragraph. I find that these two programs work nicely together to keep my drive clean, with my doing weekly scans.

Never PURPOSELY Share Your Account Information Or Password

Any web link you get from an email that brings you to a page where you’re supposed to enter sensitive information like your credit card, bank info or passwords, don’t do it! Banks and other service providers would NEVER contact you that way.

Any instructions you receive about sending an email with specific details enclosed (usually under the guise of “I can upgrade your stats/equipment/cash” if you just follow these instructions…), examine the information carefully - if you’re sending out your username and password, they’re stealing your account!

Even just giving out your username can encourage hacking of your account at times. If your username is not already visible to others, don’t give it to anyone, as they may try to crack your password with brute force (ie: a program that has a list of dictionary words it uses as passwords in login attempts).

Be Careful What Addons And Hacks You Download

While some online games allow for third-party software to be “added on” to improve your enjoyment of the game, some games do not. RuneScape, for example, has no legitimate addons which do not violate the Terms of Service you agreed upon when signing up, and very often any addons you’ll download are actually keyloggers that enable someone else to steal your account entirely.

Games like World of Warcraft, however, have a thriving “UI Mod/Addons” community and many advanced users download and install .LUA scripts which work with WoW to change launch bars, introduce in-game schedulers, track information while gaming, etc. In this case, the general rule is this:

If the Addon you’re downloading contains an executable file (in the form of a .bat file or a .exe or .com file), be very careful about running it. Executable files can easily contain keyloggers specifically added to steal your account information.

Keep Your Virus Checker Up To Date

And finally, as is standard these days, get a virus scanner that runs on your machine all the time it’s on, and make sure the virus scanner keeps up to date. I personally use Norton with its LiveUpdate feature, but you may prefer something else, or your computer may prefer something else ;) I’ve had virus programs severely slow down my machine’s performance and even crash it, while on other machines that virus program works just fine. Do what works, and what doesn’t cause you headaches, and then make sure it scans at least once a month.

Keep your computer clean. It’s an important step in protecting your personal, private information from those of unscrupulous internet users!

This entry is a continuation of “Intro to Deathknell: Warcraft home of Undead”.

Heading Out To Quest

As an Undead, you’ve already learned a lot about moving around and interacting with the game in a way that other races haven’t had to do yet.  If you got lost in the graveyard to the south of the town of Deathknell, or if you have already taken time to explore a little bit, you’re way ahead of Orcs and Trolls who haven’t had to worry about getting lost yet.  From here on in, however, the playability-difficulty is about the same for all races.

Shadow Priest Sarvis has given you a “starter quest” designed to get you to give you a bit of battle experience and get you to level 2, so let’s get to it! Turn around and head back outside, then continue north along the town path, down past Deathguards Bartrand and Randolph and through the gate they guard.

Always re-read your quest objectives before heading out to fight. As your Quest Log (the letter “L” on your keyboard to bring it up) fills up, reading quest objectives and planning your attack becomes more important.

Depending on how many other brand new players are running around, finding Wretched and Mindless Zombies may be easy or difficult. You might want to take a look at the Zone Map before you run too far away from the Deathguards - by hitting ‘m’ you can bring up a map that is much larger than the minimap. The You-Arrow appears on this map so you know where you are and what direction you’re facing just like in the Minimap. The Deathknell area is rather small compared to the rest of the map, so take a bit of time to memorize where the town is, where you’re standing right now, before you head out to take on the zombies. Being able to use the ‘m’ map to find specific spots in a zone is crucial. The World of Warcraft is HUUUUUGE. Start your good habits early.

Zombie-killing Tips

Since you’re in a newbie zone, most of the quest targets are named in yellow, meaning they are ‘neutral’ in status towards you, and you can walk by them without any fear of them lashing out and drawing you into battle. Each newbie zone DOES have a small selection of ‘aggro’ mobs/enemies, however, so be aware! Once your targets get to level 4 or so, they’re likely to also be named in red, meaning they’ll attack if you get too close.

Wretched and Mindless Zombies are level 1 and 2 creatures, however, so they won’t attack you first and won’t try to defend their fellow zombies who are being killed beside them. This first quest is designed to be an easy fight for a new player who isn’t interested in experiencing game death quite yet. You should be able to go into this with confidence, just looking to have fun and explore, and you’ll do fine.

Choosing Between Quest Rewards

Once you’ve toasted 8 Mindless Zombies and 8 Wretched Zombies and picked up all of the loot from their corpses (keep everything!), head back to the town of Deathknell so you can turn in your quest to Shadow Priest Sorvis. I’ll bet you’re level 2 by this time - congratulations! When you turn in the quest, you’ll be presented with a choice of equipment reward before receiving your cash and equipment reward for the successful completion. If you forget what equipment you’re already using, you can type ‘c’ while the quest-solve window is open. As a brand new player with barely any equipment, you’re best to choose the equipment that is NOT colored entirely red (meaning you cannot equip it as the class you are playing) but DOES have the highest AC (armor class) rating.

Cash For Training

Now that you’re level 2, you get referred to your class trainer in Deathknell (probably in the same church as Shadow Priest Sarvis)… but if you haven’t sold the loot you picked up from the boars, you probably can’t afford to train anything! Go find a vendor, like the General Goods vendor or the Apprentice Armorer/Weaponsmith, and sell the junk you picked up.

I’ve actually got a macro for selling “garbage” (grey) items that I’ll share in a later post and link here. Eventually. If you’re savvy, look for ’sell grey items’.

Get into the habit of picking up every piece of junk dropped by things you kill, and selling them at vendors. At a low level, the wee bit of cash this gets you can be the difference between not training skills every two levels and being able to not only train skills, but upgrade your equipment from vendors as you run across them in time as well.

Stay Tuned For Part III

There’s a lot more to Deathknell than I’ve written here, so stay tuned for part three, coming soon :)