When you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Friday, August 29, 2008

Vista's UAC and World of Warcraft

I recently bought a toy computer to play games on, and it happened to come with Vista Super Premium Mocha Lattechino. I've got a techie background so I figured I would give it a go.

My first major decision was that I was going to try to live life as just a normal, unprivileged user. So after setting up the admin account, I made a nice ordinary user account for me. I then tried installing Ventrilo and was pleasantly surprised when it started asking me for password prompts. Welcome to something approaching multi-layer security!

Long story short, I install WoW and Wowmatrix (my addon manager of choice) and go to town. I launch the game from Wowmatrix, everything seems fine. I quit to uninstall some addons, and when I relaunch WoW none of my addons load. Yowza.

So I try to open an addon folder, and the first thing that happens is that UAC kicks in and asks me for my password. Hrm. So by now I am getting the picture that WoW runs in an unprivileged state (which is normal), but then it subsequently does not have the privs necessary to read the addons, which were installed by an admin-privileged instance of Wowmatrix.

All of my folders were set to read-only, and I would try to unset them and it would not stick--UAC kept reverting them. After a fair amount of cursing and some research, I determined that I essentially had 3 options:

  1. Disable UAC entirely
  2. Make my user account an admin account
  3. Grant WoW (and ancilliary programs) the ability to execute as admin
I wanted to avoid 1&2 at all costs-- I come from a *nix background and a dead easy way to prevent a lot of bad stuff from happening is to restrict what can run in the first place. Option 3 does introduce some risk, but it's less risk overall than either 1 or 2. There is still the potential for the WoW executable to do Very Bad Things to my hard drive, but at least in that case I know who to yell at.

After switching to the admin account while keeping my account open (another feature I'm glad they copied shamelessly from Apple, who copied it shamelessly from the Unix world), I found Wow.exe and went to properties > security tab > advanced > and checked the "run as admin for all users" box. Switching back and I confirmed that, voila, all of my addons were working.

I do have to type another password now whenever I launch WoW, but I feel that is a small price to pay for having a less-vulnerable system. Microsoft has finally caught up to the rest of the world in its approach to security, and I would commend them for that. I think better documentation, however, would go a long way towards allowing people to understand what is going on.

So if you happen to stumble across this page in your Google search for Vista UAC and World of Warcraft / WoW problems (gratuitous keyword reusage), I hope you find it useful.

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

I have a Mistress...

...and her name is Warhammer Online.

The astounding lack of vision and communication regarding the Paladin class in general and Ret paladins in particular is only highlighted more by this post at Warhammer Alliance:

http://www.warhammeralliance.com/forums/showthread.php?t=61523

I'll wait.







Not that long, I have ADD.

I've been in the corporate world for a good long time, and I realize that the more power and influence you have, the less you should say. I also realize that you can't make all of the people happy all of the time. What is missing, however, is a lot of the "Why". Everyone wants to know Why, and someone (even if not the devs themselves) should be able to articulate that response. Kudos to Mythic for understanding that.

Saturday, August 9, 2008

I am made of pure Fail




Everyone has horrible pick-up group experiences. Everyone thinks everyone else is terrible. Chances are though, that at some point it's been you.

Lat night I offered to help 2 guild mates get through normal Magister's Terrace. "Find a healer, and I'll tank for you" I offered. Well they did, and off we went. Our group was Tankadin, Holydin, Elemental Shaman, Hunter, Rogue. Not my preferred group (no real AoE damage), but 2 cc classes, so it seemed workable.

My first clue that we were going to be horrible was that the holydin was really undergeared. Mostly greens, with the engineering helm. No problem, I thought, I would just use (shudder) crowd control to help him keep up. Never mind that Kael is hard for a good paladin to heal...

We wipe on the third trash pull when our hunter (who, to his credit, had never been in the zone before) face-pulled the trash pack on the other side of the tree while I was busy marking the pull in front of us.

The shaman send me a tell "If we wipe on the first boss I am out of here".

First boss goes down easy, and we actually power through Vex in one shot, although me and the holy are the only ones left standing in the end. Then the shaman has to leave. I hit the LFG
tool and there's a resto druid available. Well, 2 healers is probably not ideal, I thought, but we need a body and this is only normal mode. I grab the druid and we start clearing to the Priestess.

On the first 6 pull we almost wipe, but pull it out at the end, with just the druid and the holydin dead. On the second 6 pull we utterly fail at cc and wipe totally. At this point the druid says "I've had enough," and leaves. I look at the clock and decide that we might as well call it at this point.

Now put yourself in the druid's shoes. You get pulled into a PuG with an insane tankadin, an undergeared main healer, a hunter who can't trap, and a PvP-specced rogue. How long would you give us?

I am willing to give most people the benefit of the doubt. I think last night I was too forgiving... I knew, as soon as I saw who was in the rest of the group, that we were doomed. Yet I stuck with it, for probably too long. Then this poor druid comes along and finds himself in the middle of a horrible PuG and eats 2 deaths in the space of about 10 minutes. Yeah, I would quit too if it wasn't my guild-mates.

I'd like to blame Blizzard for this one, but the sad truth is that last night it was my turn to play the role of the "PuG from hell".