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.

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.

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".

Tankadins in WotLK

I am very, very excited about the class changes that were proposed for Paladins in Lich King. Seriously, I cried a little with joy when I first read the notes. IRL.

We have absorbed another guild, the Exiles of Loradeon, into our ranks, and we hope that this will push us over then edge into hitting critical mass for raiding all the time. We got a lot of good players, the trick is going to be trying to get people settled and comfortable.

3 months

So it's been just over 3 months since my last post, and I haven't had the desire to write much. The demise of the Watchmen was sudden and painful, and I put myself into a position of responsibility by assuming a leadership role. Now, 3 months elapsed, I have been able to oversee a successful merger, and a return to T5 content. I want to do a post on how to do a successful guild merger, as well as thoughts on new content and so on.

I'm glad to be back.

So that was unexpected

Sorry I haven't posted in a while. In the past week, my guild sharded and I have found myself in the position as GM for a new guild, Hope of Kul Tiras. Blogging from the outside has a different perspective than blogging from the inside, and I'm going to need some time to adjust and figure out what direction I should go from here.

An Officer and a Gentlebear

Finally we get to some human interest! I have a strong academic interest in communication, leadership, and organizational behavior, and World of Warcraft guilds are like great little MBA petri dishes. If I thought I could get away with slipping “gnome warlock” into a dissertation, I would.

So recently, an Officer in my guild posted on our guild forums a short message asking for all of our stats in all of our sets. Now as far as our culture goes, I think we’re a very stat-happy and list-happy guild. We like numbers. We have minimum stats for T5 raid attendance (a.k.a. “You must be this tall to get on the ride”). We make lists of people in various categories. I don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing, but it’s the way we are. We’ve been a functional guild for over 2 years, longer than any other guild on our server. We’re not in the top 10 for progression, but we are in the top 15. So this is, generally speaking, business as usual. I’m going to quote snippets because today we’re thinking about communication, and why not let people speak for themselves?

“For those of you declaring yourself tanks, please send me a P.M. with your unbuffed tanking stats. Please include the following:

Unbuffed stats and resists wearing your normal tanking gear
Unbuffed stats and resists wearing your nature resist tanking gear
Unbuffed stats and resists wearing your arcane resist tanking gear
Unbuffed stats and resists wearing your fire resist tanking gear
Unbuffed stats and resists wearing your frost resist tanking gear
Unbuffed stats and resists wearing any other resist gear you can think of that you happen to own, except pvp...

(I realize that some of these resist sets aren't popular, but for sake of completeness, I'm including all of them. If you don't have any items from a resist set, just indicate as such.)

I need this info as soon as possible :) Sorry for the short notice.”

Now one of our senior bear tanks responded thusly:

“Coming up with these numbers is a bit of work and I will post them later today or tomorrow.

I want to point out that, at least for me, these are not static numbers. I am continually replacing items in my resist sets as fortune allows. Additionally, as fights arise that require any resist set, I tend to concentrate my efforts on improvement of that set. Every set in current use is as good as I can make it. Period. (Right now, for Guild runs, this is the Arcane Resist for TKTE, the Frost Resist for Hydross and the 150FrR/150NR for Hydross.)

To be honest, the resist gear situation is somewhat complicated.

I have, for example, two arcane resist tanking sets: One for Curator and one for Arcane Protectors and Void Reaver.

I have two Shadow Resist sets: One for use on a few shadow bosses and one for Malacrass in ZA. I expect that I will be working on a very complete SR set as we approach Black Temple.

My point, assuming I have one, is that tanking resist sets are specific to boss fights. Right now in our progression, a raid tank only needs a resist set for Hydross (Nature 290 or Frost 290 or 150Frost/150Nature.) By the time we reach any other boss that requires a certain set, all of us will have changed our gear to a greater or lesser degree. That's the nature of our insanity.

As indicated, another tanking resist set exists and is not on your list, above: 150 Frost and 150 Nature at the same time while uncrittable. This is used during the Hydross fight.

I will oganize this data and give you a snapshot. Anticipate boredom. (Unless you are a tank. And even then.)”

And then:

“Just re-read your post and noticed that you have asked us to list our gear.

I respectfully decline to list the roughly 100 separate pieces of resist gear that I use on all sets.”

At this point, another officer chimes in:

“I'm not speaking for [First Officer] at all, but understanding the reasons may help with this chore.

We need to get a qualified list together for SSC (immediate need, others will follow). This of course, can be a GO/NOGO type of thing. Additionally, we are getting ready to spend some mats on more resist gear for other tanks, and are trying to prioritize how best to use the primals provided to maximize our inventory.

Perhaps listing ALL resist gear isn't required, particularly if you have hit a "GO" status, but if your a "NOGO" SSC tank, we need to know which pieces you have in hand, and which ones we have to provide mats for.

Again, this is [First Officer]'s project, these are only my unsolicited comments, and I grant her all rights to poke me for getting involved.”

(cue air circulation device. What’s that I smell… it’s kind of foul…)

Our GM then weighs in:

“Post your shit.”

(What’s this? Someone has thrown excrement at the air circulation device! Now we are ALL covered in excrement! I had NO IDEA that was going to happen!)

I’m not going to post the rest, because things got much more heated, and then everyone calmed down a bit and worked it out. The bear posted the appropriate stats, and everyone who went off the ranch seemed to have returned.

So how did a well-intentioned idea (hey let’s find out what you need, so we can HELP you gear up), turn into a fairly nasty disagreement among a bunch of otherwise good friends? And how did Coristad, who cannot shut the hell up about anything, actually manage to stay out of the way?

“Ask, don’t tell.”

Come back on Thursday for the rest.