Originally published @ Bite My Review on Oct 19, 2009

Prologue

Aion, for those of you living under a large, Tauren-shaped rock, is the latest MMO from NCsoft. Originally released in the Asian markets a year ago the North American launch begins with the expanded 1.5 release. Titled “Shadow of the Belaur” the birds-eye highlights are a significant boost in content from the original including 12 new instances, the Dredgion PvPvE battleground and an additional 10 levels tacked on to the cap.

In the interests of effective time-management (HA!) let me take a moment to point at the review score in the corner. I gave the game a five. Neither positive nor negative, but right in between. In the last week I’ve read more than a few Aion reviews and if I mash them all together I’m not sure they deliver a single nugget of useful information. Reviewers seem to be deathly afraid of actually talking about the game. They seem content to regurgitate press info or something they saw on Wikipedia, as if that could in any way assist a potential game-buyer in making an informed decision. If that’s what you’re looking for you can give this review a pass. My goal, dear reader, is to tell you about Aion. Launch Aion to be precise. Together we shall explore what is and what could be, the pitfalls and possibilities, so that in the end you will be more than capable of deciding if it’s worth 50 of your hard-earned simoleons. Read the rest of this entry »

Just a quick note for all you folks running WordPress blogs. There is apparently a hack in-the-wild that can lead to a site compromise. There’s no patch as of yet, but it does seem to be “under control” per some of the news I’ve seen.

Regardless, I wiped out 99% of the user accounts in the system as a precaution. Basically any username/mail address I didn’t immediately recognize as legit got the axe. If that included you and you are a human being with eye-holes and whatnot take heart that it was not an intentional slight. Just re-create your account and it’ll be right as rain.

While you’re at it, feel free to post a comment. Or don’t.

ghacks.net story * Trend Micro Coverage * Network Solutions * Christopher S Penn’s Coverage

I’m very curious as to what the infection vector for this is, as after 48 hours NO ONE seems the have a fucking clue – least of all WordPress. That in and of itself is curious, if a bit frightening. They are rarely at a loss for words when something like this comes up. The silence, as they say, is deafening.

edit:

It seems that WordPress is side-stepping the issue today with a general statement on file permissions. The implication is that the host screwed up and it has nothing to do with WP directly. But that doesn’t seem to fit given some of information out there. Are general users safe? Are they not safe? This kind of ambiguity absolutely KILLS me when I encounter it professionally. Accept blame if it’s due and fix the problem OR state emphatically that there is no problem. Either way the steps are easy:

1. know
2. tell your “customers” what you know
3. profit

Yeah, so I’ve been playing STO quite a lotta little bit lately. It’s actually pretty fun once you learn to ignore the parts that, well, aren’t. Like crafting. Jesus H Christ on a crutch is the crafting bad.

More on STO later, maybe, but for now enjoy a couple vids I snapped in XFire. Yes, it’s only a LC1, I rerolled after discovering that Engineering is not my forte so fuck off, k?

This one is me flitting about a +1 Battleship. I failboated 2 attack runs in this video, but the result was still an easy kill. Much like WoW, you have to get to the Commander (or beyond) tier before fights start really becoming dangerous.

Here is me vs 3 gimp frigates. Zero challenge in this one but I still managed to failboat 1 attack pass by firing off a spread. Mentally I was going for the clump AE setup, but I used it from the wrong side of combat and only managed to hit 1 target. He took some damage, but it was a poor use of the combo.

I may cap more vids as time goes on. Obviously I’ll take time to make them good later so just consider this a proof-of-concept. The one is shot at “half” resolution and the other at full. I can’t really tell if there was a discernible FPS loss, so kudos to the XFire crew for the tech. Both were shot with full audio @ 25fps.