Originally posted by Dracondis

Originally posted by Byrhofen

Advertising it may be, but its advertising for free software.

And before you start with the slippery slope arguement, they can be fun, have you not been to a water park before?

It isn't free.  Multiplicity costs $39.95.  $40 for the "free" software.  Pure advertisement masquerading as news.  Relevant or not, it doesn't belong in a news feed.

While Multiplicity is not free, Input Director is... and it does the same thing:

http://www.inputdirector.com/

I am a happy customer of many pieces of Stardock software... but this one is too expensive and Input Director does a better job (in my opinion).

The first step would be to accurately test your power brick... the light may come on, but that does not mean that the correct power and amperage is making it to the laptop.

If you have a multi-tester you can test this yourself... if not, the easiest way to test it is to go too Best Buy, buy a new power brick (they have universal ones there... bring your old one in for comparison) and try it out.

Try it with the battery attached, and the battery pulled out (the battery may have short in it causing the board to not power up... this can happen if the battery's temperature changes quite a bit... gets hot, then cold, then hot, etc...).

If it does not work, then return the new power brick for a refund.

It will be mainboard related if it's not the power brick... it is under any warranty?

Lol, they are just doing this so they don't have to release a really high cancellation rate. Honestly, if you keep extending the free gameplay, then you don't have to report that any of your players have cancelled... even if they have not played the game since they day they bought it (like myself).

This could have been such a great game. It's just FFXI with a new, slow, laggy UI... oh and all the titles have changed so you don't call your new cat woman a Mithra :-P

Anyhow, I wonder how bad their retention rate really is. I might just log into the server s to see how many people are still active. With all the bad reports out there, I'm thinking their cancellation rate would be somewhere between 40% and 60%.

Originally posted by jessian

Originally posted by duomenox

Originally posted by jessian

Dou,

 

just shows how much YOU know

 

https://eu.blizzard.com/support/webform.xml?locale=en_GB

half way down this link you will find this part...

LOL... again!

If you didn't read (and take seriously) the phising email in the first place, you would not be in the position you are in right now.

 lol.. and you honestly know i opened and READ that email ???

LOL you are one real troll

LMAO!  Well you just confirmed that you received the email, how would you be able to confirm that if you didn't read it.

BTW, I never said I was not a Troll... and I never said that I was a Troll either ;-)

But to be honest, after reading your old thread, I'm convinced that there is nothing that Blizzard can do to protect you from yourself. 

I've dealt with Blizzard on a hacked account... it is not hard, they are very fair, and they did everything they could to fix the issue and make me happy. While we were waiting for their slow systems to open the info the Blizzard Employee needed, we got talking about this stuff. And it's people like you that really make their jobs difficult. People like you clog their lines up with calls and complaints and there is nothing they can do to make you happy, so you just eat up there time.

What do you care anyway? You said you haven't played for years and that you were not paying. Blizzard has a set of rules in place to try to protect their customer's accounts. While the rules are not perfect, if they are breached, Blizzard has an action ready to go. It is easy to get your account fixed, you just need to follow their rules.

In your other thread (now closed), you claimed you cannot remember what you changed the answer of your challenge questions to... that is not their fault... YOU forgot. 

You can claim conspiracy, you can claim anything you want, but it is what it is. If you want your account back, work with them, if you don't then leave it be.

I have no idea how old you are... but grow up! Processes are in place, you have to learn how to deal with their processes. Your alternative is to not play the game anymore... so think of it this way, the choice is yours, do you play by the rules? Or do you not play WoW anymore?

Originally posted by jessian

Dou,

 

just shows how much YOU know

 

https://eu.blizzard.com/support/webform.xml?locale=en_GB

half way down this link you will find this part...

LOL... again!

If you didn't read (and take seriously) the phising email in the first place, you would not be in the position you are in right now.

Originally posted by jessian

Can i ask the mods why my thread and another thread accusing or stimpulating Blizzard is behind ALL these hacks in the first place?

Those threads are totally different to this point, i find it laughable that Blizzard has now turned security to access their database into a cash cow!

So i challenge blizzard here and now to prove i was subject to a keylogger hack !  that got "someone" access to my account answering all my questions perfectly yet at the same time requires and i qoute...

"

Attach ID Here

Please provide a scanned scan or photo of a piece of government-issued photo identification, such as a passport or driving license matching the first and last name of the registered account owner. The file must be under 5MB and be in the jpg, gif, or bmp format.

 

 

Okay now Blizzard are asking for Photographic proof of my passport ?   i dont bloody think so Blizzard.  This is totally against the data protection act here in the UK

 

now when i opened or created a new account was i asked this VERY same QUESTION ?

 

Did we all submit our passports? so how can you prove my ID is linked to my account?  MY CD key should be sufficent..

 

This is Blizzard Scamming you for more Personal ID and DO NOT give it over here in the UK.

 

LOL, you have to stop reading those phishing emails.

They are not really from Blizzard.

[quote] [i]Originally posted by jessian[/i] [b] duomenox[/b] [b]like everyone else here you are assuming a lot of ifs and buts regarding my security details.[/b] [b]Heres the kicker, 2006 account frozen. Then i recieve the first EVER email from "Blizzard" saying my accounts been hacked.[/b] [b]Strange that..[/b] [/quote] Not strange.... If someone else hacked into your account, even if it was frozen, you were hacked... by definition. It does not matter what status your account was in, they got in, may have reactivated your account, and went on their merry little way. I'm not assuming anything. I gave you a highly possible scenario.

Originally posted by jessian

i did not provide any information to any keylogger as i am running a lot more security here monitoring ALL network traffic. Next time think about what your are saying about someone, i am sitting here behind a radius server with all manners of networking tools.

I'm sorry about this, but I have to call you out on this one...

You cannot sit behind a RADIUS server because a RADIUS server has nothing to do with security. It is purely for authentication. As a matter of fact RADIUS servers default to clear text authentication which is insecure by default.

While RADIUS is still highly used, and traffic can be encrypted by various means (such as an IP-Sec tunnel from the RADIUS server to the device requesting credentials) the industry has started moving toward authentication protocols such as Secure LDAP.

At this point you are looking for a full Layer 7 Gateway where you can do deep packet inspection. That is the only way you would be able to definitively know that all your traffic was legit and none of it was unsolicited by you as a user.

Do I think you were hacked? Well before this post I didn't think you were, but now I am not sure. Either you know what you are doing and made a mistake in your post, you think you know what you are doing and are trying to sound like you know more than you know, or you know nothing about Information Security and you are trying to use buzzwords to look smart... which one are you? I honestly don't know. 

With that being said, Jessian, your fighting an uphill battle here. You're angry at the email. Hackers can spoof the headers with very little effort. The easiest way to tell if it was a hacker's email is to right-click on the link you received, select copy or copy shortcut (different based on the version of Outlook you are running) and paste it into notepad. Chances are it goes to a site that is not a blizzard owned and operated site.

Originally posted by jessian

what i want to know is how can a hacker gain access through Blizzards servers and authentication, bypass my security question answer my email address rightly and still i have never been keylogged on my protected PC.

 

Jessian, so I had my old accounts hacked as well... here is what I have found out and how I think you should protect your old accounts:

 

While your password may be secure, your security questions are typically not secure. Think about it, your mother's maiden name is a word, your favorite food is a word, your favorite color is any number of a small set of words. What is the exact thing that most websites tell you not to use as a password.... a word!

Three of my old accounts were hacked based upon brute force entry of my security questions. One was from an old NCSoft account... their support was awesome. They recognized that I was not a run of the mill 13 year old and we tracked down exactly what happened. They helped me find that my account was brute forced from the security questions and it made 100% sense after we looked at the logs.

My advice, choose a default password you use as the answer to your security question... for example don't use Smith as your mother's maiden name, use V0ltr0n (Voltron is a cooler maiden name anyway :-) ) This introduces numbers (and/or symbols if you want them) into the answer that a hacker will typically assume is a word. It will stop brute force attacks from getting through... to a point. The problem is that you need to remember what you put down.

 

This is a major security flaw that most companies don't address. Sure, they can lock you out for 15 minutes for getting the answers wrong 3 times... but a brute force bot has all the time in the world. Eventually, it will get hacked. Why don't they make it harder? If it really is you coming back, they don't want you to have a hard time getting back into your account... that is how they make money.

 

So hopefully that helps. I don't know if that is what happened to your account, but i would not be surprised as it is happening more and more lately. What sucks is that your character has probably been stripped of all his stuff and money and whomever hacked your account got it all to another character... probably another hacked one.

Great Article!

I would pay money to play a game like that, with such depth.

It's not that far off from a little game called Eve, what the writer described sounds like Eve in a Fantasy Setting with strategic instancing.

Now I am sad it is not a real game that is being developed... I'm stuck with this stupid pre-order for FFVXIV (FFVXIV is a terrible game in it's current state, it should not have been released yet).

Keep on writing! Maybe you could get a job with Bilzzard and make a kickass Diablo MMO based on the points in your article. I think the Diablo IP would fit very well with your ideas, especially if the entire human world was engaged in battle to hold back the forces of Hell. That would be so cool :-P

But I digress...

Originally posted by cloud8521

http://www.ffxiah.com/forum/topic/13698/ffxiv-mouse-lag-fix/

The hack may work... I've not tried it.

But the buffer thing works perfectly for me, and I don't have use a utility that places an un-authorized hack on an executable.

Changing the EXE like that is also against the beta agreement you agreed to when you signed up for the beta. If Square wants to be a real jerk about it, they can cancel your account for using it.

I don't think they will, but they could if they wanted to. My hat's off to Cliff for making a fix for the issue. But I'll stick with lowering the buffer, performance is fantastic for me at quarter buffer (I changed it from half again and there was a noticeable difference for me today).

The following worked for me as a solution for mouse lag in the UI.

Since I think this "solution" can be due to hardware, it may not work for you.

Open the Final Fantasy Config from the Start Menu (right next to the Game Launcher)

Select General

Select the Graphics Tab

Change the Buffer to half or quarter (quarter gives me higher improvements than half does)

Save the changes and launch the game.

I'm running at 1449 x 900 resolution at half buffer and many of my lag issues are gone.

The funny part is that the game runs the same no matter what my AA settings are set to. No AA is just as slow as 16x! It looks better, but runs the same. I think they have a programming issue with both the mouse cursor, and the way they try to use the buffer (higher buffers usually make things run better).

When I tried double buffer, the game was 100% unplayable.

Give it a shot, I hope it works for you.

PS - I have a Core2Duo Quad Core with 8GB of RAM and an nVidia 9800 GT. When I play this game all 4 cores are pegged between 90% and 100%. But my memory usage is very low... this make it look like they are doing some behind the scenes work to keep mem usage to a minimum. Probably a lot of HD caching (I have not checked my I/O operations during gameplay yet) but I am willing to bet they are using the PS3 limitations on memory as a guideline for both the PC and PS3 versions. If so, they are just being lazy and do not want to fully support both platforms properly.

Again, I hope this helps someone :-)

Originally posted by Zarynterk

Not to sound callous, I do agree with the idea that paying players should be afforded better service. That reason alone is why people who can afford it stay at the Wynn in Las Vegas rather than Circus Circus, you pay for better treatment.

I assume you don't run a business.
Hotels in Vegas are a very bad comparison. You are taking a Wynn hotel, known throughout the world as a quality brand which caters to business travelers (and those with large pocketbooks) then comparing it to Circus Circus who caters to families and family budgets. They are two different animals, apples vs oranges! That is like saying that a Lexus should work better, and have a better factory warranty than a Kia. They are different products, marketed to different groups of customers.

If you run a business, you cannot go handing out preferential treatment to a group of people (not including service industries that sell SLA based services). As soon as you give one customer preferential treatment, you degrade the level of service you give another customer. Treat them all the same and you can either strengthen the overall service structure, or relax it depending on the customer needs.

A free player that gets shafted is a non-player. The company loses the potential income of that player. A pay player that expects preferential treatment that does not believe they are getting what they pay for may become a non-player. The problem is that when does a paying player believe they have enough priority... no matter what you say, they may not be happy.

If you treat everyone the same, then you can acquire new players, acquire new paying players, and keep old paying players without having to spend a ton of time and money figuring out how much of a priority a player should have. Instead of re-inventing the wheel every time a paying customer complains about help taking to long, standardize the support department, make sure everyone gets gain support. You will gain more paying customers and minimize the loss of paying customers. Find other ways to get people to pay for your games... if you are not creative enough to make other aspects of your game enticing enough to get people to pay for it, without resorting to under-supporting free players… hire someone who can!

I understand that CT has changed their wording... but there are laws that define these charactoristics as virus activity.

Under current US legislation, any program that installs updates and/or other software without the express permission of the owner of the computer is considered a virus. The EULA cannot be used to circumvent these requirements.

"Express permission" can be granted in a number of ways. Either by requireing a person to click "OK" or by having a person enable a setting to recieve automatic updates are both ways to satisfy the express permission requirement. That is why you see many programs offer the automatically install updates option during the end of a software installation.

CT (and all other companies) could suggest this during install... but still need the user to enable the feature. In addition, CT should (if they do not already) refuse to allow a client with an older version number to connect before applying any new updates. This will require all users to apply the updates, even if they have to manually accept each one.

As for the scanning of all files on the hard drive, this is defined as virus behavior by current US legislation as well.

There is not any need to allow a game to scan and harvest whichever information they want (even if they claim it is for cheating purposes) from your hard drive. The only place a piece of software needs to look for cheat programs is memory. Since a program cannot be running unless it is in memory, there is not any reason that the hard drive needs to be scanned.

The argument can be made that virtual memory (aka pagefiles) are on the hard disk. This does not mean that the program needs to scan the disk... all the contents of virtual memory are addressed in the memory tables of the OS. Virtual memory is access the same as physical memory, therefore there should ne be any permission needed for games to scan the hard drive and harvest whatever data they want in order to curb cheating. It's all in the memory.

A better solution for the EULA would contain something along the lines of:

"Licensee understands and agrees that the information that may be inspected and reported by Castle Thorn software is limited to devices and any files or programs located in the memory, or virtual memory, of the computer known to be used for the purpose of reverse engineering, packet sniffing, or other activities used to gain advantages in the game not intended by the game’s designers."

Granted, I'm not a regular on these forums, but this EULA issue annoys the hell out of me. I do have to say that I applaud CT for responding to these concerns the way that they did. I just feel that I cannot install this game, nor any game that uses PunkBuster (thanks for the info about that) onto my system... there is not any way that these companies can guarentee that their software will not be used to harvest things like my SSN, or account information. And there is not any way I can prove they did... they look for sniffers which is what I would need to verify they are not stealing valuable information off my system. I would have to use an external PC to sniff, and I don't feel like looking at all the RAW data just to feel safer when I play a game.

Most important lesson learned from the thread...

READ THE EULA!