Play Safe – Check those links!!

I got a very official email yesterday from another gaming company (NOT Wizard 101 or KingsIsle), warning me that my account might have been compromised and giving me a handy link to a very official looking website so I could go and change my password.  The problem was – I don’t play that game, and I’ve never had an account with their system.  It was a scam.

These scams, called ‘phishing‘, are a two part process.  They send people an email that looks like it’s from some ‘official’ source – their bank, or Facebook, or their favorite video game.  This email will contain a ‘call to action’ – it will tell them that they need to log into their account to fix or verify something, and there is usually a serious consequence for not doing it, like your account getting canceled.

I’ve also seen this starting to pop up on social networking sites like Twitter as well, where URL Shorteners like bit.ly can mask a URLs true destination.  If you see some ReTweet about getting prizes or rewards from your favorite game, double check the link and be really careful!

The second part of the scam is a website, usually crafted to look exactly like the ‘real’ website, that will collect the username and password of everyone who tries to log into it.

It’s a fiendish plan, to be sure – send an email telling someone they have to log into their account to fix something, and then give them a link that looks like it’s a real website that will instead steal their password and let the bad guys into their account to steal their stuff.

To combat this and stay safe is easy, as long as you know it’s there.

• First, always remember that no website or game is going to send you an email asking for your password.
• Second, if you get an email telling you to log into a website to correct or change something, look very closely at the sender’s email address and the address it’s trying to send you to.  Instead of wizard101.com it might be wizardlOl.com – it doesn’t look too different, so you have to be careful.
• Finally – instead of clicking a link in an email, go to the main website yourself and log in there, so you know you’re putting your credentials in the right place.

Phishing scams aren’t hard to avoid, you just have to know what you’re looking for and remember, never trust an email that’s asking for your account information or telling you to log in right away – no reputable company would do that.  Always check the URLs and if something looks suspicious, don’t put in your user information, that’s the safest play.

Play Safe!

June 14, 2011 | Categories: Gaming | 3 Comments

New article is up on MMO Crunch!

I missed getting this post out yesterday (Crazy day for the Fabricated American here…) but I just wanted to post it and let people know that my latest article, ‘Finding Your Fun’ was just posted yesterday at MMO Crunch!

Thanks for all the support!

The Game Monster – Finding Your Fun!

February 10, 2011 | Categories: Gaming | Leave a comment

Ditto Plays Warstorm…

Oh Zynga, I thought I was safe from your cruel clutches. I’m not interested in farming, or running my own cafe, or poker, or the mafia, or any of the other silly things Zynga was trying to get me hooked on, nothing appealed to me at all. Like I said – I was safe…

And then came Warstorm.

You see, I love CCGs, or ‘Collectible Card Games’, and I’ve been into them for… well, let’s say I’ve got some pre-4th edition Magic The Gathering cards rattling around in a drawer somewhere, I’m sure. The card combat is actually one of the things that attracted me to Wizard 101 in the beginning – I love the idea of basing tactics and strategy around something as purely random as the luck of a card draw, figuring out the percentage chance of specific cards coming up at the right time. Will I get the Meteor Strike card I need, or will I get four pixies and a shield I can’t use? Will I draw enough land cards to power my uber combo, or will I get pounded for six turns waiting for that one swamp card to finally come up. You can take your shooter games and your twitch combat and your skill bars, they’re all fun and they have their place, but for me, a carefully constructed deck of spell cards and deck-to-deck combat always makes me a happy orange monster.

Warstorm, for any who don’t know, is a casual, free to play Facebook game created by Zynga, the makers of Farmville and many other popular social games. If you’re familiar with typical card combat type games, such as Magic the Gathering, Yu Gi Oh, Pokemon, or Wizard 101, then you pretty much know the basics. Zynga isn’t really known for doing many ‘groundbreaking’ things, they take old favorites and build new games around them, putting their own subtle spin on them. They do it well, though, and Warstorm is no different.

The concept of the game is very simple – there are five factions – Human, Elf, Orc, Demon, and Undead, and you create decks – or ‘squads’ in this case – with cards of the same faction. Each squad is built around a hero card and will contain your infantry, ‘special forces’ type cards, spells, and artifacts, and will contain only seven cards – this makes strategy crucial and very interesting.

The cards are mostly standard creatures of fantasy or dark fantasy fare, from dragons, ghosts, and vampires to typical soldiers, dwarves, and elven rangers. The cards have a ‘cost’ in turns, a strength number which indicates the amount of damage it does your opponent, and a toughness that indicates how much damage it can take. Many cards also have ‘special abilities’ like block, flying, fire breathing, health drain, etc… – again, nothing that won’t be instantly familiar to anyone who has played Magic or games like it.

Combat includes one to four of your squads versus an equal number of opposing squads. You can choose which squads to send into battle based on your opponents factions and your personal playstyle. Since you only need seven cards, including a leader, to create a new squad, you’ll find you’ll have a number of options to choose from for any fight, even early in the game. Choosing which squads to send in for different situations becomes one of the critical strategies, even as early as level five.

Victory – or defeat – can come one of two ways. The first is the obvious ‘kill or be killed’, as each player gets a ‘morale bar’, the size of which is determined by the number of squads involved in the battle, plus bonuses. Any creature sent in to attack that is not blocked by an opposing creature does damage to your opponent, and vice-versa. The second victory condition is running out of cards, meaning that you do not have any cards to draw, any cards in your hand, and you have no cards in play. If you run out of cards, it’s game over. In the earlier levels in and 1-on-1 or two versus two squad combat, this is usually the way you’ll win – or lose. With only seven cards in a squad, those games go pretty quickly.

Strategies are varied and, for me, tend to be based on the cards I have (obviously) and the size of the fight I’m in. For a single squad versus squad battle, I try to put together a squad of cards with fast casting times and I try to put as many high toughness and blocker cards as I can, because odds are in a 1 on 1 fight it’s going to be the first team to run out of cards that loses – damaging my opponent isn’t as important.

For larger battles, however – the three or four squad battles – I’ve found that you need squads set to specific tasks. I’ll normally have one squad of fast casting times, one squad (usually my dragon deck) of ‘heavy hitters’ – high casting time but serious firepower and special abilities – and then at least one deck focused on indirect damage skills like Zap and Snipe, to take care of any flying or blocking opponents. If it’s a four squad battle I’ll round it out with a solid defensive squad.

The actual battles themselves are very straightforward, though non-interactive. You get a backstory with some flavor text, you choose your squads, and you attack. Cards are drawn randomly and turns taken automatically, with zero input from the player; you just watch as the fight plays out. It’s still exciting, but I do wish there were a few choices you could make at this point, like which of your creatures you can cast spells on or apply bonuses to.

You can speed up or slow down the action, or even replay the fight if you want to pay close attention to tactics and strategy. You can click on any card in play to pause the game and read it’s text, which will also tell you what special abilities it has – a very useful feature, especially early in the game. The fights will usually run from a minute to several, and if you’re into it there’s quite a rush – seeing your cards come out, seeing the activation timers counting down on your cards and your opponents, anticipating the clashes to come… I’ll admit, I get really into it and have, in fact, yelled at my screen when I see an opponent’s awesome card hit the board and tear through my carefully planned strategy. I’ve laughed rather manically – well, as maniacal as a furry orange monster can laugh – while I see my minions burning through my opponents defenses and seeing their morale drop, knowing in a turn or two I’ll have them beat.

Winning battles moves you farther along the quest/storyline you’re on and captures a new part of the map. Areas that are fully under your control produce silver, which you can spend to buy more cards. Sometimes (OK, daily), barbarians can ‘invade’ a part of the map you already hold, and if you don’t repel them, they’ll stop your silver production and just be annoying in general. There is also the standard real-money transaction currency, and in most cases either currency can be used to buy better cards, pre-made squads, or more content/quest packs – again, nothing groundbreaking, standard free to play and social gaming fare.

The social game aspects are not at all subtle – you’ll get a lot of pop ups and dialogs telling you to send cards to your friends, visit the alchemist for stat boosts, buy new booster packs, things like that. If you are playing with others and they’re into it, go ahead and send them gifts – you can send some pretty decent stuff, and this is also the first game I’ve seen where you occasionally have the ability to win or send the real-money currency, not just in-game silver. I was able to buy a good pre-made squad using that, without spending a dime, so that was nice.

The ‘PvP’ aspect of the game is lacking only in that your opponent has no idea that you’re attacking, and has no way of choosing which squads to defend with, so it’s sometimes not a very fair or satisfying experience. It doesn’t appear that anything ‘bad’ happens to you if you get attacked, so it’s not the end of the world, but I’d love a more active PvP element to this. Like ‘Backyard Monsters’, my biggest pet peeve is the fact that I can be attacked and defeated and have no input or say into the attack or my own defense. But as I said – there don’t seem to be any consequences, so I guess overall it doesn’t matter, it’s just more battles to hone your skills.

So that’s it – the game is listed as still in beta, but it seems well polished and it plays great in Chrome or Firefox. I don’t use IE because even monsters have standards. The game is set up so it can easily be a quick 15 minute lunchtime diversion, or you can play for an hour or more and not be bored – again, that’s if you’re into card combat. If you don’t care for the mechanics and gameplay of standard card combat and collectible card games, this is NOT going to be your cup of tea.

I’m level 10 as of yesterday and still going strong, so I’m sure I’ll have more information and tactics posts in the future. Thanks for reading!

PLOX!

January 10, 2011 | Categories: Gaming | Leave a comment

Ditto’s Current Games – Dec 17th

Here I am, back with another THRILLING blog about the games I’m playing and what I’m doing… and this week we’ve got some great new stuff in my older games, and a new game that has rocked my furry orange world… I think many of my Wizard 101 friends will agree, too.

Wizard 101
As always I start with that game which is nearest and dearest to my heart, Wizard 101. Of course as people know, I have made it to MooShu, and it is SO nice!! It finally feels appropriate to be riding a Koi mount through the lush green landscape, surrounded by gentle streams and tranquil settings. I absolutely LOVE it here, and so does Madame Jasmine!

I haven’t tried gardening yet – I will, I promise, but right now it’s more about exploring the wonders of Mooshu, since it’s been a while since I’ve seen anything but grimy old Marleybone..

LOTRO
I jumped into LOTRO ‘for a couple minutes’ this week to check out the winter festival they’ve been promoting. ‘A couple minutes’ ended up being about four hours! My jaw dropped…. I’ve never seen anything like it, to be honest. Their winter festival is in a complete instance, a beautiful snow-covered village with lit trees and dancing revelers and really interesting quests, with many layers of interaction. There is one quest line that has you rousting a bunch of what are essentially homeless people off the streets, but then you’re given an opportunity to have a change of heart and donate a bunch of festival tokens to these same poor unfortunate souls. I don’t know what happens after that, but it’s wonderful!

LOTRO does continue to impress – it’s still a little overwhelming at times, but the game is just so pretty, and the quests are really immersive and fun.

The Game of the Week
Zynga’s ‘WarStorm’

OK, I promised myself as soon as I joined Facebook that I wouldn’t fall into the ‘Zynga’ trap of Farmville and Frontierville and Mafia Wars and all those other mindless Zynga games.
I failed.

WarStorm is a new Zynga game based around your standard collectible card game, similar to Magic the Gathering. There are different ‘armies’ – Human, Elf, Undead, etc… and there are specific cards for each, and you create ‘squads’ – basically small decks featuring a leader, some infantry, and some ‘special forces’ type cards that have special triggered abilities. There are also artifacts and spells you can add to your deck if your leader/general has the space for them. There’s a lot of complexity, but not TOO much.
Combat is standard CCG combat – random cards drawn, cards have a ‘cost’ in turns until they can enter the field of battle. You win if you get your opponent down to zero life, or if they run out of cards, so multiple strategies are possible. By winning battles, you gain silver and you gain control of lands that produce silver. With silver you can buy more cards – single cards, faction booster packs or even pre-made squads. You can also spend real money for these as well, but I haven’t had to (yet)
So far, I’m really hooked on this one, though I’m still just starting out. It’s detailed enough and challenging enough to keep you hooked, but not really frustrating and there doesn’t seem to be any PvP ganking like in Backyard Monsters. Nothing worse than logging into your casual Facebook game and seeing your entire yard in ruins because somebody decided to attack you eleven times in a row while you were asleep…

That’s all for this week – see you in The Spiral!!
PLOX!!

December 17, 2010 | Categories: Gaming | Leave a comment

How NOT to keep loyal players happy….

So last week I found a fun, really entertaining game called Braaains on Facebook. It was cute, it had zombies, it was fun and easy to play, but still a bit challenging. I’ll admit it, I got hooked on it – I’ve played every day since last week, sometimes logging in multiple times to check in on my terrifying Zombie horde…

Until today. Because today, when I logged in, instead of seeing my happy and smiling legions of the undead ready greet me, I found this:

So it tells me I need to ‘click here and enter my email address’ – well that’s odd, I thought to myself. Facebook already has my email address, obviously – it’s my login. Why would Braaains need me to enter it again? Well, let’s click and see…

Braaains sent me to what looks like a complete scam site ‘Get a free iPad just enter your email…’ blah blah blah. These sites are NEVER legit and I can’t imagine the flood of junk – or worse – I would get in my inbox if I were to sign up for this. I could not circumvent this in any way – not in different browsers, not by manipulating the URL tags, nothing. If I wanted to keep playing Braaains I would HAVE to give my email address to this ‘service’.

Sure I could put in a fake email address, but that’s not the point. While I understand a developer putting out a game is doing it to make money, FORCING your players to sign up for some disreputable service is just plain wrong, and I cannot, will not support this. I’ve deleted Braaains from my profile, I won’t be supporting them any more, which is sad, because it’s a game I was really getting into.

So for anyone who started playing Braaains because of my glowing recommendation last week, I do sincerely apologize – obviously I couldn’t have known about this shady business practice, but I still feel bad if anyone started playing and either got tricked into doing this or, like me, got invested in the game and then was forced to stop playing because they were uncomfortable with giving their email address to such a questionable site.

October 28, 2010 | Categories: Gaming | 2 Comments