Singleplayer

All posts tagged Singleplayer

The Cold, The Old Pirate and The Administrative Officer

Posted by Wighar Stamfaste on March 5, 2010
Posted in: Games, Life, World. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , .

A heavy cold

This years winter was heavy compared to how it has been the last 10 or so years, and I have indeed missed the chill of a real winter season, an oddity though is that I have been struck with a heavy cold this year and its a first for a very long time, last time I had one this bad was when I was like 15-16 years old.
During a cold I will often blend about 1L of hot water with a flavor enhancer or normal household orange juice that upon consumption will increase my inner-body temperature to battle the cold from within, Warm Chicken Soup or indeed most soups for example will do your body good during a cold as it keeps the body hot.

The Games of old

Looking around in my game collection I found my Sid Meier’s Pirates! box, all CDs still in superb condition, so having a bit of nostalgia I installed the game and began to play, to my surprise however the game seemed to have constant loading pauses during play, like it was loading things every 0,3~0,5 seconds thus making the game visually lag, not sure if its my graphics card, anti virus or anything else that makes this behavior, I started to check what I could possibly turn off to make it run smooth as it should, tried all compatible modes and there was no difference at all.

I tried turning off all antivirus and internet security software and apps, I unplugged my computer from the network prior to turning everything off of course.
This did nada as well, So I am currently stuck with a superb game with a constant graphical lag like state… oh well, guess I’ll find a solution for it later.

Dedication and Explaination

Onward to the world of Online Gaming, as many of you may have seen and read in my posts earlier that I started to run a site for Dedicated Game Servers, which are paid for by public donations and the ad revenue from the Google Adsense program that I have on my blog and the community forum here at stamfaste.se

I did get a few question about “what stamfaste.se is?”, questions like “Is Stamfaste.se a Company Name?”, “How many owners does Stamfaste.se have?” and “Is Stamfaste.se for sale”…
Well first of Stamfaste.se is simply a Website I created and is owned by me, and is used as a project platform for various web based projects by me and my friends, I do not see Stamfaste.se as a company or anything like that, mostly cause I have no idea how to run a company and besides I don’t ask for anything in return for usage of the site, as I explained in earlier posts and such all money that comes in to Stamfaste.se in donation or ad revenue are used for Stamfaste.se server payments and such.

A question I got from a friend was “Have you thought of joining a Affiliate program?”, I have indeed thought about it, though I am not sure I understand them enough to consider them, mostly it’s cause I can’t be bothered to read thru several pages of license / ToS documents with a dictionary to join one, and in most cases you need to join the program to get to see what you actual get to utilize or what is required of you…

The Community and Association

Wish I had so much to write that I could type a post every week instead of whenever I get a feel to do so, but that is how it is, other than Stamfaste.se I am also an administrator for Thesecondsun.org as Head Community Manager, thus I take care of the forums and most community management requirements that the community may need or want.

Though lately I haven’t done much as I am backing of my role to basic management control keeping the forum up and as of late fixing so that the forum is a part of the community rather then the base of the community.

The community being a MMORPG player Association means we have guilds in multiple MMO’s trying to keep a stable and friendly community between the games, as of recently I was given the guild leadership of the World of Warcraft Guild “Children of Twilight” by the Game Master as our leader had been offline for a extended period of time and It was noticed that my bank alt that was in the guild still had the most activity in the guild, I hope that I can restore parts of the guild with a council command structure where my character has a central role but I put the overall command to the council.

I don’t have much else on my mind right now but I hope to make a longer post next time, so see you all then and please do visit my webshop Stamfaste.se Webshop

Pre-Orders Listed and the Phissing for WoW

Posted by Wighar Stamfaste on January 22, 2010
Posted in: Games. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

The Preorders List

I will once more return to Rapture in Bioshock 2 that at this time of writing is set to be released in Sweden the 9th of February this year.
I hope it will be good or even better than Bioshock, I have seen some videos off it and the new graphics are indeed at first glance a good improvement and I love the addition of the Big Daddy Drill weapon in the teaser videos.

Now as I pre-ordered Bioshock 2 I will receive the book “The art of Bioshock” that comes as a included pre-order gift, as with most games I buy this was pre-ordered at Webhallen obviously :D .
As I am on the subject of pre-ordered games, I might as well share what else I have on the list of games to come.

Command & Conquer 4 is also on my list and it came with a pre-order inclusive as well in form of beta test access :) , I have tried it and I have been a beta tester for Command & Conquer series before so I was happy to check for bugs as with all other beta’s I have participated in :) .
I am one of those people that when I participate in beta tests of games, I do so to find bugs and exploits so that they can be fixed before release, though by experience there are usualy a good amount of people on beta tests that are just there to play the game before release and the most common to complain highly when they find one :( .

…anyway moving on to yet another game on the list of preorders

The Settlers 7 “Paths to a Kingdom”, the next installment of The Settlers series, I like this series and I have played most of them now and then.
I like games that starts with setteling down in a spot and starting a town and have it progress on the local resources to later expand with research and supply to citizens demands and see if you can supply it on your own or by means of trade and/or diplomacy.

is there a local warlord or enemy faction that has begun to see your presence in the land as a threat to their power of any king like economy or followers, these are games that I can be free to play around with my imagination and explore how to solve the situation and which is the most profitable or best for your settlement.

Moving on in the list we find Napoleon: Total War, I have been a huge fan of the total war games since I first got my hand on Rome: Total War, The Total War games battle system has an easy combat control system that make combat fun and challenging without being to complex to figure out in stressed situations.

I love the management aspect as well where you control everything from economy to dimplomacy :) got land you can easily re-conquer at a later point in exchange for some land you can make profitable and allows easier access for your military to advance into the neighbouring countries with a deeper and faster impact *evil grin*.

So I am looking forward to its release as I allready pre-ordered it on Steam.

Now lets move on to something completely different..

Friends of mine that use my Server Computer named BOTNC (Brethren of The Northern Coast) which has an email address that is used as a trash mail has informed me that recently there has been an increase in account phissing mail to it, they stretch to phissing for account details to such MMORPG’s as World of Warcraft, Aion and Vanguard as examples.

Now let me explain somethings, the mail address accepts the incoming mail but dosent open them like a mail browser, instead it types the mail in raw DOS-text to a txt document and stored in a folder naming it simply by time and date.
For the example im going to copy the header info and actually publish it here for you to read

[Phissing Mail Header]

Return-Path: <abie...@hotmail.com>
X-Original-To: (hidden)
Delivered-To: (hidden)
Received: from localhost ((hidden))
by (hidden) (Postfix) with ESMTP id 39C81A0B1
for <(hidden)>; Fri, 22 Jan 2010 17:07:12 +0100 (CET)
X-Virus-Scanned: amavisd-new at (hidden)
Received: from (hidden) ([(hidden)])
by localhost ((hidden) [(hidden)]) (amavisd-new, port 10024)
with LMTP id nYfoNRDj4vTE for <(hidden)>;
Fri, 22 Jan 2010 17:06:40 +0100 (CET)
Received-SPF: pass (hotmail.com: Sender is authorized to use ‘abie...@hotmail.com’ in ‘mfrom’ identity (mechanism ‘include:spf-a.hotmail.com’ matched)) receiver=(hidden); identity=mailfrom; envelope-from=”abie...@hotmail.com”; helo=blu0-omc4-s25.blu0.hotmail.com; client-ip=65.55.111.164
Received: from blu0-omc4-s25.blu0.hotmail.com (blu0-omc4-s25.blu0.hotmail.com [65.55.111.164])
by (hidden) (Postfix) with ESMTP id 936B535498
for <(hidden)>; Fri, 22 Jan 2010 17:06:40 +0100 (CET)
Received: from BLU0-SMTP57 ([65.55.111.135]) by blu0-omc4-s25.blu0.hotmail.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC(6.0.3790.3959);
Fri, 22 Jan 2010 08:06:40 -0800
X-Originating-IP: [124.94.43.164]
X-Originating-Email: [abie...@hotmail.com]
Message-ID: <BLU0...@phx.gbl>
Received: from exnhixixb ([124.94.43.164]) by BLU0-SMTP57.blu0.hotmail.com over TLS secured channel with Microsoft SMTPSVC(6.0.3790.3959);
Fri, 22 Jan 2010 08:06:37 -0800
From: “wowa...@blizzard.com” <wowa...@blizzard.com>
To: <(hidden)>
Subject: World Of Warcraft-Account Instructions
Date: Sat, 23 Jan 2010 00:06:20 +0800

[End of Phissing Mail Header]

Question: “What does all this jibberish mean?”
Well let’s begin with who acctualy sent the mail, Above we see the line “X-Originating-Email: [abie...@hotmail.com]” this basically saying that the mail was sent by abie...@hotmail.com and the original send in accordance to “X-Originating-IP: [124.94.43.164]” it was sent from the IP 124.94.43.164, this being an IP that belongs to “China Unicom Liaoning province network” after a quick whois on APNIC (Asia Pacific Network Information Centre).
So then we can assume that a person in China using a free hotmail mail account sent the mail, thus we can asume that the mail is 100% false, and as we allready know this mail was received by a mail account that is not listed to a blizzard account so its busted in before hand.

Question: “Now how do we know it is meant for phissing?”
As we allready figured the mail is sent from china using hotmail, nothing in the mail can be trusted, and the mail account doesn’t have any World of Warcraft account so it is totaly safe to delete it :)
but to prove the point that it is phissing there is a link in the mail that states the address to the US World of Warcraft website, but we allready know its not from there so we don’t click on it.

(Caution, Do not perform this if you are not totally aware of what you are doing)
I know that if you use Windows and Outlook you should be able to right click the link and use the “Copy shortcut” to copy the actual address that is hidden from view, Now we can visit http://www.who.is and enter the copied shortcut in the search field removing the “http://” and we should get to know where the phissing website is hosted.

In this mail specificly the link points to the registrar information for:

Registrar: XIN NET TECHNOLOGY CORPORATION
Whois Server: whois.paycenter.com.cn
Referral URL: http://www.xinnet.com

the rest of the registrar information on the owner is just plain rubbish, false email address and a random letters name like “asdasd” “fenfen” “gheghe” and such as the domain registrants information.

That it is Xin Net does not surprise me, Xin net has a real bad reputation for bad domains and spam and they are in 7 of 10 cases the registrar that shows up on all spam mail i received on the servers mail address, so don’t think I need to mention anymore on it, but we proven the point of Phissing as the website is not listed as registered by Blizzard Entertainment in the registrars owner information.

For more information on World of Warcraft Account Security read *IMPORTANT* – Account Security at http://us.blizzard.com/support

I recommend any that are World of Warcraft Players that they get the Blizzard Authenticator :)

Anyway here is where I will stop for this time, Be safe and Play fair :D