LotRO, a.k.a "Low Troe"

I had an opportunity to try out the Lord of the Rings Online (LotRO) beta this past weekend during the stress test event, and am here to give you my down-and-dirty first impressions, coming from a WoW veteran’s perspective. That last sentence is important, since that’s what I was thinking as I played it. In my mind I was comparing what I saw to what I knew. I never did EQ, and my experience with EQ2 was about 20 minutes of the ‘Play the Fae’ demo (after 20 minutes, I think I blacked out from ‘Gay Overload’). I’m really not sure if there’s an NDA in effect for the LotRO beta or whatever, I just always hit “I Accept” whenever one of those walls of text pop up on my screen.

This is a long post. Brace yourself. Go get a glass of soda. Maybe some Cheetos. This could be viewed as an important post for some of you guys, so I don’t want to withhold anything. Many pictures can be clicked for full-sized versions, and most of my links are the same. With all that all out of the way, let’s get this bad boy rolling…

First and foremost, Lord of the Rings Online is NOT World of Warcraft. Maybe that's a Good Thing. Maybe it's What You're Looking For. For me, personally, these last few days spent with LotRO felt like I had just broke up with my girlfriend, and was still in full blown “you're-not-her-mode” with my new steady. The problem is that I was still living with WoW, and just having a weekend fling with the (barely legal, gasp!) new girl on the block. She had a pretty face, and some fancy bump map lighting things, but the way she walked and swung a sword made me wonder...

There are a few things WoW does (and doesn't do) that all of us along for the ride take for granted. WoW doesn't try to have real time reflections in each puddle you pass on the ground. WoW doesn't try to have terribly realistic looking models. WoW has a graphical style that it sticks to, and it pulls it off pretty well. Some people felt like the Wind Walker version of Zelda was a copout, since the graphics were 'simple'... but within the scope of those simple graphics was a common theme, and a certain beauty that the overall world adhered to. WoW tries, and succeeds, to look like you’re playing Warcraft III with the camera zoomed way in.

LotRO has very nice looking areas. Indoor areas have light streaming in through the windows, and outdoor areas are full of fluff and frill as far as your (video card’s) eye can see. If you have a powerful machine, this game looks great. If your machine is not so powerful, it looks a little bit like ass. Mid-range machines will do okay with a few options turned down, but you get that annoying ‘the grass stops exactly 12 feet from me, then as I walk forward, it grows’ effect happening. Click the thumbnails for full blown versions. These are Low, Medium, and Very High ambient frill settings.



The highest one really gives a nice meadow look, but the illusion is hopelessly shattered as you walk around in the low one, with flowers appearing at your feet and fading out again.

An indoor area. Note the textures on the floor, and my character. Overall, though, even the low-fi version is passable.



Another example, this one much more pronounced. Running the game on my laptop with every option turned down in an effort to improve framerate. It didn’t help. Then again, my laptop is built for Word and email, not MMOs. NPCs don’t even have eyes at ultra low… they just have flesh colored blobs attached to necks. Seriously, though… if you’re running the game that low, you either just don’t care, or prefer that ‘old school feel’.

On the other hand, you could have a fancy looking million dollar sports car, but without responsive controls it’d just look good collecting dust out in your driveway. WoW has a very solid, responsive (and extensible!) UI. My UI has been cut, hacked, butchered, and replaced to be about 90% different from the default one that comes when you buy the game. That said, even without all my Addons, the WoW UI just feels tight. You click a button and you get an appropriate response from the game. Your character does a little flip spin thing, the weapon glows, the enemy is Gouged, and you know that you’ve ‘pulled off a move’. All the while, the button has a cooldown animation happening, and you know right when you can do that move again.

LotRO’s UI is not so finely tuned. They have the basic buttons all down there, and they give you plenty of bars to work with (1 through =, along with Ctrl, Alt, and Shift modifiers) but they look a little muddled… some of the icons are trying to convey too much information, and just look confusing. The buttons themselves feel too small, and surrounded by too much ‘wasted space’. The default WoW interface does this too, with it’s big fruity griffon textures. I’ve grown accustomed to Bongos, and turning all that crap off for a while now. There are some icons in WoW that I still don’t even know what the icon is supposed to be representing (Warrior’s Recklessness? Is it like an orange meteor? A hot piece of coal?), but it’s a big bright clean shape, and very ‘clickable’. Clicking a button (or hitting its hotkey) in LotRO just feels like it lacks the immediate impact that it has in WoW. Your avatar does something, but sometimes it’s not so easily distinguishable from the auto-attack. I noticed this mostly on my burglar. The warrior Champion I rolled had a few pretty impressive attacks.

The cooldown indicator on the button does a little sweeping clock motion, but then it does some other kind of cloud puff thing, then blinks, then re-lights up… it’s hard to describe. I’m not sure exactly when the skill is ready again. Combat feels a little bit clunky… it just doesn’t feel as ‘crisp’. I’m sure it has to do with just getting used to the timing of combat. I’ve played a lot of other MMO demos, and LotRO has easily the 2nd best system, WoW being the best. I don’t want to go off on a tangent, but within the first ten minutes of playing WoW I kind of had the concept down. Stunlocking and stance dancing come later, but the basic ‘flow’ of combat was easy to pick up. Maybe I just need to unlearn WoW before I can appreciate another game. Overall, the more time I spent with it, the better it felt. At first it was just a change.

Also keep in mind that I reached all of level 6 on my rogue class, and earned about 5 skills. Maybe the ability animations get more impressive and ‘pop out’ more as you gain levels. I don’t want to judge this aspect too harshly, because I did only focus on really playing one class. I rolled a warrior and chopped a few things, and saw a few mages running around setting pigs on fire or whatever, so I’m sure each class gets perks as you go along, and each class has more distinct moves. On the subject of melee combat, one thing I will give marks to LotRO for is debuffs. I only saw a few in my course of playing, but they stood out. I had a Thunderclap style move that ‘slowed their attack speed’ and it had a cool little animation when it landed, kind of like Retaliation in WoW, but on the enemy. I laid it on them, the swords were spinning, then slowed, and finally came to a stop. Their attack speed was getting slowed. It made sense. Another one I saw was a similar effect being laid on me by a spider, and I let out a little yelp when I realized my character’s attack hand was actually covered in webs. They stretched and pulled as I continued to fight. Very Cool. Much cooler than a debuff icon that simply states ‘Attack speed is slowed by 20%’ or whatever.

One place LotRO absolutely SHINES is in character creation. Well, facial creation at any rate. WoW really “sucks the big one” in this department, as my mom would say. WoW lets you pick an entire face from about eight choices, then do things like add an earring for variation. LotRO’s face generator got me all hot and bothered, and further enhanced my ‘I play a pretty girl online’ inner craving Imagine my surprise (and delight!) when after I had fleshed out my new Isobelle, I was able to choose where she hailed from, which totally changed things. Being from the lands surrounding Bree gave me lighter skin tone choices, and opened the option for green or brown eyes; while those living in Dale Lands near the Lonely Mountain had darker skin tone choices and blue to brownish eyes available.

	Some of the animations get a little weird... my eye drifting...

There are a few races available: Elves, Hobbits, Human and Dwarves. Strangely, you can pick male or female for any race except Dwarf, which offer only males. After selecting a race, you can choose from the various classes. The choices range from Guardian (Tank), Champion (Fury Warrior / Berserker), Captain (Buffs, Pets), Hunter (Nuker), Minstrel (Healer), Lore Master (Crowd Control, pets), to Burglar (Rogue / Debuffer).

Hunters are straight up ranged nukers, no questions asked, with Lore Masters and Captains handling the pets (I saw a crow or two). There are a few different variations on the warrior class, and the rogue class has an interesting twist in that it isn’t the melee DPS class, as much as a traditional debuffing class. It also uses a sort of combo system, but is party based. I (as the burglar) can begin to set up moves that allow other classes to build off such ‘openings’ (called conjunctions in the game). Sadly, as everyone I came across flatly refused to party with me, I never got a chance to try these moves out.

The basic feel of the UI, besides what I’ve mentioned, is good. The front end ‘dashboard’ could use a little polish, but there’s a lot to discover once you start opening windows up. You can write a little bio of your toon, check your family tree (?), and see any feats you’ve achieved and titles you’ve earned. I managed the feat of making it to level 5 without dying once, earning me the title of ‘Isobelle the Wary’. This can be displayed as I walk around town, I could opt for ‘Isobelle of Rohan’, or just plain Isobelle. The quest window and quest tracker are strightforward, and NPC questgivers show up as a golden ring on the minimap. A ring also appears above their heads, replacing WoW’s question and exclamation marks.

The Lore Book is a new addition, giving overall bonus objectives to complete for each zone, as well as for your race and class. I discovered (and examined) a Dunedain Cairn, with added an entry to ‘Research the History of the Dunedain’. There are six other alters or obelisks to find around the world, and once I’ve examined them all, I gain a +1 Idealism bonus (additional fate, increased will and resistance to fear). Cool. There’s even a gauge showing how ‘done’ I am with a certain zone. By level 6, I was about one third of the way done with all the quests the Bree area had to offer. Completing them all grants me another bonus stat, etcetera. Kind of like a rep grind, I guess, but just presented in a different manner.

Guilds are known as Kinships, and can be formed by creating a charter in town. I would imagine they operate in a pretty similar fashion to any other guild system, but I didn’t get a chance to get in one during the weekend.

There’s also a crafting window, but I couldn’t find a trainer to acquire a skill.

	This move is most certainly NOT "Preparation", OK?

I like it because it's different, but the premise is pretty whatever. Maybe I’ve just had an overdose of Frodo to last me for a while. Slow down, and smooth out your panties… they’re getting bunched. Yes, I've read the full, unabridged versions of all of the books, own the super deluxe-o extend-o versions of the DVDs, and lived with a roommate that owned (and preached the virtues of) The Silmarillion. I can appreciate all the lore Tolkien has weaved to create a living, breathing universe. However, in the first five minutes of the game on my burglar, I had already come across a Sackville-Baggins, and Black Riders searching for the 'two hobbits'. Rolling a dwarf had me spawning next to Gandalf, and talking to Gimli to receive my first quest. Is this kind of stuff going to be casually dropped into the background of every quest for the next 2 years? I remember the Star Wars Galaxies demo starting out with me as a Level Nothing Nobody helping Han Solo get to the Millennium Falcon. It felt trite. On the flipside, all the choices at the character creation screen are ‘the good guys’, so there’s no need to create this sense of an endless artificial ‘war’. Parties are called ‘Fellowships’ and there are various mentions of ‘Allegiences’, which I can only imagine means a raid.

I have no idea what that means for PvP. Sorry to be so brief on this topic, but I just didn’t encounter any. I saw a duel in town between two level 2 characters, but that was the extent of my exposure to PvP. The official PvP forums are crawling with people saying LotRO should be strictly PvE to follow the lore (play a good guy, fighting evil), but I imagine those same people will break down and die on the inside when they see five hundred elves named 'Legolollerskates' running around naked, sending each other tells asking for cyb0rz.

The website claims you can ‘Play as a Monster!’, but the option wasn’t available to me. The ramifications of ‘playing as a monster(!)’ are intriguing (what class are you? do you earn new skills as you level?), but it’s all speculation at this point. I did notice the mysterious crafting window mentioned earlier explicity stated ‘Monster Classes cannot train a crafting profession’. Hm.

	NOT "Evasion", OK?

At any rate… the weekend was a brief glimpse into this game, and I left it excited about the game. By partaking in the stress test, I think I may have landed a spot in the full beta. They had this promotion going on where if you played at least two hours during each day of the stress test, you could earn a full beta key. If that’s the case, then I may be able to pick up again on this in a few days or something. I hope so, because I am curious to see a little bit deeper content. Feel free to ask any questions you have, but I’ve pretty much laid out everything I could think of here, and without a full key I won’t really be able to jump back in and check anything.

There are a few more pictures I didn't include, but if you're hungry for more screenshots, jump right in the folder at http://notaddicted.com/images/isobelle/LotROstress and check 'em out! Keep in mind I took a few on my laptop with all textures at bare minimum, so if something looks horribly bad, it was probably one of those ones.



So… who’s doing a serious write up on Vanguard for me? Runned…?

[continue...]

The End of Beta (tm)

So last week, I mentioned that I thought I had deleted my screenshots folder from my install of the Burning Crusade beta after the beta had ‘ended’ in a spectacutronical display of spectutronically spec… tac… yeah. It turns out my 6 years in I.T. had kicked in (probably while under the influence of large doses of alcohol), and I had actually ‘migrated’ (that’s I.T. jargon, there) the screens to my default World of Warcraft folder before blowing away the install. I seem to mash that PrintScreen key a lot on accident as I fat finger the backspace key during chat or whatever. Sometimes it’s good to go in there and see if you can remember what made you take a screenshot of the dead bunny in the first place (*hint* check the combat log!).

Imagine my surprise when I rediscovered all of the craptaculous
screenshots I had taken for YOU, my dear readers! Hooray! So, without
further ado, let’s get this show on the road! This post has also been typed
to keep the text from scrolling off to the right since all the images line up
along the left side of the screen. I know it's weird, but I have yet to figure
out every nuance of how this editor works. Deal with it. It builds character.

Our story, like many before it, began with a simple blue post on the WoW
General Forums.



This thread immedately had about 800 responses, 98% of which were
people crying about this post being found on the (public) General boards,
even though the event itself was relegated to the (not public) beta
servers.


75% of that 98% were people swearing that this was the final straw and
that they would be cancelling their account as soon as humanly possible.

I had pretty much given up on the beta after a few weeks of playing it,
because it broke my soul to get such good drops, and to gain level after
level, only to know ‘it doesn’t count’. I mean, yeah… I know none of the
entire game actually amounts to anything in the long run, but the beta just
felt ‘extra pointless’ to me for some reason. I got to level 63 or something
on my one toon (a warrior), and then pretty much just went back to live.
Everyone would have the expansion soon enough, and I was keeping myself
busy on live leveling a rogue. There would be plenty of time to do all that
crap later.

ANYWAY. So I decide to pop back in and see what all the commotion is
about. I can’t believe that I actually happened to catch that post on time,
and still be able to patch and patch and patch and patch and patch and
still be in Ogrimmar before it ‘ended’. My laptop is an utter piece of garbage,
and every option that’s ‘turn-down-able’ in the settings is maxxed at the
bottom of the barrel. That’s still not enough to manage a decent framerate,
so I even crop out a good two thirds of my screen to ‘black bar mode’ to
further shrink the display. This is all in an 800x600 window, and my UI when
I’m playing (on my laptop only, duh) ends up looking like this:


(from here on out, each image has been resized… click them
for the full-sized glory if desired)

I cranked up all the details and textures for YOU, dear reader, so you could
experience the full earth shattering glory of The End of Beta (tm). I’ve been
beating around the bush a little bit here, because The End of Beta (tm) wasn’t
really that exciting after all. It basically amounted to GMs summoning a few
of the same mobs over and over in the middle of Ogrimmar, and people
going all out in retard-o mode using the yell channel of chat. The reason I
say ‘the same mobs over and over’ is because they couldn’t just summon
C’thun or whatever because he has scripts that run during the encounter
that would ‘break’ Ogrimmar. Something like Kazzak is supposed to be
fought outside of an instance, so he’s okay. Anyway, on to the pics:


Some bugs. I think from AQ40 or something? My guilds have always been
pretty craptactular, so we never got very far in there. One month I found
myself in a guild that was up to Sartura or something, but it was scary. I
have a Blue Resonating Crystal that sits in my bank, wasting a bagslot.
Hooray.




Rawr, I’m a big bug!



Emeriss. One of the world dragons, if I’m not mistaken.




Kruul and Kazzak, simultaneously.




Those obsidian guys from the beginning of AQ40.




Happy Chinese New Year, or something!




Overlord Saurfang. Everybody loves this guy or something. He got blown up
to "Super Mario World 4 Mode" and fought some Alliance NPC for a while.




…eventually Saurfang lost, BTW.




The king of Iron Forge. He’s a dwarf, I think.




Watch out Frodo, use the elf bottle of light thing!




Oh, Sam!



Thunderfury did not drop. That actually reminds me, but I don’t have a
screenshot for it… after everything died, people would begin spamming LINK
LOOTS! Link TEH LOOTS! WHAT DROPPED?! …as if it fucking matters what
dropped, the beta is ending in an hour, you dipshits.

So yeah. For the sake of the screenshots above, I hid my UI while snapping
off pics, but that isn’t to say there wasn’t a delightful stream of engaging
conversation taking place in between each mob…


Ah, lol… I lied. Here’s a shot of some winner asking for LEWTs,
as well as someone informing everyone of the FF ARROW…?
I like Peeface’s name, though.



”101 101 L t A A F” apparently spells out ZUG ZUG NIGGA
on Alliance chat, so you can be sure that was a popular icebreaker.



This person was roleplaying being hungry, I think.



I like this one for a few reasons. (1) This is right about when the everyone
realized that everyone in the beta was from (gasp!) all different servers.
Typical territorial pissing ensues. (2) I’m not sure why, but saying that a
certain guild ‘goes into restaurants and eats all the food’ just strikes me as
hilarious. (3) Outright begging to be recognized for getting a stupid mount
that can fly, before it’s wiped out forever. LOL @ U.



This wasn’t even during The End of Beta (tm). I think this was a random
pre-expansion AV on Scilla. As I was going thru my screenshots folder
looking for noteworthy chatlogs, this one refused to be ignored.



He just kept going like that for a while…



Fpsdoug gets the Energizer Bunny award for just going and going… 97% of
what he said during The End of Beta (tm) made no sense whatsoever… DDR? HEAGEN? I think he was
having a seizure or something, and was desperately trying to get help. Rest
in peace, Doug. Gone, but not forgotten.



Here’s where someone inevitably begins complaining that having 40 man raid
bosses dropped in the middle of Ogrimmar isn’t engaging enough for him. He
preferred the old Ogrimmar vibe of scanning the Auctionhouse or checking
his mail. That was back when the game was fun!



His sentiment is immediately latched onto, and the fanclub is formed.



Anther common theme in the chat was people drinking quarts of KY to help
facilitate smooth entry of Blizz’s weiners into their mouths. I’m sure Blizzard
was taking notes during the shitstorm, Lokki and Sandia. Keep checking
your mailbox for free copies of the New Starcraft Beta (tm)! You’ll be first in line
to beta test for your kind comments while everyone else was busy typing in
synonyms for penis! I felt no such obligation, as I applied, but was
ultimately rejected for the beta. TOO BAD AN OLD GUILDMATE HAS A CM
FOR A BROTHER AND I GOT A KEY ANYWAY, LOL.

Suck it! God, I’m so badass.

[continue...]

Kevin Mitnik plays WoW

Okay.... I'm not going to pretend I'm not in Thrallmar running errands for gold and toys right now; but I take my deadline seriously, and haven't missed one yet. That said, I had planned to show some pics from the 'End of Beta' thing that had the GMs standing around Ogrimmar summoning crap and everyone spamming the yell channel like retards, but my screenshots got wiped when I uninstalled the beta, and forgot to back up my folder.

Shuffling thru My Documents today in an effort to look busy at work, I came across a document I had typed up detailing the steps I took to circumvent my last school's 'Locked Down LAN'. The article was typed up back in March of 2006 for the benfit of my loser guild (none of them understood a single word of it), but I worked so hard on it that I saved it. The information inside is still perfectly relevant, and I've even updated it with pictures of unsavory criminals, and added hyperlinks for the lazy.

I figure we probably have a few readers that can relate to being stuck in a situation where the only internet traffic allowed is WWW, and they're going through Thrall Withdrawl. G.I. Joe used to tell me "knowing is half the battle", and some famous dead guy once said 'knowledge is power'.

Armed with these two quotes, I will dive head first into my phone like neo and show y'all how the truly l33t among us get our groove on. This is all perfectly legal, but might upset a few people (network admins) if you're caught making them look stupid, or ---even worse--- you force them to fix holes in their 'secure' network.

Without further ado, may I present to you:

*how to bypass a corporate or school firewall*

One day, not too long ago, I found myself stuck in a LAN where the only open ports were 25 (SMTP), 21 (FTP), 53 (DNS), 80 (HTTP), and 443 (SSL).

This is a common situation. Most LANs are "locked down" for one reason or another... in schools they don't want you downloading dirty pictures on their pipe. In businesses, they don't want you screwing around on Instant Messaging apps when you should be busy in Excel or whatever. In hotels, they just hate you, and wish you would have gone to the motel across the street, so they can get back to downloading dirty pictures and screwing around on Instant Messaging apps like they were before you walked in the door.

But what if you really want to check your mail or repost an auction in World of Warcraft? What can you do in a situation like this? A little while ago, I thought I was out of luck. Then I started reading the internet (port 80 was open, after all), and realized a lot of people were in the same boat. I came across an application called SocksCap32 that can cram any application you choose into a "Sosksified Wrapper" (their words, not mine), and shoot it out into the open wild.

Well, kind of... It can override any application that doesn't normally support SOCKS, and wrap it up. SOCKS, by the way, is " ... a protocol that a proxy server can use to accept requests from client users in a company's network so that it can forward them across the Internet. Socks uses sockets to represent and keep track of individual connections. The client side of Socks is built into certain Web browsers and the server side can be added to a proxy server. "

That sounded promising, and I was on the right track.

A proxy server is used in most big corporate LANs as a way of filtering what websites get seen, or just to keep track of where the LAN's surfers are going. It can also speed up browsing in a closed LAN. If everyone visits that same page every day, a proxy can keep a copy of that page cached so that the request inside the LAN can be dealt with without having to ever even go all the way outside the LAN to the internet. A proxy server can ALSO be used to redirect a request for a webpage. If I'm sitting in Texas, but have my browser configured to relay my requests through Nigeria, then I go visit Yahoo.com, yahoo's servers see the request coming from Nigeria, instead of Texas. People get all fruity and use three or four proxies in a chain and bounce their request from Texas to Nigeria to Poland to Russia, then go to Yahoo and think they're awfully clever. The fact remains that all those bounces are still traceable, and although it would be more of a pain in the rear to track you, it's pretty much never impossible. I could pretty much care less who sees where I'm going, though. I'm going to Azeroth, not Scotty's House of Barely Legal Teens.

I looked on the internet and found lists of free 'open' proxies (no username or password required to use them) that ran on one of my few open ports... 53 was out, because I still needed to do DNS resolution, but 80 and 443 were available. I got on a public proxy, loaded it's address in the Connections Tab of Internet Explorer's options, and tried to request a page. It loaded, albeit slowly, and I thought I was almost there! I added that same proxy's info into SocksCap32, and launched WoW socksified... and nothing happened. It timed out trying to log in...

Grrr.

So... what happened? I'm not positive, but I believe that even though I was attached to an outside point, and shooting WoW's traffic over this port 80 link, after it got to my open proxy (in India, lol) it unpacked, and started shooting the handshake to log into WoW over the regular Blizzard port (3724). These requests may have even been met, but when the traffic returned to India to say 'ok! go ahead and log in!', India was like 'World of Whatthefuck?' and the walls came tumbling down.

OK.

At any rate, it was progress. So I needed to find a way to get the packets out of my LAN, to a box on the outside that would then shoot the packets along, and when the response came back from the WoW login servers, it would wrap them back up, and shoot them back through the unblocked port 80 on my LAN, back to my box that would be eagerly awaiting news from Blizzard on whether or not I could log in now.

I started digging around again. I came across the concept of "Tunneling HTTP Requests" again and again, and I kept seeing SocksCap32 mentioned in conjunction with this process. I came across two commercial products that seemed to do what I needed, HTTP-Tunnel and Hopster (*Hopster may be defunct since the writing of the article? can't find it anymore...-iso).

I downloaded and tried them both, and huzzah, they both worked. I launched HTTP-Tunnel (or Hopster), connected to THEIR OWN PRIVATE tunnel, and launched WoW socksified... ta daa...! I connected from inside my 'locked down' LAN. I was very pleased with this result, and many people will stop reading this right here and get to it. Grats. You have found the easy way!

That's great, but my ping was awful. I'm talking 5000ms. Walking around the Undercity was barely manageable. In the past, I used to connect to my home box using remote desktop software (across one of my open ports) and launch WoW on that box, and try to read my mail that way... Playing a full 3d game across something like TightVNC doesn't work... it takes a good five minutes to walk from the auction house in Ogrimmar to the mailbox by the bank. The lag makes you overshoot it, and then you back up too far, and then you screw up your camera so you're looking straight up into the sky... it's retarded.

This situation was *better*... but not much. I was rendering the game locally, but my packets were still taking unnecessary hops across the globe and back.

I read up some more on these two programs. It turns out they apparently throttle you down to 1-2k/s during the free demo. HTTP-Tunnel is 1.5k/sec, but you can run it forever gimped like that. Hopster's retarded demo gives you a whopping 2k/sec, but it has these pop up banners every 15 seconds or so, and then shuts off after like 5 minutes of use. Both of these companies don't actually SELL a unlocked version that I could buy, you SUBSCRIBE to their faster connection (paying for access to their own “tunnel”)... it's a couple of bucks a month, but I no longer reside in the continental United States, and therefore am hard pressed to come up with american money. Anyway, if you absolutely must use one or the other of the free versions of these two, I'd reccommend that you get HTTP-Tunnel.

I, on the other hand, was like 'yeah right, if they have a fancy tunnel, **I** can have a fancy tunnel', and set out to build my own.

I dug around on the internet again (see a pattern forming here?), and came up with my salvation: HTTPort and HTTHost. FREE software to do exactly what these guys were doing... HTTHost sits on a box of your own out in the wild, and HTTPort sits on your box inside the locked down LAN. You stretch a tunnel out from inside your locked down LAN to the box running HTTHost, and it unpacks the data at that end, send the requests along, and when it gets responses ("ok! ready for you to login!") it wraps them back up in the tunnel and sends them back through the hole in your LAN's firewall (firewall: "What's this? Traffic on port 80? That must be a webpage! Move along!"). ... BUT!


BUT!


The server end of the tunnel only runs on windows. Yeah, you can run it under WINE or whatever on linux but that's just stupid. Why you would run windows programs on a linux box is just beyond me. Any extra layers of emulation are just going to slow things down. I'm not exactly dealing with supercomputers... I just so happened to have an old Dell 900 something-or-other laying around. I bought another NIC (that's an ethernet card), threw Windows 2000 on it, and made it into my router at home (Look up "Windows ICS" on google for how to do that, and what to watch out for).

I won't lie and say I feel wonderful about having a naked Windows 2000 box flapping around in the breeze as my router, but the Linksys BEFW11S4 i was using before wasn’t winning any uptime awards, so it's not like I'm sad to see it replaced. I even downloaded IPCop, and tried to build a Linux router out of the Dell, and even had it up and running before I realized that HTTHost only ran on Windows. Wow... ok, whatever, reformat...

OK!

So now I have a locked down Dell Router that's attached directly to the internet, and I've installed HTTHost as a service on that box, and bound it to a port that I know can get through my firewall here in my LAN. I've given the windows box a ridiculous password, and given HTTHost a DIFFERENT password than my root account on the windows box (HTTHost's password can easily be sniffed if someone were so inclined, but honestly... i'm checking my mail in WoW here... this isn't to hide nuclear trade documents or whatever... big deal, if they find out my HTTHost password, they can use my tunnel, too... oh noes). All that was left was to launch HTTPort from inside the LAN, enter the location, port, and password of my new Dell Router, connect (thereby 'building the tunnel'), and launch WoW Socksified.

w00t. I logged in and pooped myself. It was just a little bit, and didn't make a big mess. Keep in mind that while it might have taken you a minute or two to read this far, this was about 2 or 3 days later for me. It's not like I was slaving over a hot keyboard for 12 hours a day, but my days are slow here sometimes, and it was keeping me entertained during the daily lulls.

My Dell router at home is connected to a stupid fast pipe by most home connection standards (10Mbit connections in my area of Japan go for 20 bucks a month), but that doesn't mean that i'm getting 100ms pings all of a sudden. My pings are now in the 600ms range, which is more than fine to check mail and comb the auction house. I don't expect to be main-tanking Molten Core from where I am, and I'm certainly not going to try and run counter strike... but a lag friendly game like Yu-Gi-Oh Online or something not too intense like the mailbox in Brill is more than doable, and I'm not paying anyone for subscriptions.

Well, except Blizzard and my ISP, but duh.




To summarize:

1. Build a Windows Router. Windows 2000 Pro or Windows XP will work. Windows XP has the built in Firewall, or you gain some knowledge and read up on how to secure a naked Windows Box on the “big scary internet”… which services to disable, etc. Even if you go with XP, there are still extra steps to take to make sure it’s safe. For the most part, this box will do nothing but be a router. Don’t dial in and use it for anything else. Lock it down, and let it do it’s own thing. Put Apache or an FTP server up there, just don’t use it to browse porn sites, especially if you love clicking on pop ups.

2. Download three apps, they are all free. SocksCap32.exe, HTTHost, and HTTPort. Google is your friend.

3. Install HTTHost on the server (Windows Router). Launch it, and specify an open port that is available to you inside your LAN. 80 is recommended, as anything with an internet connection is going to allow basic "http" 99% of the time. In the event that you do decide to install an Apache webserver or (heaven forbid) IIS on this box as well, the HTTHost app even does swanky redirecting for web requests coming into the server. It shifts all the requests to port 81 transparently, so HTTHost is running on port 80, but 'so is Apache'.

In the 'Bind External To:' window, put your Windows Router's WAN IP Address (don't know it? Visit http://checkip.dyndns.org from the Windows Router box. If you don't have a static IP you can get a Dynamic Hostname from dyndns.org and put the domain name you chose in that window. That's what I did. Google for 'dyndns.org' or just go to the site to figure what that will do for you. It would be good to get a client that updates your dynamic DNS entries as well on the Windows Router box. Once you set it all up you can forget it, and it will take care of itself. THIS DYNDNS STEP IS TOTALLY OPTIONAL, BUT VERY HANDY. If you don't do it, you'll need to change the 'Bind External To:' window each time you get a new IP on the Windows Router. Read up on dyndns.org. it's handy).

4. Install HTTPort and SocksCap32 on the client (the box inside the 'locked down LAN')

5. Set up SocksCap32. Under SocksCap's settings (File > Settings), set the SOCKS Server to be your own box by entering 127.0.0.1 in the first window, and 1080 as the port. Check the SOCKS Version 4 radio button down below and enter your name (or whatever) in the name field.

6. Make an entry in SocksCap32 for the game or whatever application you want to use. Do this by dragging the icon of the game (the actual icon, not a shortcut) into the SocksCap32 window, and hitting 'New Application Profile...' Then hit OK. Ta-Daa.

7. Configure HTTPort. The Tabs of this app break down as follows:

System: Check "Accept only connections from this PC"

Proxy:
Top Half -> empty.
"Misc options" -> User-Agent: HTTPort 3.SNFM, Bypass mode: Remote Host
Bottom Box -> The address of your Windows Router, port it's using, and password you put on it.

Port Mapping:
Top Half -> empty (there was some AOL and yahooIM crap in there, i just deleted it)

Built in SOCKS4 server: check both boxes!! This part is important as this setting means "my box that i'm on now is the beginning of the tunnel". This is why when you set up SocksCap32, you set 'your own machine' as the SOCKS server (above, in step 5)

8. Launch HTTPort (inside the locked down lan) and connect to the HTTHost box (your windows box sitting out in the wild). Launch SocksCap32 and double click the application's icon that you created within SocksCap32.

Note that you don't need to stick to World of Warcraft here... you can use this method to run IRC or whatever, but remember you will be running the app back and forth thru a pipe that is taking extra hops to your house or office or whatever and back... the speeds won't be blazingly fast. Chatting over IRC would work fine, but don't expect to be downloading anything or whatever, and I seriously wouldn't even waste my time with P2P apps or anything. That would just be silly, and probably illegal. :P


Note* This article is the documentation of my own journey to find out how something like this could be done. I do not endorse using this method to break the law or make your network admins crazy. I myself was a network admin for 6 years before coming to japan, where I now teach English. If you are a network admin, then maybe this can serve as a lesson in how your LAN can be circumvented. Take this knowledge and make your LAN better. Knowledge is power, yadda yadda yadda.

I have no intention of following up on this, posting answers to anyone’s questions. It took me about 3 days of searching the internet and actually trying to find out the info for myself. If you honestly can’t get it working with just HTTP-Tunnel and SocksCap32, then any response I would give would be over your head anyway.

Good luck out there.

(send your gold and epics to) Isobelle

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I QUIT!!! (I mean, wait! i was wrong! help! I <3 u!)

Maybe you've been there. Maybe you've only threatened to go there in emo posts on the WoW boards. Maybe it wasn't even WoW, but I think you'll understand where I'm coming from on this one. MMOs have this amazing ability to tear us between wanting to spend every waking moment in them and never wanting to see them again. I guess they’re kind of like girls, but they never ask you to empty the cat litter. Hmm… I can see the Blizz devs reading this post, and suddenly having new ideas for questlines. I think I’ll quit while I’m ahead. In fact, I’ll quit the game altogether! Yeah! Screw this game! To make sure it’s final, I’ll even disenchant all my epics, vendor anything that won’t DE, and give all my gold away to make sure there’s no coming back!

That was me, not too long ago. I had one level 60, my warrior, and I had grown so sick of the game that I felt I needed drastic measures to finalize the process of ‘leaving’. My little guild fell apart, and got swallowed by one of the server’s “big ones”. I had an influential place in the old guild, but now I was just an undergeared no-name grunt compared to the MTs in the new guild. I had a job, which apprently meant I wasn’t ‘dedicated’ to the guild, and I couldn’t raid on their schedules even when I could raid since I lived in Japan. I needed to stop this crap, once and for all.

That lasted a good week or two. During that time I played every free demo for any game I could get my hands on, and I even bought a few console games. I went so far as to re-install CounterStrike for Christ’s Sake.

I hate CounterStrike.

Eventually, I came to accept that WoW was the only game out there worth playing. It was the only game that interested me, anyway. FPSes are tired. I can only shoot someone with an announcer screaming HEAD SHOT! in my face so many times. Any time I would load up a counterstrike map, I’d see custom WAVs be the only thing loading, and just cringe. Fuckotherservers.mp3 YOUJUSTGOTOWND.wav takeitbitch.wav cornholio.mp3

Yeah.

I wanted my warrior back. I missed Isobelle.

Sooo! I put my CC info back in. I log in. I’m standing in OGR with a Simple Black Dress, a Blue Sparkler in my offhand, and a Green Skeletal Horse in my (solitary) backpack. Hmm. Time to open a GM ticket.


Here’s a tip, if you ever find yourself in this situation: NEVER admit that you did what you did willingly. As much as Blizzard wants you back on the smack, they can’t just give you all of your loots back. They could, but then you’d just quit again in a day or two. No, the best strategy for them is to make you re-earn it all again over the course of 3 months, and then let you quit again, and let the "Circle of Life" continue. My first ticket foolishly admitted that I DE’ed everything, and I was pretty much told ‘go eat a weiner. too bad, so sad’.

Another ticket was immmediately opened. Same deal. I began to ask around for people in similar situations, and I found that if your account was hacked, or it wasn’t you that did it, your chances were much more likely to be considered.

Suddenly, an imaginary little brother I never had appeared beside me, and the answer became clear! He had foolishly created those (lying) first tickets after I threatened him with physical violence! This could work… hmmm… Blizzard's fan base is supposedly 99% comprised of Night Elf rolling Emo Teen Spoiled Brats (myself and my friends obviously comprising the other 1% of mature and totally cool Horde), so I put my Hat of +3 Roleplaying and set out on a mission...





This was promptly responded to. Well, okay, it took forever... but I was determined.
*I've used the magic of photoshop to differentiate my chat from theirs.





I don't think I sounded desparate enough, so then I really began to pour
it on for the next ticket:





It's only a shame that these are the conversations I decided to screenshot. The ones before these were pretty uneventful, but once I decided they weren't going to restore anything, I started telling them I hated them, and asking them to die in fires. I never once recieved any warnings or anything, and, in fact, seemed to make more progress just being an outright dick. At one point, when they supposedly restored my Heroism Set, I recieved 2 Belts of Heroism in the mail. It was icing on the cake.

End Result: They restored anything that couldn’t be raided for on my own. Things like my Breastplate of the Chromatic Flight and Balckhand’s Breadth can only be recieved by doing quests. Once the quest is done, it can’t be repeated. Thus, it was restored. Things like my Brutality Blade or ‘Tier 2 Hat’ are static drops, and can be replaced by playing.

Raiding in all greens was an interesting experience, but the Big Guild had crapped itself apart, and my old guild had come back together again. We picked up the pieces, and I began to get my drops again. On my first raid back I ninjared a Breastplate of Might, much to the dismay of warriors that had foolishly attempted to take my place in the spotlight. Within a few weeks, I was back to where I was, and maybe even a step or two above.

Last week I swore I’d stop playing this game again, but now I know better. I’ve emptied out my mailboxes so nothing bounces; but my bags and bank are happily stocked full of blue and purple pixels, and will be awaiting my triumphant return in a week or two.

Yeah. Neverwinter Nights 2 isn’t WoW, and the EQ2 demo?

LOL

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