We need to raid! So we made a post on the Drenden forums about it.

Well, the summer vacation bug has hit Aetherial Circle pretty hard. We’re not raiding again until the end of August. I would certainly like to continue MH and BT progression three nights per week, but my guild cannot support it.

How are you all doing in this area? Is your MH/BT guild not able to get a raid going nowadays?

I’d like to see if we can get some Drendeneers who are in the midst of MH/BT content into a 3x week raiding schedule, without dropping our current guilds.

Just thinking off the top of my head, Aetherial Circle can provide:

two holy pallies
two resto druids
one prot pally
two bm hunters
one shadow priest
one holy priest
one fury warrior
one arcane/frost mage
one resto shaman
one feral druid tank
and possibly more.

Would you be interested in making an Drenden Outcast Raiding Consortium to run Mount Hyjal and Black Temple 3x per week? You’ve got to have 3x Tier 5 to be geared for this stuff, too. I’m not looking for a crew to “explore” these instances, I want to beat them. AC is 4/5 MH and 1/9 BT, (6/6 SSC, 3/4 TK). This is the experience level for which I’m hoping.

If we can get 30-40 people who want to do this, it could be fun.

Your toon quit the guild and is having fun with your flight form. We tracked him around Shatt and talked to him so much he /ignored us. Then the rest of the guild started bomb-whispering him, and now he’s ignoring the whole guild.

We asked everybody in Shat to start whispering him, telling him to put the account back. It probably won’t do any good, but what else can we do.

We’ve put in a ticket, we’ve put a post on the guild forums, we’re trying to contact you!

Just like your wife was a few days ago, Adellm, you’re being hacked right the F now.

Update #1: GMs contacted and they respond.

Edit #2: Adellm Gets His

Adellm saw the post on the guild forums and this blog about his being hacked, so he changed his login info via the admin panel on the WoW site, and got his toon back. Of course, he found his stuff gone. However, the GMs were able to get him all his gear and gold back! Unfortunately, he lost all his gems and enchants, so the guild is reequipping him as we write this. The really big Bad Thing was that the hacker unlearned Adellm’s professions before he was usurped, and the GMs say that’s one thing they cannot fix.

Adellm said the quick-action we took in reporting the situation to a GM was essential to him getting his gear back so quickly. We’re thrilled to have been any help at all.

Adellm is saved! /danceparty

Here are some of the things that really steam our biscuits if we think about them long enough.

Our guild has all the tabs it can buy in the guild bank. But we could start a 2nd guild, buy all those tabs, and shuttle stuff between them via bank mules, effectively doubling our guild bank space. Yet, after three years of playtime and Elune-knows how many years of development, Blizz STILL won’t lift the decree that states that Hunters can only have three pets.

Llama is still banned. He’s leveled his new hunter to 65 – probably higher – since the ban went into effect. C’mon Blizz, that’s two strikes now.

We wiped our raid last night. In a spot we know we’ve wiped them before, and we know how to do the pull, yet we honked it up anway. We did it properly the 2nd try, but it was said that a “BRK Hunter Guide Movie to Wiping a Raid” should be produced. And it’s not a bad idea.

Someone quit our guild to join a more-further advance raiding guild because they wanted to see end-game content before WotLK came out and we weren’t progressing fast enough. Last night, we noticed his new guild was in Black Temple. We also noticed that he was not. On Monday, Aetherial Circle is going to starting our initial foray into Black Temple. While we don’t have any ill-feelings towards the guy… we’re not sayin’, we’re just sayin’.

Al’ar dropped our hunter token last night. And we won it. And it’s pure junk. Our token-karma is the worst ever.

Pet “+Hit Rating” food. Hello?!

Shot-rotation macros that include Multi Shot. You wanna ban something, Blizz? Well here’s your chance. Any hunter that breaks crowd-controls or busts tanking assignments because they don’t know when to switch macros needs a ban-hammer. Well, maybe that’s a bit strong. But STILL…

The next hero class should be Ninja. And it won’t be. Gnome Ninja; who wouldn’t do that? DPS for the little-guy. Melee cloth-wearer FTW. It’ll probably be Ranger, which is cool, but all we hunters really want is a wider variety of ranged weapons and a couple d@mn more stable slots, not a funky name.

Wintersaber Trainer rep still stinks when you have a fixed number of hours per week to play, and they’re allotted already.

The best scope recipe drops from Attumen, the first boss in Karazhan. 285 bosses after that, nothing. Engineering needs a scope-buff, pronto.

Ditto guns.

And our BRK Banana Clip idea has yielded no results, either. A BRK Banana Clip is an engineering device that is like an ammo pouch but only holds, say, 50 rounds. But on the plus side, it gives a healthy Haste rating buff. Only four BRK Banana Clips can be carried or equipped at a time and they cannot be reloaded, as engineers use shoddy manufacturing techniques. BRK Banana Clips would give engineers a “consumable” they could sell that people would actually want. Nada from Blizz on this brilliant idea.

Fel Reavers are immune to Concussive Shot and Snake Trap slowing effects. Just ruins all our Hellfire Peninsula-fun, it does.

Misdirect only works on party/raid members. Pure and utter cr@p. Seriously. We’re not saying we should be able to MD on the opposing faction… OK we are. But if we can’t have that, at least let us MD on the night elfs who try to steal our skinning targets.

The best raiding gun we had pre-BC at level 60 was the Core Marksman Rifle. It does 45.4 DPS. Now we have Tuskbreaker, which does 86.4DPS. Does this mean that when WotLK comes out, we’ll have access to a 160DPS ranged weapon? We could one-shot heroic Shattered Halls with that thing. People are out there one-manning Onyxia; when will it all end?

Not again.

Aetherial Circle needs raiders. We are a casual raiding guild, but some folks have decided to lean much more heavily on the “casual” side as real-life and school interferes with their playing. We wish them well, and now we have to re-fill our raiding-ranks.

Give AC your tired, your poor, your DPS and healing classes yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming servers. Send these, the guildless, Tempest Keep-tossed, to BRK: We lift our lamp beside the golden portal.

Healy-type Shaman, Druids, and a Priest.
One or two mages, pick your spec.
A rogue willing to be humiliated on the damage meters.
An Affliction warlock who understands what 5/5 Shadow’s Embrace means.
An additional ranged DPS, any class.

We raid Wednesday, Sunday and Monday, from 8pm EDT until 11pm. We are 6 of 6 SSC, 3 of 4 TK, 1 of 5 MH. Our immediate plans are to clear Mount Hyjal, get Vashj to farming status, and take a peek into Black Temple.

If you’ve got the raiding gear, i.e. all done with Gruul’s and Maggy, know your class and your spec, can commit to raiding at least two of those three nights per week, and are interested in seeing end-game content with us, drop us an email at either:

bigredkitty@gmail.com or
recruitment@aetherialcircle.com

You can also visit http://www.aetherialcircle.com/forums and drop a post in the Recruitment forum. Armory profile linkage is a must. A gear-list could be helpful if you frequently log out while wearing a PvP or fishing ensemble. Long-winded applications aren’t necessary, but a quick, “Who I am” paragraph is always helpful.

And any rogue that can out-DPS us, we’ll pay your repair bills. Hasn’t happened yet, though. /boast&dare

Tchann is a mainstay on the World of Warcraft customer service forums and has communicated with us his her thoughts on the ban-wave. His Her writing is clear, concise, and bereft of warlock-bashing. In spite of these short-comings, we asked if we could reprint some of his her conversations with us. He She relented, and thus, please quit your yapping and pay attention as Substitute BRK Day presents: Lessons From Tchann.

“The recent banwave focused on automation within the game. There are several degrees of automation that Blizzard finds bannable, ranging from delay mechanisms (/in) to third-party programmed gameplay (Glider). All of these are at the very least potentially actionable.

“Blizzard requires that we play based on what is possible through their .lua scripting code. When they find something possible through that code that they deem inappropriate, they will change the mechanics of the game to disallow that code from working. Bans do not usually result from exploiting code that wasn’t meant to work, although sometimes they might slap people with a warning - something I expect to see with the /in command, since Blues have cautioned us against using it.

“The next step up from that contains the special keyboards and keypress software. The keyboards themselves are perfectly okay to use, as is the software that makes them work. What can get a user actioned is when they use the macro software to include delays, since that bypasses Blizzard’s .lua code in order to automatically perform an extra action. The same goes for the keypress software in which you constantly hold down one key to spam a single action. This is the level of automation that Blizzard begins banning at.

“Then comes the botting programs. There are multiple kinds, not just Glider, and this latest banwave occurred after Blizzard included new Warden code to detect Glider in patch 2.4.2. Here is where things can get really tricky. Some botting programs will continually run in the background of the system, even if they are not currently being used, and Warden will pick up on that.

“There has been a slew of posts on the Customer Service Forum from players pleading innocence to have their accounts restored. As some of the threads progressed, the posters began to confess what might have gotten them banned - either they were sudden realizations of mistakes made, or admissions of guilt.

“Some of the things we’ve seen so far include:

- usage of keypress software
- afk botting
- downloading botting software out of curiosity for the code
- playing on a computer that has botting software installed
- botting
- hacked accounts

“It is also possible that some software out there is returning a false positive for a botting program. As with the Cedega issue, it took players discussing the problem en masse with Blizzard and Cedega to spur a resolution, one which culminated in overturnings of bans and an official apology. Nothing of that sort has yet to crop up, but as I said, it is possible.

“In the end, there is absolutely nothing to be lost by contesting the ban. If the player has an idea of what might have gone wrong - hacking, using the computer of someone who bots - then that is a firm standing ground to start from when contacting Account Administration.

“The one thing that should be kept in mind when contesting a ban is that your hands *must* be clean. A closer look at your account can bring things to light that may be unrelated but still actionable. But if someone is truly innocent, the odds are definitely in their favor. Blizzard does not want to drive away honest players, but they do take a hard stance on the activities they deem illegal, and the banwaves represent that.

“Your guildmate mentions having called Billing. Billing and Customer Service are unable to aid with overturning bans. That all rests with Account Administration, which is only reachable through email. Since the banwave hit, AA is going to be flooded with emails, so it will take a while to receive a response. Repeatedly emailing them is unnecessary - just one that calmly (that part is crucial) explains the argument against the account action. And then, unfortunately, patience is required.

“Please let me know if there’s anything I can explain further, or if I did not state something clearly, Tchann”

So by now you’ve all probably read about what happened to a guidie of ours, yes? He got slammed with the Blizz Ban Hammer for “cheating*”, getting caught in the same net as the Glider-folks. Our erstwhile, miniature, whirling dirvishette of awesomeness has pretty much covered the feelings of our guild, so we’re not going to repeat them here.

Succinctly, Lamaa is not a cheater*. Lama is Good People. Unfortunately, we think Lamaa cheated*.

“What’s the deal with the asterisks, BRK?”

The deal with the asterisks is: we’re very unsure of what Blizzard considers cheating*, we think the vast majority of warcraft-players don’t know what Blizzard considers cheating*, and we’re quite positive that Blizzard isn’t exactly forthcoming about what cheating* is.

“Cheating is doing stuff that Blizzard says you cannot do! Dummy!”

OK, what can’t you do?

“Well, everything that’s in the user’s agreement.”

Yes, and what are those things.

“You mean, like a list?”

Yes please, a list of all the stuff that’ll get you banned.

“Um… gold selling?”

Yup, that’s one.

“And… account selling.”

Two.

“Naughty named-toons?”

Not normally a bannable offense, but it could be, if Blizzard so chose, yes.

“Botting!”

Four, very good. And where in the user’s agreement do you see any of that stuff?

“Um… is it there?”

You bet it is. Have you ever read the user’s agreement? Probably not, right? Well, let’s dig right into the most juicy parts, shall we?
There ya go. Do not attempt to host the game yourself. Do not interfere with your client or the server’s communications. Don’t mess with the game files. Don’t mess with their servers, foshizzle.

Do not use any software designed to modify the WoW experience, or else.

Or else?

Yeah, or else; Ban Hammer-time.

And how does Blizzard know what you’re doing? Do they put cameras in your dorm room? Do they hire spies to infiltrate your home?

Nope. They bot you.

Their game, their rules, they’re watching you. Don’t like it, don’t play.

And not only are they watching what you’re doing, they’re reading and recording what you say.

So there ya go. Hope those private-chat conversations of yours that Blizzard has recorded don’t get subpoenaed by your ex-WoW-widow.

Now what is it that Lamaa did that was fell into the ban hammer-able category of, “…third-party software designed to interfere with the World of Warcraft experience”? Was Lamaa a Glider? Pfft, no. Was he a spammer, a leecher, a doofus, a power-leveler? No on all counts.

He did, however, own a G15 keyboard. And what comes with the G15 keyboard? Software. And what does that software do? It allows the user to make use of its macro keys to send in-game commands in much the same way as an in-game macro, but without having to write an in-game macro.

Was Lamaa writing G15-botting macros?! No, he wasn’t. He didn’t even use those keys.

But he did had the G15 software installed, and Blizzard knows the G15 software has been used to interfere with the World of Warcraft experience previously.

Our opinion: Blizzard banned Lamaa for owning a G15 keyboard and following its directions to install the keyboard’s software, regardless if he actually used the keyboard software’s ability to cheat*.

Is that right?! We sure don’t think so! According to Blizzard, just having that software on one’s computer is cheating*. Plug in the keyboard, the software and libraries load, and now you’re running illegally.

Is it within the scope of the user’s agreement that they can ban him for this? They most certainly think it is.

But is it Right.

Of course it isn’t right; it’s totally Wrong!

Look Blizzard, if you don’t want people to use the G15 software - we’ve noticed that the keyboard itself is perfectly fine - how about writing a little code that will disable the G15’s software and giving the user a little pop-up window telling them what’s going on.

“Hey guy, your G15 is spiffy, but people have abused the software it comes with in violation of the EULA. You want to use your G15, go for it, but we’re going to kill the G15 software right now, capice? Press OK to continue or Cancel to exit the game.”

Lamaa did not cheat* and he’s not a cheater*. However, he was using software that Blizzard considered cheating*. It sucks and blows and Blizzard should be ASHAMED at how it’s treating it customers! Nuking the Gliders is one thing, f-ing with people who didn’t have a clue they had inadvertently installed cheating* software is ignorant and rude.

What other software is out there that Blizzard could consider cheating*? A C++ compiler? A bandwidth monitor? Video-conferencing apps? Nobody has a clue, and Blizzard, to our knowledge, does not have a list of unapproved applications and utilities.

Ignorance of the law is no excuse, but Blizz, we need to see the laws before we can comply with them. A non-inclusive list of stuff we shouldn’t have running would’ve saved Lamaa, a bunch of other people, and your company’s reputation, a lot of flak.

Do we want Lamaa back in our guild? D@mn right we do. Are we only writing this screed because the massive ban hammer episode affected us personally? Most certainly. We’d much rather be discussing what the WotLK alpha has shown for us hunters and our pets.

But for us, this is a Big Deal and, since it’s Our Blog, we’re going to write about it. We’re probably not going to help Lamaa at all, but we certainly hope someone at Blizzard gets their head out and fixes this situation.

Blizzard, Warcraft is a game, but the people in it are not.

IMPORTANT EDIT: If it turns out the G15 sofware is not causing the ban, well then something else is amiss and we haven’t a clue what it is. And neither does Lamaa. And that stinks, too.

Our guild, Aetherial Circle, is lookin’ fer some people. Again. We need the roughest toughest, rootenist, tootenist, doggone shootenist hombres, east, west, north AND south of the Pecos.

Resto druid or shaman. Keep our raid alive and you’ll get all the phat loot you want.

A mage. Yes, you heard us, we need a raiding mage. Now there are lots of mages out there, so we’re going to be really picky about this person. Lots of DPS but able to control their aggro. Aggro Management, squishies, that’s the key to raiding as a mage, and you’d better be able to handle yours.

No, not handle *yours*, you pervert.

Typical AC raiding stuff applies. We raid Wednesday, Sunday and Monday, 8pm EDT to 11pm, sometimes 11:30pm. We use the SWAPS DKP system. You must be fully Tier 4 or equivalent geared. Some experience in SSC and TK would be nice but not mandatory. Pre-server-transfer interview will be followed by a heroic instance run, at which point a guild-invite will be issued, assuming no problems are unearthed.

Aetherial Circle is a casual raiding guild. We will not be raiding more than three times per week. We do not do guild-organized PvP. If you want to experience SSC/TK/MH and beyond, meet our class and spec requirements, are willing to transfer to Drenden, and think you can deal with the nuts in our guild, send an email to recruitment@aetherialcircle.com, or bigredkitty@gmail.com.

Include your armory link, a gear list - in case we catch you in farming gear, etc. - and a brief biography of your raiding experience.

Holy Crud, the Running of Da Bulls for Sharvan is tomorrow!! We expect you there, ya know. /glare

You have donated $127 for Sharvan, much gracias. If you haven’t contributed a dollar, please consider doing so. We get 6000 readers per day; we’d love to hit $500 by race time.

The BRK Non-WoW Thought of the Day: If you want us to order lunch from your restaurant, keep your best selling items in stock. Telling us every week that you’re out of tostones makes us order from the Chinese restaurant next door, and they give us free eggrolls. Free, foshizzle!

“Dear BRK, so WTF, where’s _________? Angry readers everywhere want to know. Your friends, the Angry Readers.”

OK, so you see… there was this thing we had to do, it was kinda important. Sort of. But the result was that we didn’t finish our movie, our macro post, or the shot-rotation thingy at Dr. Boom. Saturday we have to do some yard work, so that’s going to pie our type as well.

If someone volunteers to prune our Washingtonians, we could do some warcraft-theorycrafting like we all know you want us to do. Just admit it; you won’t trim our trees because you’re selfish. Pathetic.

Ratshag the Spriest is level 70. We can’t wait to Misdirect something in Karazhan onto him.

Speaking of abusing Misdirect, it’s time for a “BRK Honks It Up Again!” story!

One of our jobs in the Al’ar fight is to drag the adds off of the platforms and over to the bear-tank. We have the bear-tank as our Focus and we use our Misdirection Macro to help us. This isn’t a hard thing to set up, not at all. Click on the bear-tank, click our Set Focus Macro, and off we go.

We wipe on our first try, not quite sure what happened. While the raid recovers and rebuffs, our enhancement shaman types in raid-chat,

“Please please PLEASE don’t Misdirect on me anymore.”

Who the h3ll is MD’ing on an enhancement shaman? That’s just stupid, our hunters know better than that… and we look at our Focus. Bingo. We set the shaman as our Focus, not the bear-tank, resulting in us dragging an exploding fire-bird onto a melee shaman.

/epic fail

The newly acquired Egotistical Priest and her buddies were four-manning regular MrT. Um, Ego, we have thirty-eight 70s on right now, why don’t you say in gchat, “LF1M DPS reg MrT”? She gave us some silly excuse involving a zoo of tea bags and how states that are wider than they are tall should be excommunicated. We wisely ignored all that and threw a Tier 5-geared druid in their run. Ego completed MrT, the druid got a phoenix hatchling, and we’re a hero. /hero

Another hunter in our guild got the ZA hunter helm. You know the one with the big eye? We’re not sure if he should be happy or sad. Frankly, ZA helms are a total abomination, a practical joke played by Blizzard on their paying customers.

BRK Email Etiquette. If you’re asking us a question about your gear or talent points, including an armory link is mandatory. If you’re not asking us about your gear or talent points, you don’t have to include an armory link. Y’all are going silly with the “Just wanted to say Hi, here’s our armory link like you asked for” emails.

Aetherial Circle is no longer recruiting. We got what we needed and a little extra. Thank you for considering us, we really do appreciate the enthusiasm. Next time we have an opening, we may have to make Aetherial Circle Idol and demand application videos…

/blink

Wow, that’s a really good idea, isn’t it. We may have to guild-kick someone just to implement this.

Hi, my name is TJ and sometimes I’m too busy doing my real job to put in appropriate links. I also haven’t been bribed in a while.

At has been brought to our attention that our sidebar links have some issues. Well it seems that that analysis is quite correct. For example, The Egotistical Priest has moved her place to a custom domain, and we just this morning corrected it. We’ll address the rest of those linkies as quickly as possible.

You know, if you happen to stumble over to her little web-abode, be sure to say hello and ask, “What’s new?”

Perhaps, just maybe, if you’re mannered and proper, she’ll even tell you what guild she’s in now.