It was a 7.1 gig patch, but I did managed to get into Flying Lab’s Pirates of the Burning Sea last night, and spent a little more time with it tonight. Just went through the tutorial, did some of the Yuletide quests, joined a “society” (guild) named La Fédération, and wandered around the starting town. Veteran players were being helpful over the nationwide chat and the server was hopping. One server for North America, one for the EU, and a test server. I haven’t played PotBS for a couple of years, but I was very much impressed by their improvements to the land game. The NPCs sing, dance, and make the town very much a lively place to stroll – see the video at the end.

There’s a bit of rough sailing today, though; read all about it after the break.

To play World of Warcraft is to be hacked. I found out recently that my account had been used to spam gold sellers over a bunch of servers, and I never give out my password to ANYONE. AND I have an authenticator! You just can’t win. Some of the best minds with some of the best computers in the entire world devote all their time and energy to hacking WoW.

I’d like to say I’m shocked and surprised that this kind of stuff goes on in EVE Online, but seriously, EVE is all about the criminal underground. I haven’t checked lately, but I’d be willing to bet some ISK that there’s skills you can train to hack more efficiently. Toldain, with whom I shared one corp for a few weeks and another corp for about an hour, recently got hacked to the tune of THREE BILLION ISK. There was a time that would have been big news, and the thief would be bragging about it everywhere. Now, it’s just something that happens so often that CCP’s customer service doesn’t even blink an eye. Trying to sell Toldain’s character on the EVE forums, though – that was a nice touch.

DragonChaser Pete recently had his Lord of the Rings Online account banned for suspected hacking; not on his part, of course. Turbine managed to catch the hackers before any harm had been done, thankfully, but there’s a lesson in Toldain and Pete’s troubles: Go to your games and change the passwords to them all, right now. Because if you ever used your game password as the password for any other website, odds are you’re going to be hacked. No authenticator will save you if they really want to get in.

When you’re at a party, do you snipe from the edges of the conversation with hurtful remarks, or do you draw all the attention to yourself? Tesh draws the parallels between WoW groups and holiday gatherings in his treatise on Social Tanking.

You’ll never find someone as militant about smoking as an ex-smoker. And you’ll never find anyone quite as down on World of Warcraft as an ex-WoW junkie. As Cataclysm’s launch draws near (6 DAYS OMG!), Syncaine’s tirades against the world’s most popular game of all time and forever continue with a treatise on why WoW (and games like WoW) can never possibly do PvP better than EVE Online.

He has a point. The Ancient Gaming Noob wrote, just today, that “we get called griefers for daring to engage in PVP on a PVP server.”

Oh, wow – Massively’s Game Archaeologist is looking back at RuneScape! I remember playing that game way back before it looked so nice. Can a return to Nexus: Kingdom of the Wind be far behind?

And lastly, via Cyanbane, word is NASA is going to make an announcement of an astrobiological discovery that will affect the search for extraterrestrial life. So, I guess we’re finally going to meet the aliens that landed here fifty years ago?