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I like MMOs.

I've played World of Warcraft, The Matrix Online, Guild Wars, Dungeon Runner, City of Heroes, City of Villains, and EVE Online.

Some are better than others. WoW has arguably the strongest base, but CoH/V gives you great control over customizing your character. GuildWars is subscriptionless and generally good; Dungeon Runner is subscriptionless and mediocre-at-best. EVE Online is a very cool idea, but comes of as dull and confusing. In fact, the only reason I've played EVE at all is because I got a free trial of it. After two days, I still don't know what I'm supposed to do or how to improve my character, so the odds of me *paying* for the game are slim.

The point is, though, offering a free trial is probably the best thing an MMO can do right now. "The first taste is free," and if your game can deliver then they'll come back for more. That's part of the trouble I'm having right now, or rather, that's the problem I wish I was having.

Tabula Rasa is out. It's a new MMO, big whup, but instead of being another Fantasy game (as it seems most MMOs are), they're taking a Sci-Fi track. That's nothing new, The Matrix Online and EVE Online are both Sci-Fi, but not being "another fantasy game" is at least a step in the right direction. In my opinion, Matrix was half-cocked and EVE is not-even but still, two points for effort. Tabula Rasa is even supposed to play less like a standard 3rd-person MMO and more like a 1st-person shooter -- hitting your target is still based on stats and die-rolls, but the look and feel (I'm told) is FPS. That's a good mark, too.

The trouble is, I can't seem to find a free trial to the game. Which is a HUGE obstacle to even giving the game a shot. To buy the software is $50 right now, and then to get a month's subscription is $15 additional. I'm unwilling to pay $65 on a game sight-unseen when there are other quasi-similar games that I already have a feel for. If it was, say, $20+$15, or maybe even $25+$15, then I might be willing to give it a shot, but $65 is just outrageous, *especially* when I have no idea what the game is actually *like*. If I'd paid $65 to get EVE Online I'd be pissed.

So, I'm stuck. I'd like to give Tabula Rasa a shot, I think it looks like good stuff, but I thought the same of EVE before I played it. I'm not saying that Tabula Rasa and any other MMO that tried to break onto the scene without a free trial is going to fail, per se, but I am saying it's unlikely that I'll be playing.

That being said, I'm going to hop onto CoH/V.

Edit: Apparently the $50 buy-in includes a month of playtime. That's still $35+$15, which at least brings it down to an almost-reasonable level. I still have my reservations.

Tonight was definitely one of the best nights of my life. It was just great.

Friday nights are Draft nights at the Game Habitat (the game shop I'm always referring to). We usually get a mid- to large-sized draw of players, and it's a nice time, usually whittling down to The Usuals by the end of the night. Saturdays are Constructed tournaments, which usually draws significantly fewer players -- almost always just The Usuals, and the games run a bit timelier because we're all playing decks we've personally tuned to the event. I like these a little bit better, partly because I feel more comfortable with my weapon of choice, and partly because there's less riffraff (and, as noted, I'm kind of an elitist). It's just the regular guys; we all know each other and we all kick around for a few hours with our shared hobby.

Tonight after the tournament (Haven beat Rob in the finals; I was running an experimental B/W deck dubbed "Save the Pandas" by it's original creator), a group of us went around the corner to Denny's. We ate some food, drank some coffee, chatted a lot about MtG, The Game Habitat, Judging, problem players, everything. We also played a cool little card game called Gloom, which I very much want to get now; it's loads of fun. Haven, Brent, Chris and I played a couple rounds of it.

After all that I drove Haven, Brent, and Chris to their respective homes. We got to hear about when Brent got beat up by a swan, and the strange wordplay games Haven and his siblings (Lyric, Cheer, and Eden; their parents were hippies) play. Then Brent asked what the band was that I was playing -- ThouShaltNot, which I admitted was Goth music. And apparently both Brent and Haven like Goth music (in retrospect, I think the large-gage earrings Brent has should have tipped me off), and Brent asked if I'd heard of VNV Nation -- if you're keeping score at home, VNV Nation is one of my three favorite bands! So he asked if I know Apoptygma Berzerk and was surprised when I said I did -- no one knows Apoptygma Berzerk, and he thought he was showing off.

So we got into this whole thing about my 'other life' as a Goth, and I told them how Leslie says "deep down inside I have black little heart that bleeds mascara." We got into talking about Goth clubs, anime conventions, leather pants, and randomly making out with Mint.

At one point Haven said, "It makes sense now: it only sounds like giggling, it's really the laughter of the damned!" We all laughed a lot. I laughed myself to tears -- which was bad, as I was driving at the time. My sides *still* hurt, I laughed so much.

So the three of us have decided we seriously need to hang out more, outside of weekly MtG events and stuff. They both already have my email (JackOfAllGeeks) and apparently they both envy me for it -- "We didn't I think of that," Brent said.

A very awesome night.

So, a friend of mine recently got a message from LiveJournal telling her that her password was weak and that she should change it. Like so many users, she's was confused, because surely there was no way that anyone could guess her password. Someone else commented that they got the same, and their password was really hard to guess, too.

The thing is, yes, 'wubbliewoo' may be very hard for a human to guess, but we're not concerned with people sitting at the login screen trying to guess your password themselves. The problem is that a computer program may be trying to crack your password, in which case 'wubbliewoo' is trivial.

Special attacks aside, a computer program can do a Brute Force attack, where it tries all possible combinations of characters based on the alphabet in use and the length of the password. It tries 'a' then 'b' then 'c' moving onto 'aa' and 'ab' and 'ac' into 'ba', 'bb', 'bc' until it's trying 'hyttj' and 'hyttk' and so on. It tries everything, and when it finds a match, it has your password.

Brute Force will find your password, guaranteed. But it's a relatively slow process, if you make your password sufficiently difficult to guess 'for a computer.' This means a long password made of characters from a large alphabet. If you have only lower case letters in your password, you have an alphabet of 26 characters. If your password is then 4 characters long, there are 26^4 possible strings it could be, from 'aaaa' through 'zzzz'. That's nearly 500,000 strings, but we're talking about a machine that can make hundreds of thousands of guesses in a second. if you add a capitol letter to your password (even one capitol is enough to make the program have to try harder) then your alphabet is 52 characters, and 52^4 is a lot bigger than 26^4. Generally speaking, a strong password is considered to be at least 8 characters in length, using three of the four types of characters (upper case, lower case, numbers, and symbols). This puts you in the range of 92^8 or so, which will take a computer 6 to 12 months to break -- and presumably you'll have changed it by then. These policies about password make-up and duration aren't made to make your life difficult -- I've personally used a program that could crack a 52^8 password in under 5 hours, max.

The math in all of this is fascinating, but I'm saving you all from most of it.

"But how will I remember it?" My friend asks. Well, if you have a weak password, it's not hard to do minor changes (as far as a human's concerned) that will make it significantly harder for a computer to guess. The password 'foobar' is not the same as 'Foob@r', and just those two changes bump it from a 26^6 password to a 92^6 password. Additionally, though they say "don't write your password down," as long as you aren't concerned about someone in your immediate vicinity cracking your account, and you take precautions to keep it mostly-hidden from visitors, there's no reason not to. it's a bad idea for a manager to write down his password at work and leave it on his desk, but an LJ password at home is a significantly different situation.

DO NOT post your password online, anywhere. Seriously. if something's online, it can be found, period. The internet is so complex, and the 'rules' can be gotten around so simply by someone who knows what they're doing, that it's just a supremely bad idea. I'd advise stenciling your password to the side of you monitor before posting it online; much, much safer.

Caveat: OK, I really don't like making people paranoid, so I thought I'd add this in here. Yes, the internet is a dangerous place. if it's on here, it can be found. And yeah, if someone wants to crack your password badly enough, they will. But that brings us to the biggest protection anyone has on the internet: you're simply not important enough. And I don't mean that personally; in general, none of us are that important. If someone got my Bank info, he might be able to get, I don't know, a couple hundred dollars. If they hijacked my LJ, they could probably make me look pretty bad socially. But with the effort needed for either, the pay off just isn't that big. Now, someone like TheFerret, who's so well known her gets a mention in blog entries totally unrelated to him by people who don't even read his stuff -- he might want to be particularly careful about his security. The point is, you aren't important enough to put a lot of effort into, but if you have a weak password, it's not a lot of effort. No one's going to run a program for three months to hijack your account (unless you're the aforementioned TheFerret, maybe), but if they just have to run it for 5.2 seconds, it's trivial. The point is to make the payoff not worth the effort.

Computer Geek


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