Klepsacovic Sanctioned Whining

Oh my God, am I too late to WHINE?!

Okay, good.

Today I want to whine about logging into WoW.

No, not playing the game itself, not the thought process that goes “shall I work for the betterment of humanity or play WoW … I think I’ll just play WoW for a bit and then work for the betterment of humanity” but the actual physical process of logging in.

I’m rubbish at it. Really rubbish.

It usually takes me upwards of 10 attempts.

Take my password. Well, metaphorically anyway. Don’t take my password. That would be mean. Give consideration to my password.

It is long and convoluted, it is not a standard word or a phrase, it has letters and numbers, and all the malarkey it is meant to have in order to stop my account getting hacked and some disappointed gold farmer running off with all my fish and my beloved Tier 2 shoulders.

It is a Very Strong password. Google would applaud and cheer it.

I am proud of it.

It takes actual memory power to retain it.

It is the Traveler’s Tundra Mammoth of passwords.

What I can’t do, however, is type it

Especially not when under duress – if, for example, I got dc-ed in the brief window of time after the first boss in HoR and Vent is full of my terrified guildies praying to the Internet Gods for the return of their healer before the next wave spawns.

What makes the whole situation additionally complicated is that as well as an insanely hardcore password I have an authenticator. Thus giving me NOT ONE BUT TWO opportunities to fuck up getting into WoW, and no way of telling which I’m fucking up at any given time. Yeeesh.

I am, not, for the record, actually clinically paranoid. The thing about being hacked is that it seems like such an incredible annoyance for something that’s trivially easy to avoid. And there’s something particularly unbearable about bad things that happen to you when, if you’d only got off your arse, they probably wouldn’t have happened.

Like … bikes get nicked a lot around here. I used to have the bike from my adolescence – a blue-ish-purple-ish BMX no less, with a polar bear bell left over from my very first bike, it was the height of cool, I looked awesome on it, oh yeah¹ – and it had bike lock, except it was basically a bit of string you used to tie your bike to a lamppost, like it was a terrier taking a piss. And I’d be tying my bike up and without fail I’d think “I should really get a proper decent bike lock for this” and lo and behold some weeks later my bike got nicked. This wasn’t a massive problem, the bike being basically worthless except for those with a fetish for polar bear bells but it drove me absolutely metal because it would never ever have happened – or it would have happened substantially later – had I not been a lazy bastard.

Hence the authenticator. I’m not, like, evangelical about them – I don’t think people who don’t have authenticators DESERVE to be hacked, like some people do. But I have one. So that’s that.

I don’t have a mobile phone so it’s one of the stylish plastic ones – sorry “stylish” plastic ones. And I live in perpetual fear of losing it. I have no idea what the design principle behind it was: ah yes, we’ll make it very small and black and camouflage-like to maximize the potential to totally screw someone over. I lose my authenticator, on average, about five times a night.

I suppose it doesn’t help that I play WoW on a laptop, so I’m an itinerant gamer, constantly juggling laptop, and power-cord, and headset and mouse and bloody fucking authenticator, and invariably leaving one or more of these behind (WTB MOAR ARMS PLZ). But my authenticator moves. Sometimes it’s on the table. Sometimes it’s under the bed. Sometimes it’s by the sink. Sometime it’s on the bookshelf. Sometimes it’s ON A DIFFERENT FUCKING SHELF OF THE BOOKSHELF. What’s with that?! I don’t know what evil magic makes it do this because whenever I put it down I am very careful to note where I put it, due to my hyper-awareness of losing it. Maybe it’s a mage and it’s casting blink every 6 seconds.

If Blizzard ever gets round to redesigning their authenticator, they should bloody well do something sensible this time. Like it making it about the weight and size of your average filing cabinet, with 6 ft LEDs displaying your number, and a button you have to hit with a mallet. Or maybe you could send up a flare, or something, and a goblin in a dirigible comes and writes your number across the sky. Or what about the option to have it implanted in your skin like something from a Philip K Dick novel. I’d go for that.

And yes, yes, yes, I know it’s got an “attach me to your keyring” thing going on.

But seriously.

Seriously.

Do you really think I’m going to WALK AROUND IN PUBLIC with my WORLD OF WARCRAFT AUTHENICATOR dangling off my keys like a big neon sign reading “Hello there, my name’s Tam, I’m an enormous nerd, ask me how.”

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not ashamed of playing WoW, nor of my nerdery, but there’s a difference between not being ashamed and advertising it to the world.

Picture this:

You’re on a date. It’s going really well. You’re being charming, you’re being sophisticated, you’re witty and sensitive and you’re actually listening when s/he’s talking to you, as opposed to thinking a) how to get them into bed b) what you can say next in order to make yourself look cool. It’s a WINNER! You have a good feeling about this. Your homes lie in a similar direction so you walk through the starlight streets together, connecting and fancying each other and it’s all going so well! You suggest s/he comes back to your place for coffee or a nightcap – ideally “coffee” or a “nightcap” you know what I’m saying? And, amazingly, s/he doesn’t immediately vomit into a paper bag or phone the police.

You linger on the steps of your house to give your housemates time to GET THE FUCK AWAY AND UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES ATTEMPT TO INTRODUCE THEMSELVES OR MAKE THIS PERSON PLAY ARKHAM HORROR TIL FOUR IN THE MORNING AS PER YOUR ARRANGMENT² and because, err, the moon is beautiful tonight, yeah. Sparks of desire are leaping between you. Awareness of what may or may not lie ahead (and, please, God, don’t let it be Arkham Horror) is crackling like sherbet upon your tongue. Your shoulders brush, and it’s like your own personal thunderstorm of sexual tension.

You reach for your keys … your WORLD OF WARCRAFT AUTHENICATOR jangles musically against your front door key.

You lose sight of your date in the dust cloud left by their rapid, screaming departure.

Win.

Yeah, thanks Blizzard. Stopping us getting laid since 2005.

1. irony notification [↩]
2. not that this has ever happened to me, oh no [↩]