US accounts are now able to access the beta registration from https://www.worldofwarcraft.com/account/beta-opt-in.html and opt-in for the Wrath of the Lich King beta. EU accounts saw this feature implemented a short time ago. It looks like the leak from the German Community Manager Gnorog is holding up to be true.

Remember that when you opt in, you are not guaranteed a spot, and you will likely not get an email inviting you to the beta right away. Instead your name will go into a pool of players who will then be chosen for the beta. That's why they call it opting in.

This is a good time to remain vigilant about email scams and other malicious programs that might try to get your user name, password, and other account information. Never share these with anyone other than official worldofwarcraft.com websites.

If the beta invites do start going out soon, expect us at WoW Insider to let our friends and families know what's really important this holiday weekend: bringing everyone late breaking WotLK news, all while enjoying their finely cooked BBQ food. I'll take two burgers to go with jalapeno cheese and a Corona.

The problem with keyloggers and other methods of account theft has been well documented here at WoW Insider, and it seems like a constant problem. Even the most conscientious of players has fallen prey to it. However, at the Worldwide Invitational, Blizzard is introducing a little piece of hardware that could make those problems vanish. Say hello to the Blizzard Authenticator.

The Authenticator is a small piece of hardware that you can associate with your World of Warcraft account. Once the Authenticator is associated with the account, you will need it to log on. Every time you log on, you press a button on the Authenticator to generate a six-digit code that you must input to log on. Since only you know the code, and it's generated apart from your computer at the time you're ready to log on, it will be safe from trojans, keyloggers, and other hacks.

The Authenticator will be available at the WWI to start, then eventually at the Blizzard Store. The starting price being quoted by Blizzard is $6.50 -- a small price to pay for safety from a ransacked bank and naked server transferred characters, for many.

Is this the big announcement though? It's possible, of course, but we like to think there's more in store at the WWI. Stay tuned here, and we'll let you know.

Playtime credits: they're not just for European realms anymore! Blizzard must have been reading the comment thread for my post on the Bloodlust battlegroup's problems yesterday because, clearly in direct response to the demands of commenters Todd and oniwah, they are issuing a one-day credit to the accounts of anyone with characters on the affected realms.

Once more, those realms are: Aman'Thul, Barthilas, Blackrock, Caelestrasz, Dath'Remar, Dreadmaul, Frostmourne, Frostwolf, Khaz'goroth, Kil'Jaeden, Kilrogg, Nagrand, Ner'zhul, Proudmoore, Sen'Jin, Silver Hand, Thaurissan, Tichondrius, and Vek'nilash. So if you've got a character on one of those servers, perhaps $0.50 worth of playtime will help make up for your troubles. Did they ever fix the latency/disconnect issues, by the way?

Hackers are getting more and more brazen lately, hiding various trojans and keyloggers not only in random forum links, but in ad banners and even in electronic devices. Even common sense avoidance of suspicious links and websites doesn't always seem to work anymore. Luckily, there are other tools you can use, such as the Noscript extension for the Firefox browser. Lifehacker reported on a new one yesterday as well: Anti Keylogger Shield for Windows.

This freeware program purports to work not by blocking installation of keyloggers, but by preventing them from logging your keys once installed. Lifehacker tested it by loading a keylogger and reported that it seemed to work, at least in that case, as the keylogger's log file was completely empty.

Of course, you probably shouldn't just install this program and go off clicking strange links willy nilly, but it does look like it could be one more line of defense in the ever escalating battle to protect your computer and your account from those who would steal it. Plus, it's free, so that's even better.

[Thanks for the forward, DrDiesel!]

The worst part of the keylogging episode was that my Shaman was transferred from a PvP to PvE server. After about a week in limbo my beloved Tauren was returned to her proper place. I was extremely relieved. Unfortunately that's the only thing on my account that Blizzard was kind enough to restore. They refused to return any of my gear or gold and did nothing about the items ninjaed from the guild bank. I appealed their decision with several emails. Those appeals were ubiquitously denied despite logical arguments and heart-filled plights. I thought it was all over, for better or for worse.

I got more bad news in my email box the other day:

Many of our readers will be happy to know that several people are reporting that the character transfer to the PTR is up and running. Our thanks to WoW Insider reader Jason for pointing this out to us.

You can get on the PTR and learn to love patch 2.4 by heading over to the Account Management page on the main World of Warcraft site. When there, click on the "Test Realm Character Copy" button, and then on "Copy a Character". After you've asked Blizzard to copy your character over, come back and check about every hour to see if they've done it yet. Even though the wait time says four days, in my experience it has been substantially less.

One last tip: if the button comes up gray, just hit refresh a few times.

Good luck!

Updated 1:15 p.m. EST: Screams of frustration can be heard around Azeroth as Blizzard plays dirty tricks with their character copy process. People are now having mixed results in getting their characters copied across. It might be that the queue is full again.

My first post on WoW Insider was about a friend of mine being hacked, this time it's about me. I woke yesterday and tried to copy a character over to the public test realm as I've been doing often lately. I got a password error. I tried to log into my account- same thing. My email had this happy little surprise for me:

Hello Amanda,

The character transfers listed below have been completed as of 2/14/2008. The character[s] listed will now appear in the new location and/or account selected and are immediately available for play!

- <character> - Level 70 Tauren Shaman - now on realm: Blade's Edge.

On Saturday night I noticed a guildie acting strangely. He kept switching between characters and wouldn't respond to tells from even his closest friends in the guild. Concerned about him, we gave him a call... on the phone, to see what was up. You guessed it, he was nowhere near his computer at the time. He went to log in and found his password was changed. Unfortunately, he had also forgotten the correct response to his secret question "What is your favorite activity?"

The hacker kept running in and out of the Shadow Labyrinth. I checked the customer service forums and found that this was common behavior among hackers. Either there is an exploit in that instance, or hackers just really enjoy hanging out with Blackheart the Inciter. I'm leaning toward the latter.

Every Monday Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership.

It's the holiday season, and for many players that means extended periods away from Azeroth as we spend more time with family and friends. If your characters are a critical part of your guild's success, you may be tempted to give another player access to your account so they can help the guild in your absence. It's a generous and noble gesture, but in the big picture it's a dangerous gift to give. I would urge everyone to be a Scrooge and keep your account info all to yourself. And this week's e-mail shows why:

What do you do as a guild leader, when you have two or three different people in your guild that have, in the past, shared accounts, and then one leaves the guild in an ugly way? Or at all?

Especially if one has guild bank access?

I know that, technically, sharing accounts is against the EULA, but among young teens it seems fairly common . . . especially in raiding guilds, where if a raid is short a priest, JohnnyX may have access to another guildies' account so he can bring the AFK player's priest on.

What do you do if one leaves? The other two accounts are mostly played by the owners . . . but if the toon comes online, but the player isn't on a voice chat application, how do you know it is REALLY the owner, and not the player that left? Worse yet, what if the player had been booted?

Is it right to remove other people from a guild because they have shared their account with someone else?

I'm sure you've read before about watching out for all sorts of scams -- after all, your World of Warcraft account information is valuable stuff, and plenty of thieves out there would be happy to get their hands on it. The latest technique of account theft that I've noticed is all over YouTube, in many videos offering to teach you how to hack World of Warcraft accounts for fun and profit. All of these videos suggest that Blizzard has some sort of account retrieval service that can be accessed by e-mailing a random address (often at Gmail or Hotmail) with your account name and password as well as the name of the account you wish to access. Then, the videos claim, all you have to do is wait for Blizzard to mail you the password of the target account!

Of course, the entire thing is a scam. The people posting these videos just want to take your password and run. So be warned, everyone -- don't fall pray to greed, and don't give your password out to anyone, regardless of what they might promise you in return.

I've heard of plenty of reports of scammers trying to get your account information with e-mails claiming to be from Blizzard, but after having one land in my Around Azeroth mailbox, I thought I'd share it with you. And while we're at it, we can talk about how you can tell that an e-mail came from Blizzard or not.

First off -- this didn't come to my primary e-mail address. Blizzard doesn't know me as "aroundazeroth@gmail.com" so any mail going there has to be bogus. And secondly, it's coming from Blizzard Europe, while I don't have a European account. However, if this had landed in my primary mailbox, and substituted US contact information for EU contact information, I'd have to take it seriously -- after all, it appears to have been sent from blizzard.com and it sounds awfully ominous. They suspect me of trying to sell my account and they're going to suspend it unless I verify it! Yikes!

However, here's the big catch: after going through all of their ominous threats, they tell me to give them my account name and password. Nope, sorry. A Blizzard representative will never ask for your account name and password -- so don't give it out to anyone claiming to be with Blizzard, because that's all the information they need to take over your account. And if you get a mail like this that you're just not sure about -- don't give them any information, but confirm its authenticity with Blizzard, first. Get in touch with their billing support team by phone or e-mail!

For those of you curious as to what one of these scams looks like, the full text of the e-mail is after the jump.

Tobold, MMO blogger-at-large, has posted that he has cancelled his World of Warcraft account.

Sign of the times or outraged for the wrong reason? That's for you to decide-- Tobold says his guild has moved on to Serpentshrine, and since he's not attuned yet, he probably never will be, which means there's no point to moving on. Apparently no one has told him about Vashj's attunement scrolls, which will let a guild that beats Vashj attune whoever they want to SSC. Of course, he'd have to wait until his guild actually beats Vashj, but hope is not lost yet.

Then again, maybe Tobold's just going with the flow. If you ask me, leaving because your guild has moved on is a terrible reason to leave-- not only is there lots to do out there, either on your own or with the people in your guild who don't happen to be running SSC, but I do believe there is more than one guild in the game. Surely someone else would be willing to take Tobold to Karazhan, right?

Either way, it's his choice. As he says, cancelling the account sends a clear message to Blizzard that he wants things to change. And if enough people send that message (for whatever reason), then you can't but agree that they will.

Want to hit up Blizzcon but don't want to shell out for the ticket? Our contact at the World Series of Videogames sends along a note that they're sending one lucky guild to Blizzard big event in Anaheim, California. The catch? They'll be picking one lucky 3v3 team at random from all of the teams that attend their next event in Dallas, Texas on July 5-8.

Yeah, it's kind of a big hoop to jump through (especially when you can just pay $100 now to get your own ticket anyway). But then again, tickets are going fast (I got mine the other day), and if you're planning on going to the event in Dallas anyway, it's a nice bonus. Interesting that they're giving it away to a lucky 3v3 guild-- maybe they need more of them to fill out the brackets? If you're interested, register an account on the WSVG site, sign up for the event when you're logged in, and then you've actually got to show up to the event to be eligible.

We'll keep you updated on more giveaways as they come along-- WoWWiki has already given away a couple of tickets to their own contributors, and we're sure there will be a few more in different places in the days to come.

I've never canceled my World of Warcraft account, so I can't give you any first-hand experience of the process. However, I do know that Blizzard never deletes characters, so if I were going to go on vacation for a month to someplace without internet access (ha!), I could cancel my account and pick up again later without any real consequences.

But what if Blizzard deleted characters when you canceled? Over at Curmudgeon Gamer, they note that the cancellation screen seems to change depending on the reason you choose for canceling. When choosing an option for needing more time for school, family, etc, our curmudgeony friends were given the following message:

We are proud that we were able to make a sucessful [sic], enjoyable game. And as much as we'd like you to keep playing, we understand that there are certain cirumcstances [sic] which may prevent continuous game play. Currently, we have no plans to delete World of Warcraft accounts regardless of their activity history. Provided that the characters do not get deleted by the account holder, we will retain all character information on our servers indefinitely.

So you're safe for now -- but next time you try to cancel, who knows! It seems like it would be a PR disaster for Blizzard to start deleting character accounts at this point, if you cancel, they still hold the threat over you.

Apparently there is a flaw in the way windows handles animated cursors that could enable people to hack into your WoW account. Now I'm not sure why anyone would want an animated cursor in the first place, but de gustibus non est disputandum. It seems that malicious cursor sites can install arbitrary code on your computer along with the cursor, where it sometimes lies in waiting until you log in to WoW. At this point it pounces, records your login info, and sends it back to the hacking group responsible.

The good news is Microsoft already has a patch out to fix this vulnerability (released on April 3rd), so go download it (auto-update will get it) and you should be safe. One interesting factoid in the BBC article on this flaw is that the value of a WoW account is now greater than the value of a credit card, at $10 and $6 respectively. What's so useful about the average WoW account that it's worth $10 on the open market?

Update: You can find the download link for Microsoft's patch in our previous article on this vulnerability. Please download the patch if you have not already.

[via MMORPGDot]