Quick Tip: 'Fake' Blizzard E-mail Going Around (That Is Actually 'Real')... [Notification]

Although many of you may be able to recognize a "fake" or "scam" e-mail that is not from a company that it 'pretends to be', senders of these types of spam letters ('fishing' for your account information or credit card information, called "Phishing") are getting better and better at it - and it is getting harder and harder to recognize these fake e-mails for many people. However, I wished to speedily created this Quick Tip, to inform others that there is another 'fake e-mail' going around very recently - but this one may actually from Blizzard Entertainment...

Above, is an example of the 'fake e-mail' [with MOAR FLAREZ], that purports to be "from Blizzard Entertainment" - one that I just received myself - and although just seeing this e-mail may immediately scare off most recipients [which is not a 'bad thing' in regards to unknown email], this one may in fact be an actual, informative, notification from Blizzard.

Many are already asking on the Official World Of Warcraft Forums if this e-mail is 'real or not', and according to a Blizzard Representative, there may indeed be some 'house cleaning' going on, for aging accounts - to be more specific, ones that do not have either any full-version (non-Trial) retail games on them, or ones that have not been utilized for a very long period of time. One such related post, by such a representative, is below:

So, there may in fact be some very old, or very unused accounts being notified recently that their accounts may be purged soon. However, since these types of e-mails are mostly [as in 96.333% and up] NOT from Blizzard and are merely "phishing" attempts at getting your account and/or credit card information, some Tips are in order [in my opinion].

Two easy tips that I can give immediately are:

• Do NOT click on any links, images, buttons or anything else interactive within the e-mail
• Instead, close/delete the email and go directly to Blizzard.com or Battle.net, by typing in the address yourself, directly into your web browser and access/update your Account from there

By simply using the above two tips, the chances of you going to any 'fake sites' or being 'scammed' is immediately reduced to a much, much lower possibility.

Of course, other measures can be taken; such as deleting the e-mail, not opening it initially (after only seeing the Subject in your Inbox) and obtaining an account Authenticator from Blizzard for your account.

Regardless of the steps you wish you take, I wanted to quickly put this up here, as this is a very recent email distribution [and one that I received myself regarding an old Trial account I had forgotten about], in order to help others... 

Be careful out there, always investigate, if in doubt - and See You In The Game!

GTAM Minute Tutorial - Editing Textures (Repairing A Deleted Branch In Leaves) with The GIMP

Playing around with editing textures for Minecraft (Tutorials on how to do that Coming Soon!) something happened that I think others would run into - it was a pretty minor/specific thing, but I'd like to share what I did and how I fixed it, just in case anyone ever runs into this little problem.

The GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program, changed from General Image Manipulation Program) is a free editing application that is quite capable to stand up against most of the functions of Adobe's Photoshop and similar programs. Using it to edit the general Leaf texture portions of Minecraft's texture source, I accidentally selected and deleted a section of branch. Wanting to change the colour anyway, I replaced it but then thought that this might be something that could happen to other people, especially those new to graphic editing. I wanted to erase it again and record what I had done to repair the poor deleted branch and share it.

Perhaps for you it was deleted and then the file was saved, or perhaps you didn't notice it until a later step, where it was then inaccessible as a layer or similar problem. No matter what the situation, if anyone happens to run into this specific minor misfortune or even similar, it has spawned what will now become the first in a new series of videos I'd like to start, called Game Tips And More Minute Tutorials.

GTAM Minute Tutorials will be very short (60 seconds or less!) instructions showing how to do something very specific. I don't mean completing a quest or mission, I mean one thing, or at least a small number of steps, that complete one specific task. It may be editing or troubleshooting (the "And More" portion of this blog's namesake) or it may be how to jump high or shoot something in a specific game. Whatever it may be, in this time of short attention spans (who doesn't get crabby when the computer takes more than a second to do what you just told it?), all the tutorials/walkthroughs will be less than one minute. Really. Guaranteed! Not really.

In this tutorial, I show how to easily replace a deleted branch in a photo of leaves. That is something pretty specific; but the concepts presented, such as shading, blending and some general GIMP usage can be applied to many other situations and projects as well:

It is played back at 4x speed and states the steps being taken and basic concepts behind them. Being very specific in nature, not a lot of extra information is given, but this video is targeted towards people already editing [Minecraft textures for instance] and familiar with programs and games such as GIMP and Minecraft.
(I would like to do a full tutorial on how to extract, edit, import and save your own textures for use in Minecraft in the future)

Recorded with: Bandicam
- 'Rectangle On A Screen', 'For Edit Premiere/Sony Vegas' Preset
- 1280x720 (720p HD), 60fps, no Audio
- compressed to 720p, 30fps, 10Mbps, h.264/AVC for smaller upload size


Check back for more Game Tips And More Minute Tutorials in the future and See you in the games!