One of the sadder parts of this job is reporting on the numerous scams that sweep across the World of Warcraft landscape. It's no secret that your WoW account is valuable to thieves -- the entire gold-selling industry is built on a foundation of hacked accounts and stolen items.

Their latest scam vehicle? Our inherent desire for sparkle ponies. Let's get two things straight off the bat:

Drama Mamas Lisa Poisso and Robin Torres are experienced gamers and real-life mamas -- and just as we don't want our precious babies to be the ones kicking and wailing on the floor of checkout lane next to the candy, neither do we want you to become known as That Guy on your server.

We have news of two new tricks hackers are currently using to steal WoW accounts. First, from Curse, comes news of a Google sponsored link that claims to lead to the popular addon manager Curse Client, but instead leads to a malware download.

Ever since the Real ID friend system was announced, players have voiced concerns about hackers and phishers exploiting this system. They're worried that hackers will move through a group of Real ID friends like a wildfire during a drought. While it is always good to have concerns about account security, sometimes paranoia is a bit too much.

If you are the leader of a guild that has a large number of people who have account security issues, you regularly get emails from Blizzard that say the following:

Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com's daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.

In any discussion concerning botting, farming, hacking, or gold-buying, someone inevitably makes the argument that Blizzard should cut out the middlemen and sell gold to players themselves. I wanted to use this article to explain why this would not necessarily be a good idea.

It has been brought to our attention that Blizzard's technical support department is currently handling a security exploit that is, in a limited capacity, circumventing authenticators. Before we get into the details, please do not panic. This does not make authenticators worthless, and it is not yet a widespread problem.