Blizzard Considering Mandatory Authenticators

I haven't posted anything SCII related for a long time. Time to lose my re-developing virginity.

http://www.worldofraids.com/news/1061.html

Let the discussion begin.
I'll start us off. Please you amateur idiots learn how to surf the internet without getting infected with trojan keylogger every second week!

 

link not workin

 

From the original source
http://www.wow.com/2010/01/08/blizzard-giving-serious-consideration-to-mandatory-authenticator/#continued

"WoW.com has learned through trusted sources close to the situation that Blizzard is giving serious consideration to making authenticators mandatory on all accounts. According to our sources, while this policy has not been implemented yet and the details are not finalized, it is a virtually forgone conclusion that it will happen. "

"We do not know if authenticators will be mandatory on just WoW accounts or on any Battle.net account."

 

It's ok. People are too stupid to protect themselves. And their stupidity causes negative things to the game like account selling, scamming, gold farming with hacks, etc.

 

Sounds good to me for WoW. As long as they come with the box retail, of course or are very, very cheap.. I don't want to be forced to spend too much money on something I'm not that worried about happening.

As for it be required on all Battle.net accounts, that's just not all that likely and has no logic behind it. If a WoW account gets hacked that person could potentially permanently lose weeks, months, or years of work as well as any items they might've bought in addition to them losing their paid time. Also, Blizzard, from a business perspective, needs to prevent this from happening because there's a high chance that that person will quit WoW thus Blizzard losing out on money.

In Diablo 2 and StarCraft 2, however, you pretty much just lose your record and characters/items. No biggy. It sucks but not enough to require authenticators. That would put a strain on both the customer and the Blizzard servers. I doubt Blizzard is going to require something that unnecessary if it's going to bog down the service.

I'd say Blizzard's been having a lot of problems with the hacking of WoW accounts so they're taking the next step in fighting against it. Again, the other games aren't that necessary. No one really cares about going through the trouble of hacking a state of the art system or sending out keyloggers just to get someone's record or characters/items.

 

You seem to not understand the issue: Diablo, stacraft and WoW are all under the same battle.net account and password. Unless they modify the system mandatory authenticators would have to apply to all people who will play any game using the new battle.net.

 

You seem to not understand the issue: the authenticator provides a randomized password when you press a button. This password allows you to log-in once. All Blizzard has to do is make logging into StarCraft or Diablo not require this password and to not require the password to change or use anything on the Battle.net website except for WoW specific features. So, the fact that they're on the same service is highly irrelevant.

This is another example of how rabid fans can jump to conclusions and get worked up over nothing. The community (not anyone in particular) needs to learn to calmly examine the facts before we rush to the conclusion that Blizzard is a money grubbing company that will put the customer through any inconvenience without a second thought.

For any other questions you have visit:

http://us.blizzard.com/support/article.xml?locale=en_US&articleId=24660

 

Actually I see it differently. It depends on how the games log into battle.net. Well there are 2 ways of it being done.

1. The game itself goes into battle.net and then asks for your password. In that case it'd be your SC2 or WoW or whatever loging into battle.net. And in that case you could have an authenticator just for WoW and not SC 2 or D3.

2. You log into a general battle.net portal (through the game though) and then once logged in it checks for which game you are playing. Because it only knows what game you are playing after you have logged (cause it's the same general portal you log into no matter what Blizzard game you play) in then it'd be the same no matter what game you are playing. And in that case you'd need a authenticator for every blizzard game.

Well since Blizzard consolidated all the seperate accounts into one large battle.net account recently I think number 2 is the more likely option. And it makes sense. You just well your accont what games you have and when you log in it can scan for the game you have and send you to the right part of battle.net. And yes sure there is no monthly fee for SC2 or D3 but I'm sure if any of those parts of your battle.net account were hacked and you lost a lot of game play time, people would be mad and complain. So I think for the authenticators I think it's best to have them for all Blizzard games ro not at all.

 

@DeckardLee: Please read what I said properly before you call me rabid.

edit:

This crossed the line.

 

@Higgs Boson: Please read what I said properly before you assume I called you rabid.

I didn't. In fact, I don't believe you've even made clear what your opinion is on this so how could I insult you if I don't know what your stance is? This in conclusions with a whole bunch of statements in my post having absolutely nothing to do with you or anyone else in this topic should give you a hint that I'm addressing a larger audience.

As for the quote of yours, I was addressing that to the community (I was very clear on this) as a whole which seems be on that trend. I stand by this statement and I should think you would agree with me now that you know I was not aiming that at you or anyone else here.


@the8thark: If your account is hacked, you really only use your record. You can still quickly get back to your previous ranking if you play decently because it'll match you with similarly skilled players. Diablo 3 is different but I see no reason why an authenticator should be required for either. I could see why Blizzard would want to require them for all WoW accounts, however, because more is lost and it actually costs THEM money when you give up on the game.

 

I see your point. But there will be achievements lost with SC 2 not just B.net ladder rankings. Well that depends if the achievements are on your B.net account esclusively of if they are kept locally on your machine too. And some of those achievements could take ages to do. That said I agree Blizzard need to protect their sources of revenue more. And that is WoW accounts and not really the other 2 games as much.

 

Theres no gold in SC2 to sell, thus not much incentive for someone to try to hack it in the first place.
The reason accounts in wow get hacked is to sell everything on them and transfer all the gold to another character that is used by gold sellers.

I don't think many people will want to spend real money on a win lose record + achievements. And if they did, they'd probably just go to ebay not some "Buy top SC2 accounts here" website.

Just because all the games will use the same bnet account doesn't mean they will all have to be authenticator linked. The only thing that makes me wonder if blizz would do that is the SC themed authenticators. Those could just be for fun tho, and I think were only around in blizz con swag bags.