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Battle.net Accounts Becoming Mandatory For WoW
An anonymous reader tips news that Blizzard will be requiring all World of Warcraft players to use Battle.net accounts to log into the game starting on November 11th. After that time, players who don't switch will be unable to play the game. Some time after the transition is complete, players will be able to "participate in cross-realm chat in World of Warcraft, create real-life friends lists, and communicate across different games." More details on the new Battle.net and what it will do are available in our Blizzcon wrap-up and interviews from August. Naturally, the idea that the new Battle.net is getting closer to deployment has sparked speculation that the StarCraft II beta might come along soon.
It means your WoW guild leader can see that you are online playing Starcraft II instead of being in WoW during raid time. And that is 50 dkp minus.
And if one account is banned, you lose online on all your games. So smart people will make separate accounts.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
or just abide by the rules like really smart people
WoW players the world over cried out in anger over yet another small change.
This means that the SC2 beta will be released November...December at the latest. The multiplayer game is polished and ready to be played, from my personal discussed with my Blizzard friends they are simply waiting on BNet to roll out. The fact that they chose to pilot it for WoW instead of testing internally with SC2 just shows that they're confident it's in a solid state.
:D
Fuck yes, finally my beta key will be active
Bullshit. Really smart people just don't cheat because they are smart enough to understand that it ruins the experience for all involved, including themselves. Noob.
Yes, because there will be no false positives whatsoever. And because all the rules are fair and deserve to be followed. And because with LAN play you can always choose to use an alternate way of networking for SC2.
Nope, I'll just be making a new SC2 only account.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Basically, Blizzard is creating their own Steam-like competitor. You need a AAAAA level game that people are willing to register a new account for (like Valve did with Half-Life 2). Some people might bitch about it, but if you drink the Steam-Kool-Aid (like I do) it creates a better community atmosphere for those who play particular video games 10, 20 or even 80 hours a week. But enough about the community aspect, this is really a push to create Blizzard's own digital distribution network, similar to Valve's Steam. Valve pioneered the idea of building a D.Distribution network on a AAAAA title, and Blizzard is following their buisness plan step for step, by requiring people to register a battle.net account for Starcraft 2 (and WoW). Between the two, they'll have how many tens of millions of registered customers ready and waiting to buy games through their digital distribution channel? On day 1 no less. Pretty cool, and damn smart. Whoever the executive was that pioneered this (at the cost of delaying SC2) is getting a phat performance bonus next year
One can only hope (dream?) that battle.net and steam will have some sort of interoperability down the road. Fenced gardens are great, but people aren't going to want to juggle Battle.Net, Steam and Games for Windows Live buddy lists.
moox. for a new generation.
Q: Do Battle.net accounts work with the Blizzard Authenticator?
A: Yes. If you use a Blizzard Authenticator, you will need it when merging the associated World of Warcraft account into the new Battle.net Account. The Authenticator will automatically transfer to the Battle.net Account during the merge process, and you will still need it when managing Battle.net Account information and logging in to the game. In addition, Blizzard Entertainment offers the Battle.net Mobile Authenticator, an application for mobile devices that players can use to protect a Battle.net account and any World of Warcraft accounts associated with it. In addition, Blizzard Entertainment offers the Battle.net Mobile Authenticator, an application for mobile devices that players can use to protect a Battle.net account and any World of Warcraft accounts associated with it. For more information on the Battle.net Mobile Authenticator, visit http://eu.blizzard.com/support/article.xml?locale=en_GB&articleId=35970.
It's not a troll, happened to me and at least to 16 other people I know (guild mates and RL friends). I'm not sure how, but if your account is not linked to a battle.net account, and they know your email, they can link that account to their battle.net account and activate it as legitimate users.
Hell, even Blizzard has warnings on their official forums with steps to follow if you get that email, is just they don't acknowledge is a bug on their system. Oh, of course, if you tell them is a bug they deny it, Blizzard doesn't have bugs!
Not a big issue if you don't play any more, but not nice for heavy players who find their toons naked and without all the epix l00t they gathered in these months.
this is really a push to create Blizzard's own digital distribution network, similar to Valve's Steam.
It'll be nice to see some competition. Having one company control the distribution channel will cause issues over the long term when they get too comfortable. Blizzard's one of the few publishers that has the weight to compete.
I doubt they'd be quick with the friends list integration though. Third party tools will probably pop up long before.
Whoever the executive was that pioneered this (at the cost of delaying SC2) is getting a phat performance bonus next year
Dear Mr. Hadlock
In the future, please refrain from requesting performance bonuses on public forums.
M.Morhaime.
P.S.: Your bonus will be based on your Arena ranking, as every other director's.
You appear to be confusing morality with intelligence.
Bullshit. Really smart people just don't want to get locked in because they are smart enough to understand cross-game data-mining and the fact that they can no longer gift/sell a used game if they are all tied to one account.
Dont forget there are requirements that such changes are 'legal' not just in the USA, but subject to laws in Australia, New Zealand, as well, at least for the US version... then there is the can of worms that is the EU (not being judgemental, but alot of the laws the EU have tend to look down upon a company changing the rules on their customers). As to anyone who says 'oh but your EULA/TOS is binding in the USA, even if youre from country X, ill say this: Im an ex WoW player, and im glad ive given up WoWCrack and im not a lawyer... but when a company like Blizzard, sells (yes i said sell, they SELL the game) the transaction is local in my country, and here, neither party is allowed contract out of your legal rights... infact Blizzard has already made reference to said laws a couple of times ;)
The change was announced about half a year ago and the deadline was announced 31 days ahead so I have no idea what you're on about.
Since when did WoW players have real-life friends?
Says the guy posting on Slashd-
Oh, nevermind.
The way Battle.net accounts are currently set up, if you receive a suspension on a World of Warcraft account attached to that Battle.net account, it has no affect on any other World of Warcraft accounts that may also be attached.
Source: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=20464488049&pageNo=2&sid=1#39
Yes, but the really, REALLY smart people...
Oh, nevermind.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Battle.net as a digital distribution service did not exist since 1997, it was primarily a matchmaking service.
There are a few myths stated in the comments I wish to clear up:
/2 and you won't get banned.
1) Battle.net accounts are actually more convenient, a single login for all your Blizzard titles will make things easier.
2) As far as I know, unless your guild leader is on your battle.net friends, they won't be able to see you play Starcraft 2.
3) If you get banned from World of Warcraft, it will NOT ban your from other games, including other WoW accounts on your battle.net account.
4) Don't bot, cheat, scam people, stay stupid shit in
5) You can add multiple World of Warcraft accounts to a single Battle.net account. You'll get to choose which account you want to use when you login. If you goto another computer (multiboxing, letting your GF play, w/e) and use your battle.net login, you can choose the other account and be online at the same time (you've still gotta pay 15 bucks a month for the subscription, per account).
6) Alarmists ARE indeed funny to read.
Blizzard + Steam = .... Rain?
It depends what you mean by "the rules". If you want to be a really successful criminal, it almost always means joining or founding some form of organized crime (and before people start, I'm including being elected to political office). Organized crime is simply a replacement trust network for society at large, and while they break society's rules, they don't break their own very often, since the penalty for doing so is usually far worse than anything society metes out.
In order to live almost any kind of life that could be called a "success" you have to form and sustain trust networks with others. It's just unavoidable.
Sometimes you can get away with breaking the rules, but this is quite uncommon. The only reason we don't think this is so is that we are so used to following the rules that we don't tend to notice when we're doing it.
There's also an unexamined assumption here (yet another example of Christianity's baleful influence on our culture) that people can actually choose to be good or bad. I'm not sure that this is the case for most people. Good people tend to be pained, shamed and distressed if they do bad things, so for such people there really isn't much of a sense in which they'd be "better off" breaking moral rules. Bad folks don't seem to care, so that's not a problem for them. Given that by the time most of us are old enough to ponder it, our moral characters are already formed, the idea of a "choice" is somewhat senseless. Ask yourself how many people you know who have radically altered their moral character. All such cases I know have involved some traumatic event, like going to jail, being the victim of a terrible crime, or some sort of head injury.
"by that I mean people who don't sit on slashdot all day wondering why everyone else isn't building robots" DECS
Heh... Considering that Linux users using WINE were tagged as breaking the rules, even though they weren't, I'd say that creating an account for each style of game accordingly might not be a bad idea.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
In WoW's case, the cheaters forced Blizzard to push out the Warden to everyone.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
I'm not sure Valve is immune to the heat generated from some of the other DD services. Direct2Drive's recent per-week sales are now over. The buzz generated on slickdeals and the gamer forums I frequent was pretty high. I log in to steam last night and lo, they've got an extremely similar per-week deal going. It's even THQ games, which were what most people, again in my circles, were excited about on D2D. Titan Quest/SupCom/CoH/foo.
I can't believe that's coincidence. If hope blizz does get into it, I want more ridiculously cheap games.
--- Do you believe in the day?
When asked at Blizzcon, they stated that the battle.net account would be banned from all games, they made a joke about how that would be 'real' punishment.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
The difference is Blizzard currently has no delusions of destroying the game publishing companies like Valve did. Battle.net 2.0 is more like their own version of Facebook for their own games only.
I wouldn't expect to ever be able to buy a non-Blizzard game on Battle.net, and I wouldn't expect any more interoperability than Facebook and Myspace currently have (i.e. none). I could always be wrong, though!
P.S.: Your bonus will be based on your Arena ranking, as every other director's.
Finally the mystery PvP nerfs have a motive...
The ability to track a person across different characters/games is a serious problem Blizz is going to have to look at. A lot of people have non-guild alts so they can play the game in a non-social way when they want (to escape guild infighting, to unwind after a stressful day at work, to avoid stalker-ish people). Take that out, and the game loses value.
Remember, as penny arcade put it:
Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience = Total Fuckwad
Without anonymity, responsibility exists, and a game where you have to act responsibly all the time is far less fun (it's real life by a different set of rules). Sometimes we just want to be fuckwads.
Oversimplification is overly simple....
Cheating is awfully subjective and the consequences felt by other players from cheating varies from 'not at all' to 'a lot', depending on what is being done.
Some cheating violates the mechanics of the game. Cheats that let you fly or make you impossible to kill. Yes, you being invulnerable is one of those things that could negatively impact other players....but only if you PVP. If you spend the entire game, from 1-80, playing alone, in instances; who have you hurt? But that's a pretty extreme cheat....
A lot of cheating doesn't violate the mechanics of the game. Buying gold is 'cheating', but what does it really do? Arguably, it increases inflation. The counterpoint is that high level toons on old servers cause inflation and create a need for n0obs buying gold. In either case, anyone can get gold. There is an infinite amount on the server, the server creates more gold all the time. Buying gold just saves the purchaser *time*.
Really, most of WoW is simply a function of time spent in the game.
What, exactly, is the difference between me playing my character for 20 hours this weekend, farming gold, and increasing the total gold on the server by 10,000g or between me playing my character for 5 hours, doing something fun, and buying 8,000g from a website? In either case, my character ends up with 10,000g more than what it had. In the farming example, more inflation is created because I've introduced more gold into the game. The gold buying, arguably, only created 8,000g and would cause less inflation. But, really, the only meaningful difference is how much time *I* spent having fun and how much money *I* spent.
Being 'great' at WoW is simply a matter of how much time you will spend playing WoW. You can be a retarded monkey, but if you play 14 hours a day, you will hit the level cap, have great gear, and be able to find a great guild.
But, if you aren't willing to make that time commitment, 'cheating' allows you to play the game in a meaningful way. Is it fair that someone can buy gold and someone else can't? I don't know. But it's certainly no more unfair than paying extra money to get 3x experience with refer a friend. The only difference is who the money goes to; but the affect on the game is the same. People who are willing to 'cheat' get benefits that non-cheaters didn't and, arguably, 'devalue' the achievement of leveling.
Automation with bots, two (or more) boxing, refer a friend, buying gold, getting a friend to 'run you' through an instance, buying a character are all ways to get further in less time. All of them are unfair, some are considered 'cheating'. Hell, at release, getting a mount at 40 would have been cheating, but now it's not.
If you want to be strict about it - you can simply say that Blizzard makes the rules, and anything against the rules is 'cheating'. And that's fine and I wouldn't feel the need to argue. But when you say that 'really smart people don't cheat because it ruins the experience....' I feel like you are making an awfully bold claim, without any substance.
Some cheating can negatively impact your gaming experience, certainly; but there is also cheating that won't affect you at all. I've bought gold, two box, and wrote my own fish bot. Oddly enough; two boxing has had a much larger affect on my gaming experience than the other two (and that's the only one that isn't considered cheating!). The gold I bought served only to save my low level horde character a run to a neutral AH to exchange gold with my high level alliance. That purchase saved me an hour or so of death running - maybe more. In either case, my level 1 horde guy would end up with 1000g. I wrote the fishbot because I didn't want to spend an entire day leveling up fishing. I spent more time writing the bot than it would have taken to level up my fishing by hand. The bot was simply 'more fun'. I fished until my skill was maxed out (which is exactly how much fishing I would have done by hand). In either case, my fishing skill was going to get maxed out....my cheating didn't change the gaming experience for anyone else, other than myself.
With MMO's though you're not really buying the game. Want World of Warcraft the actual game? It's free on a ton of demo DVD's. The whole friggen game. Alternatively, you can download the game online legally. What your initial payment (essentially a signup fee) and continued monthly payments are buying you is an account on an online game, not the game itself which is more or less distributed for free.
Trying to resell that is no more logical than trying to claim fire sale doctrine on your Sam's Club membership.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
That's what the swirly thing between continents is!
What you fail to understand is where a significant number of gold suppliers get the gold that they pass on to you - by compromising the accounts of others, robbing the character blind, disenchanting everything they can't flood the auction house with, pulling everything they can from any associated guild banks, then setting up the character as a gold/resource farmer and shuffling all the rewards over to a 3rd party account until the actual owner of the account realizes they're not in control any more and contacts Blizzard to go through the dance of character restoration. Heck, the less moral ones will even go out of their way to target players that just made a purchase from them, because they know they'll have a better return on investment. By purchasing gold from gold suppliers, you are directly impacting the experience of other players in a way much more severe than most people realize.
The parent post is so naive and self-centered that I can't believe that it was modded up as insightful.
The poster's logic is that buying gold and using bots doesn't hurt anyone and helps me out so it isn't really cheating....
Let me help out out. Blizzard says those two activities are cheating and, like it or not, Blizzard is the Dungeon Master. There's your definition right there. Not to mention that they can ban you if they catch you doing either one.
You say that your cheating doesn't hurt anyone... what about the other fair players that have to invest 10 times more personal time in the game than you to get to the level cap and make enough gold to equip themselves? What about the people your "purchased" gold was stolen from? What about the items your farming bots took that could have been given to actual player-controlled toons in the farming areas farming the area at the same time as you? In all cases, you are inconveniencing real life humans because you are too lazy or greedy to play fair.
You need a real world analogy to drive the point home? It's like buying a term paper off the internet, copying test answers off the guy next to you, or paying someone to rob someone else. You're staying competitive with people who are working harder than you by sucking off them so you can have more free time for yourself.
You're acting unfairly to gain an advantage over other players: That is the definition of cheating. And remember that time is money, friend!
That's an awfully big assumption you are making...
"When it comes to powerleving and automation that means the cheater now has 5 level 60 avatars when he really should have one"
Years ago, I used WoWGlider to automate my game play. I didn't use it build an army of maxed out level 60 characters....I used it so that I could keep pace with my friends who had more free time to play the game.
"We're going to play on Saturday - going to do the deadmines, want to come?"
'The deadmines? What level are you? I'm only 12'
"12? Dude - we're all 19. Why didn't you play last week?
'I had to go to work man'
"Bummer. Well, if you get up to 19 or even like 16 you could totally come with"
'Okay, I'll see what I can do'
So, I could run my bot while I did house work or something and keep up. The net result was no different than my actually playing the game.
And even with a bot, you'd level significantly slower than you would with refer a friend.
For all of my cheating - gold buying, bot using (the fish bot I wrote myself, I've also used WoWGlider and WoWBot (I think that's what it was. It went open source and was written in C#), two boxing (which isn't considered cheating by Blizzard, officially) I've never even hit the level cap. My highest character is 60-something (the cap is 80 last I checked).
I'm just not willing to invest large quantities of time into the game; but the game is still more enjoyable to me if I cheat than if I don't.
Claiming that all cheaters are destroying the game seems awfully overzealous to me.
You might as well say 'Quitting your job and playing 80 hours a week is cheating!'. People like that advance through content faster than expected then have nothing to do. They are more likely to grief lowbies. They have more gold and better items. They can out level everyone who doesn't have 80 hours a week to play. It gives them an unfair advantage and they get top pick of all the raid groups, the best gear, the best guilds, the best pvp ranks, etc, etc...
Basically, what it comes down to is being successful and having an enjoyable experience in WOW is about how much time you can devote to it. More time = more stuff = better character.
If you use all of your time to play WoW - that's considered fine; even though it introduces all of the same problems you've talked about in association with cheating.
If someone has more spendable income than time and is willing to use money to avoid hours of grinding in the game...he's a dirty cheater.
I'm fine with the title of 'dirty cheater'; but I disagree with the idea that my cheating negatively affects anyone else.