Nothing kills interest in a game like having your account stolen and spending the next few days or weeks getting it back. Here at MMO Fallout, I like to do little PSAs when either myself or the company are putting out reminders. There’s no harm in a little protective gaming every now and then.
Battle.net has a lot of account thieves, and this month is likely to be a big one for theft. Cataclysm launches this month upping WoW account thefts. In addition, Blizzard performed a mass ban on Starcraft 2 accounts for cheating, which may result in a surge of account thefts by cheaters looking for free accounts.
As always, keep your password safe. Change it often, use different passwords on related fan sites.
I started playing World of Warcraft again several months ago (and quit again after playing for a month and a half), and unfortunately I had to contact support over the phone to get some assistance. I found that, even at off-peak hours, the support queue was full enough that it required me to call back for almost a half hour just to get into the line to wait to get support for account assistance. Looking on the forums, I saw a similar glut of people looking for assistance with stolen accounts, unauthorized authenticators, etc.
Then one day I stumbled on to my spam folder, and realized something shocking and somewhat confusing: I receive more Battle.Net account spam than I do Viagra (or V!aGrA as they call it) and other medication spam, and frankly I’m no longer surprised that as many people are having their accounts stolen.
Oddly enough, spammers use the same technique that is commonly found in free to play Asian grinders, where the spam message is sent to millions upon millions of people with the knowledge that the small amount of people stupid enough to say “you mean I can get off-brand Tylenol at half the price of my local pharmacy and double the effectiveness?” will more than make up for the fact that 99.9999% will either not see it or immediately delete it. Essentially, if you’re trying to get a quarter into a cup from ten paces, taking a handful of quarters and throwing them at the cup drastically increases your chances of at least one getting in, as opposed to tossing each quarter one by one.
So don’t feel too bad, Warcraft’ers. If ten thousand of you lose your account this year to this type of email, that’s still only .08% of the game’s population, around the same lines as the 99.9% no-response rate that regular spam receives.
Actually, whenever I write an article on World of Warcraft here, spam bots swarm like pathetic little parasites. “Oh hey, Blizzard is letting me know via third party blog that my battle.net account is locked, I’d better click on this link, it’s safe.”
Now don’t tell me you didn’t see this coming! There’s a mod underway, as shown above, to recreate the world of World of Warcraft in Starcraft II, showcasing just how powerful the engine is.
I don’t know whether to be more disturbed or attracted by this.
Technically, Turbine has been doing this for a while with their game clients, but given that few other developers are unwilling to take on this same method, I figured Blizzard gets some notice. What’s the worst part of patching? If you have low bandwidth, your answer is likely the downloading portion. On large patch days, you can probably forget getting any World of Warcraft action in until sometime later in the day, assuming your connection holds up during the patching process.
Tentonhammer is reporting an addition to the WoW: Cataclysm beta, that will allow players to stream patches, allowing them to download only a small amount in order to get into the game while the rest downloads in the background. Your experience will not be ideal, according to the patch notes, but the hope is to minimize the time between patching and playing. There isn’t much information as to what “less than ideal” equates to, but in the realm of big patches and slow download speeds, it is better than nothing.
Hopefully this feature is made standard when World of Warcraft: Cataclysm goes live later this year.
“We’ve been constantly monitoring the feedback you’ve given us, as well as internally discussing your concerns about the use of real names on our forums. As a result of those discussions, we’ve decided at this time that real names will not be required for posting on official Blizzard forums.”
–Nethaera, Blizzard Forums
I imagine by “discussion,” Blizzard is referring to the thought of an impending mass exodus of players. Good news, WoW’ers! As you may have guessed from the above quote, Blizzard has retracted their planned update that would place real names in plain view on the Blizzard forums. The other parts of the update, including rating posts and comment threading, are still scheduled to debut on the Starcraft II forums, but you will no longer have to worry about your name being available for all to see.
The real question in all of this is: Who at Blizzard was thick enough to think this would tide over well with players, or that this would somehow stop trolling?
To call the Blizzard forums a veritable hell-spawn of trolls where intelligence and reason go to die would be an insult to the resting grounds where intelligence and reason truly go to die, and hopefully that will change when the troll’s names start appearing on the forums. In an upcoming update, Blizzard will incorporate the Realid system into their forums, meaning that instead of:
[username]
[character]
You will see:
[Real Name]
[Username]
[Character]
But why, you ask? I’ll let Blizzard’s own Nethaera explain:
“The official forums have always been a great place to discuss the latest info on our games, offer ideas and suggestions, and share experiences with other players — however, the forums have also earned a reputation as a place where flame wars, trolling, and other unpleasantness run wild. Removing the veil of anonymity typical to online dialogue will contribute to a more positive forum environment, promote constructive conversations, and connect the Blizzard community in ways they haven’t been connected before. With this change, you’ll see blue posters (i.e. Blizzard employees) posting by their real first and last names on our forums as well.”
Thanks Blizzard. Now instead of having my thread flamed by some nameless 4chan loser, I can have my thread flamed by some named 4chan loser who then proceeds to spam my facebook account, order me some delicious pizzas, harass my friends, and leave threatening phone calls on my voicemail, or to have the sociopath I beat in a duel stalk me home from work because he wants to show me his real life dagger skill level.
I hope all of you who play World of Warcraft, or any of Blizzard’s other games will be posting under an assumed name. I think we’re going to find that World of Warcraft is played by a lot of Ben Dovers.
I am Blizzard, and this is my new mount. She weighs one hundred and fifty kilograms, and fires custom tooled cartridges at three hundred thirty three rounds per minute. This gun generates five hundred thousand dollars, to run for one hour.
Out of date references aside, Blizzard’s new mount was the subject of a bit of speculation I was planning for yesterday, wondering how many people (aside from a lot) would be willing to pay for a $25 mount that, aside from looking gorgeous, didn’t have any extra flair. Of course, that article went right out the window when I saw the queue just to purchase the mount: one hundred forty three thousand people.
WoW.com has done some number crunching, and estimated that the flying horse mount has generated approximately half a million dollars per hour in the first hours after its release. So good on you Blizzard. Some companies get blasted for much cheaper items being too expensive, but Blizzard proves once again to be the exception to the social rule.
Make a wish, kids, because Blizzard just donated one million dollars to make your wish come true. Last year, Blizzard ran a two month long charity drive with a simple premise: Purchase a Pandaren Monk pet for $10 USD, and 50% of that purchase will go towards the Make-a-Wish foundation. Despite the usual complaints on the forums, over two hundred thousand of Blizzard’s subscribers pulled their wallets out and made a purchase during that time period.
Although 50% isn’t nearly as much of a percentage as I’d like to see companies (especially Blizzard) give from a non-tangible item that costs barely a couple hours to code into the game, given that the Pandaren wasn’t made for the charity, I think I can give it a pass. The sheer girth of the donation, combined with Blizzard being up front about how much they were donating, makes it an alright move in my books.
Meanwhile the PLEX for Haiti event ended last week on Eve Online, with more than forty thousand dollars being donated. In Eve Online, if players donated PLEX, it was converted directly into cash and sent to charity.
NetEase, operators of World of Warcraft China division, have officially announced just an hour or so ago that they have received approval by the General Administration of Press and Publication (GAPP), to run World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade, for publication in China. World of Warcraft has been fighting for survival in China not out of subscription numbers, but because of a war of authority between two of China’s governmental ministries, one being the GAPP.
This news will certainly delight those who have been observing WoW going through various stages of approved, banned, shut down, on hiatus, and in “demo mode” to new subscribers. Hopefully this will be the end to the World of Warcraft: China saga, although considering the fact that GAPP and its rival ministry have yet to settle their differences, I think we’ll be seeing WoW back in the news once again in due time.
The celebration at the end of Return of the Jedi likely can’t compare to the fanfare being celebrated by practically every gamer who has ever uttered the phrase “World of Warcraft sucks.” Earlier today we learned from the big boss man himself, Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime, that World of Warcraft has been stagnant for two years: Keeping stable at the 11.5 million mark. According to Morhaime, who was responding to an investor’s call, a third of new players quit before level ten I need to go back to remedial math. It was one third of players stay after level 10, not the other way around. Two thirds quit by level 10.
World of Warcraft has been stuck in a power struggle between two government agencies fighting for authority over the games market in China, where the game and half of the worldwide subscribers have been stuck in a period of limbo between online, offline, and NetEase occasionally losing the ability to sign up new customers. Earlier this week, Netease was forced to suspend registrations for a week after it was found that they are still not operating World of Warcraft with a license.
Despite issues in China, what this boils down to in many gamers is the mythical peak many have spoken of for years: The day World of Warcraft stopped growing. For those of you keeping track, this peak actually happened two years ago, December 2008, when Blizzard first reported 11.5 million subscribers.
I don’t think I need to remind the Blizzard Trolls out there that stagnant or not, Blizzard still has 11.5 million subscribers. Let’s not try and count the chickens before they’ve evolved from primordial soup, Blizzard could lose millions of their customers tonight and still have more paying customers than a great portion of the other big name MMOs in the market, combined.
Considering World of Warcraft, and each of its expansions, has dominated the PC market for five years running, it seems reasonable to chalk this up to the ratio of people who have not purchased WoW is going down to those who have purchased WoW. I myself have a copy of World of Warcraft and the Burning Crusade in my PC library (I have 68 hours clocked in on Xfire). Essentially, we’ve reached the point where the number of people coming in is matching or just barely exceeding the number of people leaving.
Blizzard is expecting a spike in returning users when Cataclysm releases, but one truth holds firm: World of Warcraft will begin the decline one day. It may not be this year, it may not even be the next two years, but it will decline. The only thing that can kill WoW is WoW itself, or another Blizzard MMO. For the moment, however, Blizzard is doing just fine for themselves, and unlike Arthas this king will not be going anywhere any time soon. So put the noise-maker away, World of Warcraft may be old enough in MMO terms to start having its midlife crisis and run around town naked, but it can still make you squeal like a pig with one hand tied behind its back.
MMO Fallout 
