Comment by darklajid | Hacker News Reader

Comment by darklajid | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I just bought a AAA title - Destiny 2. Humble Bundle seemed like a decent store, right? I made so many purchases with them in the past. 60 dollars later I had a key that Blizzard wouldn't accept. My Battle.Net account (years old, ooooold) was created in Germany. I lived in different countries since then and currently live in SG, the key that I purchased was locked to the US/Asia Pacific region.

Now .. I certainly can change my account's region, right? I'm in good standing with Blizzard, I just moved.

Well.. Prepare to hand over a government issued ID including your address or - if that ID doesn't include an address - said ID and a utility bill.

For an effing game. For a gaming network that knows me by a handle#randomNumber and an email address.

Oh - you can create a brand spanking new account from here. No ID required of course and now I have an account in the EU (my .. 'real' aka 'old' Blizzard account) and an account here (for Destiny 2, because eff you Blizzard: You don't need my ID). It makes no sense.

My point being: EA is bad, EA is crap, but even companies like Blizzard - often considered good and exemplary - are insane sometimes.

We tend to forget that EA produced great games and focus on the negative parts. For others (Valve, Blizzard) we tend to focus on the positive parts. I think it's rather easy to overreact in one way or another.

Except blizzard has a huge pobpem with stolen accounts. This is one way in which they fight that. Yes it's annoying, but people sink thousands of hours into their games and are generally ok with the inconvenience if it means their account is more secure.

For someone like you it may not make sense, but you're not the user they instituted these policies for.

And blizzard gets crap _constantly_ from their user base, you just don't see it because you're not on those forums.

I am on those forums.

How does this protect me (or more likely: them)? I disable 2FA (..), give you my credentials or you brute force them: You own my account. How's that related with "I moved"?

And why would you ever. ever. ever give a random company your government ID? Facebook to unblock your account? Hell no! Google Plus for the same reason? Certainly not and never. Blizzard because you changed the place you live outside of their digital universe? Of course not!

They can ask me questions about games I played, purchase dates of the games I own, can send me verification mails, can use the 2FA they support, can look at my login history (hey, how funny: I logged into my Blizzard account from a SG IP, even before I made the purchase).

No, they should NEVER ask for my address or my government ID. The former would be okay if they want to send me swag and should still be optional.

Blizzard's insane here, defending them is kinda weird. Would you send your ID to Google, Facebook or .... EA? If you nod reading all of this, fine. We're just not able to agree here. If you shake your head but think that it's different for the people that allow you to explode sheep by repeatedly clicking them..: Can you make sure that you're not biased?

Your government issued ID is no secret and it doesn't contain any information I couldn't easily get elsewhere if I really wanted to. You hand it over to people all of the time for trivial things.

If your account is locked due to suspicious activity (as it was in your case) then Blizzard's only options are to A) just allow it (your account is gone) or B) make you verify that you are who you say you are. I don't think B is unreasonable.

And you didn't just 'move'; you moved _countries_. I didn't get locked out when I moved from CA to TX, but moving countries isn't all that common and they only have so much contextual information with which to make a decision.

>I am on those forums

Then you should already know Blizzard takes grief for this and many other things all of the time.

https://www.google.com/search?q=why+does+blizzard+wnat+my+id...

> For others (Valve, Blizzard) we tend to focus on the positive parts.

Well, people have been focusing on the poor policies of blizzard, especially with respect to battle.net, for decades now.[1]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bnetd

I remember shortly after WoW was released, there was this huge hubub over Cosmos and other add-ons, which led to one of the funniest WoW posts ever.[1]

1: http://www.lordaeron.org/WoB/

Speak for yourself.

I had my EA account stolen once. You know what they did? Nothing. I was able to trace the culprit's real name, his e-mail address, country of origin, and ISP via an IP address (which was not provided by EA, by the way ;-)). I did not even get a response from EA's customer service, except some drone sending me a password reset, which I did not need by then.

At least Blizzard puts some effort into it. And I can, without much trouble, get a human on the phone if I call Blizzard's customer service department.

No, they don't put any effort into this.

I can hand you my (EU) account data and you can steal my games. Play Overwatch for free, in my name. Play the SC2 extensions I bought. YAY!

Now, I as the rightful owner of that account cannot add a purchase to that account, because "regions". I cannot switch regions, because that requires that I hand in the most personal information I have (address, ID) unless we're talking nudes. It feels like nudes.

You can steal my account and use it for a lot of nonsense and enjoy the paid content. You cannot move my account into a different region. Cool. Neither can I...

It's not clever, it's not "putting effort into it", it is blatantly speaking just stupid.

I had my Blizzard/Battle.net account broken into - there was nothing to steal at the moment (I had played some multiplayer something a decade ago with one of the free multiplayer-only installations).

When I wanted to create a Hearthstone account, I found that out. The Blizzard CS reps were pretty decent, and they eventually fixed the issue (I still ended up creating a brand new account with better security since I was paying money this time).

I had the opposite happen to me with my EA account.

It was stolen and I was getting emails in Russian (I think) but I didn't care (mostly because of things they do like this post) until last year when I wanted to play BF2:BC so I contacted EA's customer service thinking there's no way I could get the account back, especially after 4-5 years. They asked a couple of questions and got my account back in about 15 minutes.

I was able to get it back without their help. But I couldn't change the security question back to my own.

I had my EA account stolen last year, and getting it back was really straightforward and pretty frictionless. You just need to pick up the phone and call them (or you can also put your phone number in a form and they will call you, so there's no waiting on hold).

Tried the form, did not receive a call. I was able to get my account back without their help. But I couldn't change the security question back to my own.

For all the people that defend this crazy practice: What is a government ID going to solve here?

A new account can be created without an ID (obviously...). They never saw mine. They probably never saw my name (right, anyone can figure out my name. And I am not 100% sure that I never paid by CC instead of Paypal or prepaid or whatnot).

What is this ID going to solve? They don't know how I look like. They _might_ no my Real ID™ (remember that joke, from Blizzard as well?) aka name. If my name is common and I provide a government ID, can I steal all the accounts with the same name that .. never showed a government ID in the first place?

That approach seems so deeply flawed that I don't even understand how someone signed it off in the first place. I certainly couldn't defend this idea - it would need a lot of drinks to be creative (aka stupid) enough to come up with reasons why this might Totally Work™.

I think I would rather this happen, than have someone in another country steal my account and easily be able to transfer regions.

with the current system, if someone steals my account, its basically useless.

If they steal your account they can play all games, under your name. Most of their games (all?) allow you to set the region in which you play independent of the account region.

Say, my account is in DE/EU, but I could play SC2 in the US/ The 'region' dropdown is literally above the play button.

If I steal your account, I can play the games you own. I can play as you in your region (using your progress) or play as you in other regions (progress is usually not taken over).

It is FAR from useless.

I mean.. The person that stole your account just cannot throw money at Blizzard to buy a game (in his region) and register it to your account (if different region). That's verrrryyyyy helpful indeed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com