I don't understand why Battle.net would do this, but I guess NOW they have to issue a statement about this.
Innocent version: oops we made a mistake.
Actual version: oops we got caught with our hand in the cookie-jar.
While the entire “gamer” demographic is now considerably older than it was 10-15 years ago on average I don’t think that WoW has an exceptional demographic in this regard.
If anecdotal evidence to be used than I would say that WoW probably skews younger now despite being a subscription MMO which tended to attract more adults than teens.
Not many 30+ year olds have time for MMOs anymore but we can still log into a CoD or BF multiplayer match over the weekend.
Innocent version: we did nothing wrong and you are reacting before having even looked at that certificate.
Arent' they making lots of money off these poor addicts already?
I'm sure with Overwatch trying to become legit and the hundreds of millions that will go towards the Overwatch League, they need to ensure a level playing field.
So HTTPS is just adding entropy through waste heat, it achieves nothing, whatever a client is sending or receiving is trivially intercepted after the decryption.
Anti-cheat in the game client is all about hiding. WoW had this big thing with their Warden system where they downloaded code from the game server, loaded it into the client at runtime and then had some encrypted communication channel back. It was an utterly pointless waste of time because it was so obvious to anyone looking for an anti-cheat mechanism and trivially defeated. What worked for them in the end was doing an "unintentional" out of bounds/uninitialized memory read when assembling a network packet. It looks completely innocuous looking at it in a disassembler (and you wouldn't notice when it's one of 10000 changes in a big patch) but it just happened to send back some bytes of memory that were patched in a cheating client. By now you would probably skip the in-client cheat detection altogether and just do ML classification on movement/interaction/time data at the server.
For example, when a player makes an in-game screenshot [in WoW], this contains a watermark with the account number of that player. So if someone posts a screenshot how they cleverly exploited in the game, and remove their character name, Blizzard can still easily find out their PII because they have the info linked to the account number which is hidden in the screenshot. And its even hidden in partial screenshots.