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Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

Even with recent events, I'm still leaning towards technical glitch(es).

We've recently used this exact process (to remove an authenticator), and it was glitchy/problematic even before today, with a ton of people trying to use it at once (and I assume Blizzard staff manually verifying IDs?) I suspect Blizzard's verification system has imploded.

Kind of a similar thing happened when "WoW Classic" launched. The first 24-48 hours the whole ID recovery workflow was doing similar things/broken.

It is still on them to fix it, and people are still entitled to complain, this post is more a remark on intent (purposely down Vs. just having a bad recovery system). Although "It has sucked for a while" isn't a great defense anyway.

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Normally I'd agree with you, but when we find out that companies like Moviepass were locking active customer's accounts to save money, I'm not ready to give Blizzard the benefit of the doubt.

Moviepass was spiraling the drain though, so a desperate move like that didn't seem so strange. Blizzards having a bad week, but they're still a healthy company, and a bizzare attempt to block people from leaving would just amplify their PR problems.

So I'd guess technical issues as well.

I'd give old blizzard the benefit of the doubt, but there's obviously been a ton of churn, management and culture changes over the years and its taken its toll.

The old blizzard is dead and gone. It's the new and improved activision blizzard.

Some people seem to have been able to delete their accounts without sending in an ID. Some haven't. I have two accounts and I can't delete either of them. One even has zero purchases associated with it, so it isn't related to that.

The main thing that comes to mind is that there might be some kind of global deletion throttle to help catch abuse and it's been heavily tripped due to the recent activity. It kinda lines up with the error message.

I agree, I'd strongly lean toward a technical reason rather than conspiracy here - especially since, if a dude is deleting their account, you lost them already... if they can't delete it in a reasonable time frame they'll just walk away.

And it's not like they'd be the size they are and not have metrics on people trying to delete.

I agree, it's probably not intentional, would that even be legal?. Is there even a place to see how many active accounts they have/are losing because of this?

The fact that they fail at basic account management/authentication doesn't say good things for them. I wouldn't be surprised if they drag their feet a little getting it fixed, but I doubt it's going to matter.

Are there maybe some published historical stats of players online in different games or something like that? I was wondering how this terrible PR is impacting them. Given how attention economy works it's not immediately obvious to me how this will impact their sales short and long term.

Yes, I can imagine a scenario where bad actors gradually built up a database of login/password info, and suddenly launched an attack to delete all of them. It would make sense to have some mechanism in place to throttle them. Hopefully the outrage will outlive that process.

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