It’s no question that MANY people are trying to get their region changed due to the phone number now being a requirement. And I’d wager that the biggest question in their mind is whether or not Blizzard is even processing this, and if they are, how long the process takes.
So I want to ask people who actually got the region changed - could you share how long it took you go get your ticket resolved? If you can, some information about what region you are changing from and to might also be helpful
Myself, I am changing from US to South Korea and ticket is still open after 23 hours. Will post here if I get mine resolved.
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Ticket times are around a week right now, unfortunately. There is one CS team supporting all Blizz games and services. They are swamped with WoW Wrath release, ban waves, queues, char transfer issues, purchase issues, account access help, country changes, etc. That wait time is not normal. It is normally 24-48 hours or less.
I don’t work for Blizzard, but I can tell you that that is probably not something they can do for you.
Accounts created outside of Korea cannot be adjusted to Korea at a later point as they lack a national ID.
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Accounts created outside of Korea cannot be adjusted to Korea at a later point as they lack a national ID.
Wait, what? That doesn’t make any sense. South Korea absolutely has a national ID.
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I know they do. So does Blizzard. It take that comment to mean they can’t add the ID to a Battlenet account after creation. It has to be created as a Korean account to start with.
It means that anyone currently in Korea with a Korean phone number will not be able to convert an EU or Americas Battlenet account over to Korea. They won’t be able to play their previous OW account and would have to make a new one.
You can wait on your ticket of course, but that is what they are going to tell you. There is another thread here somewhere from last week or the weekend with someone in the same situation. Support could not change it to Korea for them.
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Wow, Blizzard… that was like the worst way to phrase that information;;; Thanks Miss Cheetah for the explanation.
Just read through Korean forums, and a bunch of people are not happy. Some people have accounts they created going back more than a decade. Others have spent significant amount of money. Now they are locked out… Jesus
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I know 
It is really really frustrating for people and I don’t blame them for being angry. Until the SMS phone requirement it did not really matter. Now that that SMS is required, the country has to match the phone and it has to be NOT VOIP or pre-paid.
I get why they are doing the SMS requirement on a free to play game, but it is certainly going to exclude some good players who can’t meet those requirements for various reasons. Reasons that are not nefarious.
I am currently in the process of changing my account from Germany to Korea and this makes no sense at all.
I do have an ID in Korea and I don’t see any valid reason why Blizzard would not allow changing your account’s country to Korea.
Now that SMS verification is required, any person with a Korean phone can’t verify it because it resets to the country your account was originally registered in.
I sent the KR support a ticket (in Korean) but I am still waiting for a reply.
They’re probably flooded with support tickets right now.
This is such a mess.
First of all thanks MissCheetah for voluntarily answering a lot of questions of this forum.
Gally and Aky, I’m in the same situation. I was in NA when I created my account and move to Korea in 2018. Like you said it doesn’t make any sense. I don’t buy the fact that our national ID can’t be verified.
I don’t know if is a technical or geopolitical issue but they need a solution for Korea because Korea it’s a massive Blizzard consumer.
My biggest concern is Blizzard deciding to do that to all the rest of the games on my Battle.net account. I bought almost everything from Blizzard since the Starcraft1 days. I have every Call of Duty game, I have all Diablo games, All starcraft, Ingame purchases on Heartstone and Heroes of the Storm.
I’m afraid of losing everything. And I’m not going to buy everything again.
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So I’ve thought about this, and the explanation - even MissCheetah’s extended version (again, thank you for that) - doesn’t make any sense.
For one thing, it looks like they have been processing requests to change region to Korea up until before COVID. So we know for a fact that it’s possible. It’s definitely not something that “cannot be done”.
For another - if it somehow CANNOT be done for reasons other than technical difficulties, it’s got nothing to do with national IDs. All that needs to be done is verification of ownership of the given phone number, which doesn’t require Blizzard to hold on to any information whatsoever. Speaking of which, they shouldn’t even be holding on to that information (Korea or otherwise) anyway. To ask for national ID AND a utility bill is ludicrous. I have never heard of ANY game company handling user region in this manner.
It ALSO doesn’t make any difference now because all the users connect to “a single global server”. There’s no reason to divide users according to region anyway. Maybe it made sense decades ago at some point, but this not only does not go with the times, it goes against how they are actually running their games now.
Lastly, this information - even the nonsense version that English users got - is nowhere to be found in Korean webpage. One would think, since it is the region this is going to affect the most, that they would at least let people there know what is going on.
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At first I thought was because censor rating or something like that.
But why only affect Blizzard?
When I came to Korea I changed the region of all my game accounts like Steam, Epic, PSN, Nintendo, Origin, Ubisoft, GOG, Xbox, everything without any issue and all automated.
I don’t understand the reason why they can’t change the region specifically Korea.
Doesn’t make any sense and again I don’t buy the lack of National ID thing.
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Not to mention the fact that they had no problem taking our money without the region change for years. Changing the region didn’t even occur to me for this simple reason.
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have the same problem \
Greetings,
We were unable to complete your request to change your country/region to South Korea because the Battle.net Account did not originate as a regional Korean Battle.net Account.
If you did not initiate this request, make sure your account is secure by following the steps in this article: Securing a Battle.net Account - Blizzard Support
Regards,
Blizzard Entertainment
Customer Support
https://battle.net/support
so I have to create new account and left all my progress… sad
Myself, I am changing from US to South Korea and ticket is still open after 23 hours.
Unless you are really really lucky, this is just the beginning.
I am trying to change countries within the EU (which is something so common and so easy to do by default btw) and the first ticket I sent them was 6 days ago. They replied yesterday, but only to tell me “Well, yea you sent in the right documents but we want to see your phone bill”. So they give you an extensive list of documents that are valid just so you can wait for a week for them to tell you “Only utility/phone bills are valid”. So now, I expect to wait for another week.
Not only will they take forever to resolve our cases, not only is this system absurd and poorly implemented overall but they don’t even offer a live chat service. Imagine, a 58bln. dollar company not being able to allocate resources towards Customer Support, especially when they decided to roll out this SMS change last minute and they knew for a fact they would have a wave of people trying to change regions.
My personal takeaway from this situation is:
“I hope you enjoy watching Overwatch as much as playing it, 'cause that’s what you will be doing the first week or so of the game’s release.”
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At this point, I would rather take the delay… It looks like Blizzard SPECIFICALLY singled out South Korea as a region they won’t process region change request for.
Ironic, as South Korea is the region that stuck with Blizzard through thick and thin during their hard times.
I don’t know what they do with the Korean ID information. Whatever they do with that, has to comply with laws in Korea. My understanding is that it is required when creating a South Korean Battlenet account to comply with the law there. I honestly know nothing more about that. I don’t speak Korean and can’t research it.
The documents they ask for when doing a legal name change, account unlock, country change, etc - are not kept on file. They are deleted once the ticket is processed. That is both good and bad. It means if you ever need help again you have to submit documents again.
You can read more about what they do with the documents in this article
I do know they have always required South Korean accounts to be created with ID to comply with laws in South Korea, but I don’t know why the can’t convert an EU or America’s Battlenet account over to a Korean one. I am sure there is a reason, but I don’t know what it is. It certainly hurts folks who have moved there over the years and are now legal residents.
I will ask around, but I am not sure I can get any answers.
I can tell you that it is absolutely not. As a matter of fact, it’s pretty illegal for service providers to ask for national ID itself in this manner however covered up it is. Only exceptions that I know of are the banks and communications companies, because everything else that needs identity/age verification all run a query through THEM. This way, each individual services only see the result of the verification process without seeing any personal information.
But as I am writing this, I think I may have figured out the why of this: there is nothing in Korean law that REQUIRES a service to have access to a user’s national ID - if anything, they actively prevent this practice. So the only reason I can think of is that Blizzard is so unwilling to abandon/update this frankly archaic and problematic way of region verification (as we can clearly see from how much other users are enjoying this process) that they’d rather abandon all requests for Korea than to work around not having access to national ID.
I still maintain this entire process is unnecessary. I don’t know of a SINGLE gaming company that requires this level of personal information from their users. Not even the Chinese companies. What they NEED is verification that the phone number provided is genuine - which proves that
- there is a genuine person behind it, and
- that they at least have an active Korean bank account.
which, for all intents and purposes, prove that they have some legal presence in Korea - which I should think is all one needs
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Heyyy, I have the same problem “Korea” excluded. They told me in a response to my ticket that they fixed my country and it is now changed to my location. But it still is the same, should I wait for it, I dunno maybe the system takes time to process or there could be a problem?
They seem to have folks working round the clock on these. It sounds like you got an incorrect answer. The system won’t let them convert an Americas or EU Battlenet account over to a Korean one, even if you have the proper documents. I don’t know why.
You can try re-opening the ticket if it gives you the option. Otherwise, you can try putting in a new one, but reference your old ticket number for traceability. If you need to change to Korea they currently can’t do that. I don’t know if that will change. MVPs are other players. I know most of the CS stuff pretty well, but anything Asia related is just outside my knowledge area and I don’t speak the languages to do research on it
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Sorry, I was not clear. I was moving the country from Argentina to Turkey. There isn’t anything Korea related in my situation. They told me that it was all done and that they changed my country to Turkey successfully. But it still is Argentina
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Ah, ok, then certainly re-open the ticket if you can, or put in a new one. When they resolve tickets they delete any documentation you sent, so you will probably have to send documents again.
The only other option I can think of is that your browser is just not updated. Logging out of the Blizzard website, clearing cache and cookies, then logging back in can force the updates to show.
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