Blizzard is actively stopping people from Deleting Accounts?

Can anyone verify this on here? I am seeing reports of people saying that Blizzard has disabled all four of their account authentication methods in order to stop people from deleting their accounts.

That is obviously not true. These rumors are spinning wildly out of control now

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Doubt it.

Probably High Traffic/ Bugs/ People doing it wrong.

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If you want to delete your account, you can either email Blizzard or use their website.

https://us.battle.net/support/en/help/wf/services/1328/1361

Rumours can be true. Denying it outright makes as little sense as confirming it with no proof.

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Umā€¦no? Because in order to verify it we would have to delete our accounts, at which point we couldnā€™t reply to verify it for you.

Sounds like a ridiculous rumor though.

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I assure you, that isnā€™t true. I think iā€™d know

Deleting a Blizzard Account is an irreversible step that requires a direct web ticket to Blizzard Customer Service. In addition, photo identification must be sent in to confirm the user before an account is completely deleted. Because of this I am anticipating there is an increased flow of web tickets being poured in and there may be a very long wait before such a request is processed. Remember if you rather, you can just uninstall your games and the BattleNet launcher for the time being.

Support articles:

Blizzard Support: Delete Blizzard account

Blizzard Support: Uninstall games

Blizzard Support: Uninstall BattleNet

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Best guess itā€™s not true in that Blizzard disable the feature to boost their numbers. What is far more likely however is they never imagined so many people would delete their accounts at the same time and the system just canā€™t handle it.

Itā€™s probably either crashed or is just so back logged most people run into errors.

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I donā€™t know if Iā€™d recommend deleting your account yet, regardless of how you feel. They could turn around tomorrow and reverse their action (probably partially, but still) and youā€™d still have a deleted account.

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Might got blocked due to a big amount of requests? I donā€™t believe theyā€™ll have it tuned to support situations like this

Theyā€™d only do that if itā€™s convenient for them to do so. Which I doubt will happen unless somehow their games are banned in china, since thatā€™s their biggest money-maker and they prioritize it over the western market.

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Do they make more money in China than in the US? Iā€™d be really surprised if that was the case.

Anyways, I think a partial reversal is pretty likely. I donā€™t think China would throw them out for a less severe response. I could see them going back, maybe just suspending the guy for a month, reinstate the two commentators, and make a formal rule addition about this. Say something about the rules being ambiguous.

I donā€™t know how you stop someone from deleting an account.
It is possible their authentication crashed and this leads to rumors.
But even evil Facebook accounts can be deleted, it took 3 years to fully get rid of mine.

Did you test it or just believe a twitter post?

They do.

Got a figure or citation? Iā€™m not challenging you, Iā€™m curious and would like to see.

Itā€™s unclear as Blizzard hasnā€™t been terribly public with their data on some things.

Overwatch for example has sold over 10 million copies in China according to some reports.

I donā€™t think Overwatch has announced selling 45 million copies yet and they did announce they had sold 40 million so that to me suggest China makes up around 20% -25% of all the people playing Overwatch.

Overwatch League viewership appears to be fairly high in China if you can trust any of their numbers.

" Hearthstone earns a lot in China. According to mobile market analysts Sensor Tower, 31% of Hearthstoneā€™s mobile spending came from China in 2018. That accounts for about $51 million, higher than the $31.3 million that Hearthstone made in the U.S. on mobile in 2018."

from Blizzard failed to make a stand for anything but China and money | VentureBeat

Iā€™ve read some other stats cited on reddit a few days ago but I donā€™t have the link to it now. Youā€™re welcome to find it. Something about China having a ridiculous amount of gamers compared to any other region, and it being quite a profitable market. Mobile gaming is incredibly popular there and thatā€™s also why a lot of companies are making the switch.

I can confirm that they werenā€™t working yesterday, havenā€™t tried today.

Each auth method gave a ā€˜DENIEDā€™ message upon the first (and only) attempt and was disabled with the reason that there were too many failed attempts. The process ended with a ā€˜please send us your government-issued IDā€™, which of course got a ā€˜lolnoā€™ from me.

This is an auth system used by hundreds of thousands of people every day. It seems unlikely to me that it was overloaded.

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