About the now mandatory Authenticator

Hello, I’ve been playing and really enjoying this game for a while now and am super bothered by the latest update. Mainly, the fact that a player must download an app authenticator to run to use the game functions fully. Sometimes, a group doesn’t already exist for the boss/achievement/whatever you are trying to do, and I have to start a fresh group.

Now (as far as I can tell), my status as a customer has been downgraded through no fault of my own…

Is there a way to regain this functionality if a customer is unable to download and run the app?

Please ask if any additional info is needed. Thank you!

Edit: (1 month after posting)

Initially I posted this in technical support, as I truly wanted a hand in trying to fix this issue or bring it to light that many players will have issues with this change. The thread was moved here, and players in my position were mocked, called names, and trolled upon in general. My subscription ends next week and I think any online ‘competitive’ game invites toxicity, cheating, and real money (boosting/carrying/scripting/multiboxing). Not fair and not fun.

LFG is still flooded with sellers and people advertising their websites and gear sales.

Thank you to the people who actually tried to help, shame it wasn’t anyone on customer support but maybe they don’t exist.

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To my knowledge, this should not effect group finder abilities You should still be able to list groups normally with out custom text though, is that not the case?

If you want to add custom text, that is when you need to have the extra security, and to be honest, your account is worth billions of dollars to criminals, the extra security would not hurt.

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GROUP FINDER IMPROVEMENTS

  • Accounts now require an attached Battle.net Authenticator to post custom text when listing a group for Dungeons, Raids, or Rated PvP activities. All players may still search for and join others’ groups.

    • Developers’ note: A Group Finder that’s full of advertisements bothers us as much as it does you, but a challenge we’ve faced in trying to eliminate those ads is that they are often posted by compromised accounts or other throwaway accounts, such that penalties incurred by in-game reporting have not proven to be an effective deterrent. And regardless, relying on reports still means that some number of players have their experience disrupted by the spam before it gets reported. The Battle.net Authenticator is available for mobile devices and is a simple and convenient way to secure your World of Warcraft account, but if you prefer not to use it for whatever reason, you will still be able to post groups that will have descriptions auto-populated (e.g. based on raid name and difficulty selected in UI dropdowns, or derived from the Mythic Keystone currently in your bags). Our goal is to clean up the Group Finder while trying to minimize the inconvenience to ordinary players.
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On my character, I can join groups, but the custom text fields have a lock icon. When hovering on the lock, text appears, “You can’t edit this field until you secure your account with the battle.net authenticator”. This applies to the [title] and [details] fields.

Edit: Was typing a reply before your second message came through.

Thanks for linking the changes, very sad that this is the only way to stop their issue with compromised accounts… especially towards those of us who did nothing to be treated like a criminal.

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There is not, no.

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This is how they could solve the problem.

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Good points, we should be able to ask for certain covenants in the group finder or what specs/features we are looking for (lust or rez…). Somewhere between BFA and SL, the mentor system required a series of metrics to qualify your character as a guide in WoW. If a character can qualify as a mentor, then that account (or just that character if you are leery of hackers) should be allowed to post text in group finder.

These requirements seem like the would filter out much of the botting and spamming as a mentor account requires:

  1. be max level
  2. compete 3000 quests
  3. 2 of the following: 3 max level characters, rival pvp rank, all m +10 dungeons complete, finish Carapace of N’Zoth and N’Zoth the Corruptor encounters in Ny’alotha, the Waking City, or purchase all research items in the Titanic Research Archive.

Copied this from wowhead, maybe the requirements have changed now that Shadowlands is the current expansion but something like this could be a great method.

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To be clear I’m not anti-authenticator. I’m anti holding GF hostage behind it.

Require authenticator for everyone because you are truly doing it for security and I will download it and be quiet.

As it stands though, it feels like they are just ruining the user experience when there were other far less impactful things they could have tried.

It is also kind of insulting that they didn’t apply this same logic to trade chat.

So 2 or 3 groups in LFG tool that I could right click to ignore was more impactful than an unreadable channel due to spam?

If this is your “solution” Blizzard, then be consistent!

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My account is worth Billions? I would gladly sell them my account for 3-4 million.

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Guess I’ll test it out for a while and see how the new group finder works without being able to type. Might not be that bad… thanks for the answer

Well this so called improvement broke the Group Finder now…many of us are having issue just trying to find group for World boss right now…it sits there and spins and spins and not load up any groups…so its broke.

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Just get the mobile authenticator. It is free and it isn’t even a bother. Legit only need to use it when you login from a new device. I would rather have this than LFG full of spam.

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if you all hate it so much, you can blame the people who whined about ads in LFG incessantly, but refused to use an addon to hide the ads.

and then get an authenticator.

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Just download the Blizzard Authenticator from Google Play. Don’t you guys have phones?

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You should not need an addon to filter spam lmfao

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Also you must have a contract phone and it can’t be pre paid, or cricket.

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I have 4 authenticators - bank accounts, investment accounts, work vpn and wow.

Ignoring the wow, how is this new to people?

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Until just recently I didn’t have a Smart Phone to be able to use mobile one…I had the key fob one…not everyone can afford a smart phone…I am lucky I got mine cause of being a Senior now…

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Overstatement of the century.

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seriously. I have TfA on everything I can have TfA on.

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