About the now mandatory Authenticator

[Yonbi-illidan (Yonbi)]

@Kozzae-doomhammer

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.

This is how they could solve the problem.

@Yonbi-illidan

So I noticed that they fixed the “playstyle” from “casual, standard, hardcore” to “standard, learning/progression, quick clear” - which is a decent start.

It also appends it to the default title. Also good.

Unfortunately it still doesn’t the other very common use-cases for real groups "need class/spec, @x boss which may not match raid (e.g. lockout list seems to be driven off of player weekly lockout rather than the current instance’s lockout - which is arguably a bug?), or other useful details like how far the group is going (or bosses being skipped Fatescribe ).

I still think they shouldn’t pull the trigger on this until they overhaul the LFG tool.

OR … .Just require MFA for all players! Be principled about it.

Holding functionality hostage behind MFA is not a good play. A lot of “casual” players are going to be in for a rude awakening on 11/2.

The amount of groups in the GF tool has dropped significantly from launch (likely due to the max level requirement). There are other steps they can take to identify throw-away accounts (max toon with quest gear, next to no achievements, only 1 or 2 mounts, etc).

I can’t imagine compromised accounts account for a “majority” of those LFG sale groups. So a better heuristic for identifying advert accounts would go a long way, w/o impacting all players without MFA.

At the very least - try some of these options before going full nuclear on this issue.

Also - there are ways to use MFA w/o a phone. So all this does is add an extra step for throw-away advert accounts, which they will likely just absorb, while still impacting regular players pretty dramatically.

Oh and for the pete’s sake can we get a new icon for ranged dps vs. melee? Keep the sword for melee, maybe add a bow and arrow for ranged? That would also help eliminate some need for custom text.

If custom text is really really the problem, then just add pre-baked Blizzard labels that we could append (such as class/spec), the word “need”, etc. So we can construct Blizzard approved phrases (“need” “warlock” or “at” “tarragrue”).

Again - please rethink this.