Of course there are still advertisements. I already stated today that I’ve reported 4 of them. But, and this is true, 4 is less than several dozen. Because now the advertisers can’t rely on their legion of compromised accounts to keep advertising.
They literally were banning accounts responsible for this, but again, with the legion of compromised accounts they had access to, it wasn’t making enough of a difference. The only way to 100% get rid of boosting services would be if Blizzard provided their own. But obviously they’re not going to do that.
Bliz can hardware ban like they have in the past, they may go out and buy a new computer the first time this happens but no one is going to go buy one repeatedly. It would cut too deep in their profit margins.
Enjoy the dead game. My sub is up in 7 days. My husband and I are planning on purchasing a few xbox1’s this week. Thousands of co-op games and multiplayer live games to choose from and microsoft isn’t going to limit what I do by attaching phone nonsense to my live account.
You absolutely do need account security. 2FA is extremely important to modern online security. Passwords are not secure on their own. You might as well be telling me you don’t need locks on the doors to your home. Just set up a damn authenticator and stop complaining about a good, effective decision that a) promotes proper account security and b) helps limit the capabilities of bots and real money traders.
To be honest, you really should have 2FA set up on anything that you either don’t want hacked or uses similar credentials to something you don’t want hacked.
Most account vulnerabilities these days don’t have to do with whether or not your password is super complicated or not. Unless you have one of the most commonly used passwords (it’s embarrassing how many people use “password” verbatim) then odds are people aren’t going to brute force your password. It’s just not worth the effort when there’s easier ways to catch other victims.
The most common way actually exploits the fact that people tend to repeat their passwords. So if for some reason Blizzard has a security leak and all of their passwords get leaked, hackers will take note of those passwords and start trying those username/password combos on other places, like banks and stuff. With all those passwords they got from the leak they’ll get a few hits and bam. They’re in your bank. Leaks like that aren’t common per se, but they happen regularly enough that hackers can rely on them. Especially if you use the same password on Microsoft/Amazon/Sony… you get the picture. If any of those are compromised then they’re all compromised.
That’s where 2FA comes in. In security, there’s generally 3 factors of authentication.
Something you know. (A password)
Something you have. (Your phone or a security token)
Something you are. (Biometric data like a fingerprint or an eyescan)
2 Factor Authentication is exactly what it sounds like - you require two of those factors in order to be authenticated. Ideally, you should have at least 2 factors protecting everything you do online, including gaming.
EDIT: I would also recommend that you avoid reusing passwords for multiple online accounts but I will confess that is extremely difficult to do without a password manager. I mean, we require so many different passwords in modern life and a lot of them aren’t used daily. The good password managers that will notify you if one of your accounts was part of a leak and require access to your physical machine in order to use your passwords cost a pretty penny though.
If you’re serious about security however, password repetition is the #1 security killer these days so you should be conscious about not falling victim to it. It’s also why you should avoid setting security questions that use publicly available information. If the only barrier to your password is knowing your mother’s maiden name or your birthday, those are easy to find on social media sites and easy to find in any major security leak. If you reuse a lot of easily deducible security questions than it’s pretty easy for hackers to reset your password. Again, 2FA stops this since a hacker would need to both know your password AND get their mits on your phone. If they only accomplish one of the two, they can’t get in.
If you have one set up and it’s still giving you this message that would be a bug and I could understand the frustration.
If you don’t… this is working as intended.
They should do this. I’m serious. If people are too stupid to understand the importance of 2FA in modern internet security they should be forced to use it.
What a god-awful take. 2FA is a necessary security measure for modern internet security. You might as well tell me you don’t want to have to set a password either. Are you one of the people who goes around saying they shouldn’t have to wear seatbelts?
P.S. Whack-a-mole banning of burner accounts is in fact the “temporary bandaid” while this authenticator decision is actually addressing the issue. You have it backwards.
Employee 3 should have went…umm, US people not in the US don’t have a country code of 1. Think we should allow the authenticator page to recognize that.
Employee 4: Nah…
Even US banks and credit card places know people like me exist. the American living abroad. So…their forms we can say country is US. But…we can change country code on their sms/authenticator setup.
The level some of you go to draw conclusions about others who don’t share your ideas is laughable. Did you actually just compare a device that saves lives to recreational gaming that people do for fun?
There is some sort of bug with it. I am occasionally not able to even start a group. The button greys out and the hover over tooltip says the group requires a custom title but in the OP’s case they can’t add a title, so the button to list stays disabled. Occasionally it just fixes itself. Sometimes it comes back though. I have an authenticator but it does it to me as well (forgets that I have one??). I don’t think it is a global problem though. Some of my guildies have this same problem and others do not.
As far as I am aware, Blizzard has never used hardware bans for WoW. They used to do IP bans, but they stopped doing those in 2010 since they’re ineffective. They have used hardware bans in Overwatch, but not in WoW.
And for a ‘dead game’ I’m seeing plenty of players running around, leveling characters, engaging in Shadowlands content and jumping into raids and dungeons so… yeah, doesn’t really seem that dead to me.
With what is flying around Discord recently, would be VERY WISE to get Authenticator, it’s what has kept my account safe since forever. I learned my lesson and now you don’t have to since I was the idiot falling for the Discord one.
You will regret not having the Authenticator when someone eventually gets you.
P.S.: Saying you don’t have an Authenticator is going to paint a target on your back, just sayin’.
That’s the M+, arena and AoTC sellers. They’re in the group finder now and they will always be there. Just don’t look at them? How hard is that? I run M+, I scroll right past those groups and enjoy my game. For whatever reason there’s a litany of players that seem feel that they have to fixate on things that bother them.
They did it to cut down on the ad traffic in LFG, given it was becoming full of ads for RMT sites. That way when advertisers want to make an ad, they have to have an authenticator tied to the account to actually change the title and so forth. So far its been a success, at the price of inconveniencing a few people.
Sadly this falls under one rotten apple spoils the bunch, similar to multi-boxxers given how badly botters were abusing broadcast actioning when it came to farming mats. So they had to put an end to multi-boxxing as a result.
In truth I wish they would maybe take it a step further and do something about the trade spam, they could literally just make a baseline channel for it, then take action against players. That are boost spamming in the wrong channel, and then for the ones that want to buy a boost for gold. They can tune into the channel and go from there.
While that may be true, the idea behind it is it makes it much more inconvient, or costly, for the person who got banned. To be able to get back to doing whatever they were doing, as if you get banned like that. You really had to be messing up or really causing issues for the game you got banned from, and generally I would take that as a sign of I need to just stop at that point.
