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The Lawbringer: Account management and you
Pop law abounds in The Lawbringer, your weekly dose of WoW, the law, video games and the MMO genre. Running parallel to the games we love and enjoy is a world full of rules, regulations, pitfalls and traps. How about you hang out with us as we discuss some of the more esoteric aspects of the games we love to play? Writing The Lawbringer has taught me a lesson in trends. Over the past few months, specific questions are sent to me in topical batches. Sometimes it is a few emails about selling accounts. Other times, I get four to five emails about account security or compromise. May's email topic of choice was transferring accounts to family members. Blizzard is very restrictive about what you can and cannot change regarding your account information. On the one hand, it is your account, right? Shouldn't you have ultimate control over the information you provide for the facilitation of a service you pay for? On the other hand, there is a certain degree of problem mitigation that comes with restrictive change. If Blizzard can control certain aspects of what you do with your account and the information it is all filed under, problems can get mitigated before they appear. Today's topic is really all about damage mitigation.
New scam tries to give you a free Celestial Steed
One of the sadder parts of this job is reporting on the numerous scams that sweep across the World of Warcraft landscape. It's no secret that your WoW account is valuable to thieves -- the entire gold-selling industry is built on a foundation of hacked accounts and stolen items. Their latest scam vehicle? Our inherent desire for sparkle ponies. Let's get two things straight off the bat: You did not just win a free Celestial Steed mount. That in-game tell is an attempt to steal your account. No one just bought you a Celestial Steed mount. That email you got is an attempt to steal your account If it sneaks by your spam filter, the latest scam email can be quite convincing. The message, which appears to be from sales@mail.blizzard.com, masquerades as a receipt for the purchase of the $25 Celestial Steed mount. Of course, the email is not actually from Blizzard (the "from" email is spoofed), and the links to Battle.net and Worldofwarcraft.com inside send you to a phishing website designed to steal your password or infect your computer with a keylogger. Attempt to collect your sparkle pony, and within a few short hours, your entire account will be under someone else's control. If you haven't put an authenticator on your account, the scammers will do it for you, locking you out of your own account and severely hampering your ability to get it back. More information on the latest scam, what you can do to protect yourself and what to do if you're a victim, all after the break.
The Queue: Roasting a pig on a MacBook Pro
Welcome to The Queue, WoW.com's daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Allison Robert is your hostess today.Random article picture is random. Today, we field questions on account transfers, how to keep a Mac cool, why the blood elves are in the Horde, and whether What A Long, Strange Trip will be BoA!Endless asks...Regarding the namechange... what about transferring your char from one account to other? Does that remove you from friendlists?Yep. Moving a character between accounts will remove you from other players' friends lists, and it'll also unguild you. One of our guildies switched his main between his two accounts this past week and we wound up having to reguild him.
Battle.net conversion to become mandatory soon
In an interview over at Slashdot, J. Allen Brack, Lead Producer of WoW, spoke about the Battle.net conversion that's going on and how it will apply to WoW. One of the more important things he said was:We have optional Battle.net conversion right now, but that will be mandatory at some point in the not-too-distant future.Many people have done the conversion already, and many speculated and inferred from past Blizzard comments that the conversion would eventually become mandatory. But now it looks like it's going to be, and that date is in the "not-too-distant future."The conversion process is relatively straight forward, and can be started by visiting your account management page. There have been times when Battle.net enabled accounts were not able to get into the game due to authentication issues, but those seem to be diminishing.We'll be sure to keep you updated on any additional announcements concerning the upcoming mandatory conversion
Battle.Net issues today
Today is a Wednesday, and that means that there has to be some sort of Battle.Net authentication/login/game-version issue today. And guess what? There is!There is a long thread in the support forums about it, and the only blue response so far is that Blizzard is aware of the problem and they're working on it. Many, if not all, Battle.Net users are seeing an error stating the client cannot validate the game version (even after they've patched to 3.1.1).There is no known fix yet. We'll update this post when there is more information to report.Update: According to Neth everything is working now.
