account management
Latest
Facebook's Accounts Center lets you cross-post to Instagram
You can use it to sign in to both accounts and Messenger at the same time.
Warlords of Draenor pre-order available on Battle.net
Update: The pre-order is now live. You can get your character boost and pre-order Warlords of Draenor. Original Article: We've been getting a lot of tips that the Warlords of Draenor pre-orders are being prepped for, and based on our own excursions to the Account Management page of Battle.net, it seems to be the case - there's the little icon in the corner there (with perhaps our first view of the box art for Warlords of Draenor) waiting for us to click on it. Doing so doesn't allow you to pre-order as of this writing, however. Based on this and the cinematic from Sunday morning, it seems like pre-orders and the level 90 boost are imminent. We'll be keeping an eye on this and if and when they come online we'll inform you.
Time Warner Cable shows Android some love with My TWC app and TWC TV for phones
We're still waiting for Time Warner to bring its live TV streaming to Android, but the platform is enjoying some exclusive support today with two new apps. The first is the My TWC account management app which lets subscribers view their services, pay bills, adjust call forwarding and, soon, tap into their voicemail remotely. The other one is a new version of its TWC TV app, reformatted to work on phones even while the TWCable TV app on iOS is still a tablet only affair. iPhone and Android owners alike shouldn't have to wait long for their relief however, as the iPhone edition is slated to arrive in January, and ICS-enabled live TV streaming is still on the roadmap for "early next year." Hit up the corporate blog for the full feature lists and breakdowns, or just head over to the Android Market to install either free app.
Final Fantasy XI to merge PlayOnline accounts with Square-Enix accounts
For a long time now, PlayOnline has been the albatross that Final Fantasy XI players have to contend with. The fact that the service essentially serves as an oversized launcher for the game has long been a point of mild frustration to console gamers and a massive annoyance to PC players. But change is coming in the form of an upcoming account merge, merging all PlayOnline IDs into Square-Enix accounts and removing the cumbersome launcher-based process for handling service changes. The change will begin rolling out at the end of July and will run until August 31st, giving players ample opportunity to complete the transfer process and manage accounts solely through the website. While a full walkthrough is not yet available, preliminary questions have already been answered in an official support topic. Final Fantasy XI will still need to launch through the PlayOnline service, but it should be a boon to players to have at least one less set of account credentials to misplace.
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.
The Lawbringer: Account security 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? New players will soon be streaming into World of Warcraft come Cataclysm time, as well as old friends and enemies returning from prolonged sojourns. With these new or old accounts becoming active again, as well as a demand for grey market services increasing with a growing player base, account security is going to be on the tip of everyone's tongue again. For good reason, too. World of Warcraft has had one of the most daunting burdens of any MMO to date in dealing with account security, account hacking and a legal nightmare overseas.
Blizzard announces automated account recovery form for hacked accounts
World of Warcraft accounts have been under siege for years, with hackers and gold-selling outlets stealing passwords, items and more to fill their coffers, selling that gold to unwitting buyers. Blizzard has fought back incessantly over the years to stem the tide of gold farming and account hacking, and as you can imagine, the scale at which this happens is very tasking on its customer support department. Blizzard has just announced a new, speedier way to get help and answered about your hacked account, stolen items, authenticator issues and more! Now, under the new system, you will not have to email or call Blizzard to get these matters into its queue -- simply use the Account Recovery Form.
Anti-Aliased: The customers aren't always right, but they should be supported
The customer isn't always right. Trust me, I know, I use to work at GameStop. *shivers at the thought of pushing reserves* Sometimes, the customer is wrong -- dead wrong -- but that doesn't mean the customer shouldn't be supported and appreciated. Customer support is one of those areas of MMO games that often goes overlooked when it goes right, or put under a spotlight when it goes wrong. There is no middle ground with that department, and the many good people who put long hours into making sure your account properly works don't get enough thanks Well, let's fix that. Today I want to talk about two recent interactions I've had with customer support, but I also want to address a few issues that I have with the system as well.
Debunking another hacked authenticator story
One of our readers, Bill, sent us a tip about a WoW account issue on The Consumerist. It seems that the ownership of Anonymous's friend's account is under dispute and Blizzard won't let him use it in the meantime. The ownership became disputed after the account was allegedly hacked, even though there was allegedly a mobile authenticator on the account. His friend has given up on the account, complete with Val'anyr, and has created a new one. We can't confirm any of the facts in this case. I am willing to believe that Anonymous is truly upset and believes the story he tells to be true, even though he is posting anonymously. There are some serious red flags, however, that seem to point to Anonymous not having all of the facts:
Breakfast Topic: What race would you change to?
My first end game character was a Tauren Hunter. It was also the first character I created. When I made him, I didn't know much about the races, starting zones, or characterization quirks. The Tauren care for the world around them and hesitance when it comes to the battle. They're a calm and steady race that, while powerful in battle, prefer peaceful methods in their balance with nature and the elements. While that may be nice for a while, I've come to enjoy the mysticism and voodoo of the Trolls. From putting heads in cauldrons to get dead men to speak their awful truths to offering advice on not cutting off body parts to get them to regenerate bigger, they've offered an interesting and sick sense of humor that I enjoy. Also, the crit strike bonus to bows wouldn't be all that shabby either.With the race changes announced and apparently on the horizon (aka: 'soon'), as well as the race/class combinations coming in Cataclysm, what race would you change to if you had the opportunity? Voting after the break.
Race changes "coming soon"
They said it wasn't going to happen, but it wouldn't be the first time Blizzard did a 180º on previous announcements. Of course, if we had really bothered to read between the lines, Blizzard wasn't actually saying 'no' to race changes -- only that it wouldn't be part of the paid Character Faction Change service. It was in their Faction Change Q&A that Nethaera squashed the idea like an ugly bug. It turns out the folks at Blizzard are shrewder businessmen than we thought, and what Neth's 'no' actually meant was that race change would be a completely different service (which they conveniently didn't mention at the time).Although race changes were confirmed some time back, we received a couple of messages from readers tipping us off to the actual Race Change button being up on the Account Management page, falling under the Paid Services tab. How soon 'Coming Soon!' actually is, we can only guess. It's Blizzard, after all. Besides, Cataclysm promised us new races, and it should be interesting to see if Blizzard will allow changing to either a Goblin or a Worgen. It's possible that it won't be allowed at first to encourage players to try out the new starting areas, but Blizzard has been rather surprising as of late. Personally, I can't wait to trade up from Blood Elf pale to Orc green.Thanks to Ryan and Tuttutt for the heads up!
Faction changes available in Europe
Since World of Warcraft's paid faction change service launched in the US at the beginning of the month, not a day has gone by when we have not received tips, questions, and complaints asking when the feature would be available in Europe. Well, European readers, the wait is over! So if you're eager to go from Gnome to Orc, all you need to do is head over to the account management page and be willing to pony up 25.00 Euros or 20.00 Pounds for the privilege. If you're the indecisive sort, remember you can only change your character's faction every 60 days -- but read the FAQ for full details. What the FAQ doesn't tell you, though, is that you should be prepared to lose your Argent Tournement standing if you make the jump -- so, to anyone jumping on the faction change bandwagon I hope you enjoy jousting!However, if you're just wanting to change races within your current faction, this is not the service you're looking for. Blizzard has said they plan to make same-faction race changes available in the future and Ancilorn confirms this is the plan for Europe, as well.%Gallery-71584%
Faction change service now available [UPDATED]
Our tipline just lit up with news that the faction change service discussed so often recently is now available! At least in the US, anyway. One of our super secret to-be-announced new bloggers from the EU mentioned that he doesn't see it overseas yet, but Rogue specialist Chase Christian is already swapping his Rogue over. Hopefully Europe will have it very soon.The faction change (accessed via your account management page), in addition to allowing you to flip from Horde to Alliance (and vice versa) also seems to include the ability to change anything else you could change through a character recustomization, such as a name change for the price of $30. We have some picture of the process incoming, so keep an eye on this spot. We'll have them put together for you in just a moment.Update: And here are the images of the process. Enjoy!Update #2: The faction change FAQ has some additional details you might find interesting. There are some mount/reputation restrictions when you switch over that you might want to be aware of before you drop your $30.%Gallery-71584%
Darkfall prepares for launch, renewed sales of games
Today's the big day, Darkfall fans! The 25th of February has arrived and Darkfall should be fully online sometime this afternoon/evening as Aventurine flips the switch on their servers!This launch hasn't passed without problems though. First came the online pre-order page becoming swamped with traffic, leading to multiple credit card charges, people who never received their activation codes, and people who got codes but weren't even charged for the game. If you have had a problem with your pre-order, and wish to check the status of your account, you can always do so on the account management page. Be warned -- account management is under extreme stress from all the traffic and has been mostly down.Today, the heavily burdened website's forums have been up and down, with timeouts occurring as players pile in to see what the news is on the servers. Currently, as of the writing of this post, the servers are still down and unresponsive.Sales of Darkfall will also resume today, as Aventurine plans to start selling the game early in the evening, around the time the servers go live. No exact time has been given yet, but we'll keep our eye on the forums for any specifics given by the development team.
How to avoid automatic subscription renewal
As most of us know, WoW credit card subscription plans in the US and Europe are auto-renewing. If I sign up for one month at $14.99, as soon as that month is up, Blizzard immediately re-bills my credit card and signs me up for another month. This is problematic for some people, who may want to switch to a game card at the end of the month, or who simply might not want their cards to be automatically billed. Fortunately, there's an easy solution: cancel your account. Yep, just push that big red button (well, actually, it's a smallish grey button, but you get the idea). You'll still get to play until the time you've paid for runs out. And since Blizzard retains your character and account info indefinitely, you don't have to worry about your characters getting deleted. At the end of the time you've paid for, when you try to log in, you'll get a notice that your pre-paid time has been used up, at which point you can go on the web site and add whatever payment method you like. I've used this method many times myself. It's only a few extra clicks, and if you want to have more control over how you get billed, it's definitely worth considering, even if it does make the peons cry.
New account management options: Blizzard Authenticator and Beta Opt-In
Many thanks to my buddy Taeous for discovering a new link on the account management page yesterday evening. Currently there are two new small items that are going to be of interest to nearly every WoW player out there: "Blizzard Authenticator" and "Beta Opt-In". We already know about the Blizzard Authenticator that'll be coming out soon enough. It is a little (optional) device that will act as a hardware based key which will be needed to log on to your account. This looks like the spot that you can associate one to your account with. However the Beta Opt-In link is really interesting. This is just in time for all the activity at the World Wide Invitational 2008, and those of us at WoW Insider are speculating that all those beta keys people are getting at the WWI08 will be used there (there will be a goodie bag handed out to each attendee). However hopefully this will also let others get into the beta as well. Right now the beta link points to the resurrect-a-friend program, and the authenticator link points to an un-published page - we'll let you know when they change over to a page with more useful information. Nonetheless, definitely something we all want to keep an eye on.
Character copy up, for now [Updated]
Many of our readers will be happy to know that several people are reporting that the character transfer to the PTR is up and running. Our thanks to WoW Insider reader Jason for pointing this out to us.You can get on the PTR and learn to love patch 2.4 by heading over to the Account Management page on the main World of Warcraft site. When there, click on the "Test Realm Character Copy" button, and then on "Copy a Character". After you've asked Blizzard to copy your character over, come back and check about every hour to see if they've done it yet. Even though the wait time says four days, in my experience it has been substantially less.One last tip: if the button comes up gray, just hit refresh a few times.Good luck!Updated 1:15 p.m. EST: Screams of frustration can be heard around Azeroth as Blizzard plays dirty tricks with their character copy process. People are now having mixed results in getting their characters copied across. It might be that the queue is full again.
Prepaid Time Expired?
Apparently an error caused US accounts that should have been automatically renewed on April 20th or 21st to not be renewed - meaning some of you have been encountering a cryptic "Prepaid Time Expired" error when attempting to login, despite the fact that your payment information is accurate and up to date. To fix it, for now, just go to the account management page and re-enter your payment information by clicking "Change Payment Method." Of course, a lot of players are likely attempting to access the same page, which means you may have trouble getting there...
