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BlizzCon 2010: Online ticket printing now available
Those of you pulling your hair out over not having gotten your BlizzCon 2010 tickets by email have some good news today: Blue poster Bashiok confirms that you now have the ability -- finally -- to print tickets via your Battle.net account. If you have not yet received an email with your ticket barcodes, you can now view and print your BlizzCon ticket by: 1. Ticket purchaser logs in to their account at http://www.blizzard.com/store 2. Then visit https://www.battle.net/account/management/orders.html 3. Select the order entry containing the BlizzCon tickets purchased 4. Click on View/Edit Attendee Details button 5. Below each ticket a PRINT TICKET button is now available This will bring you to a printable ticket page which includes that ticket's barcode. It's important to bring this barcode with you as it will expedite your badge pickup once you're at the event. For those that have already received emails with barcodes this page has the same information as the email, and isn't necessary to view or reprint them if you already have. source For those unfamiliar with the process, it's not necessary to bring printed tickets with barcodes to the BlizzCon site, but they sure as heck make the badge pickup process easier. If you haven't already printed your ticket, now is an excellent time to do so -- BlizzCon 2010 is a mere 8 days away! World of Warcraft: Cataclysm will destroy Azeroth as we know it; nothing will be the same! In WoW Insider's Guide to Cataclysm, you can find out everything you need to know about WoW's third expansion (available Dec. 7, 2010), from brand new races to revamped quests and zones. Visit our Cataclysmnews category for the most recent posts having to do with the Cataclysm expansion.
EU Battle.net problems
Many folks this afternoon playing on EU servers have tipped us to the issues going on with Battle.net. It seems that they are unable to logon, with all accounts being stuck on the "Connecting" phase. This is really bad timing for this to be happening, as it was just announced yesterday that on November 11th in the US and November 12th in the EU all accounts will have to be converted to Battle.net accounts. Many people are concerned that these problems will persist through the conversion, although it's important to remember that these issues have existed before Battle.net came about as well.There has not been any official word from Blizzard on today's EU problems, but that hopefully be coming along shortly -- along with an idea of when it all will be fixed.
Breakfast Topic: Why Blizzard should make authenticators mandatory on Battle.net accounts
With the impending switch to necessary Battle.net accounts, Blizzard has an opportunity to create and extremely secure and hardened gaming community. They can do this by waving a magic wand, angering a certain amount of their customer base, and eliminating in one swoop nearly all, if not all, account hacks.Blizzard can make authenticators a mandatory feature on all Battle.net accounts.There are many pros and cons such a move would bring about. Let's examine the cons first since everyone likes to complain about stuff. The largest con would be that people would be required to have a physical piece of equipment specific to WoW and other Blizzard games. Some people would obviously not be okay with this and cancel their subscription, and others would not understand how to push a button and punch in numbers (I'm not kidding). There would be a large cry from people around the net, particularly people who enjoy scamming others out of gold and their accounts, but those are easily enough ignored.
Blizzard is spying on you again
People who put way too much energy into watching the flickering messages that scroll past when you log in to WoW, as well as people with slow connections, may be familiar with the message "Submitting non-personal system information." Basically, Blizzard wants to know things like what kind of CPU and GPU you're running on and how much RAM and VRAM you have. Aguilar (who?) has made a blue post letting us know that they're going to start another round of collecting such data "in the very near future." If you're not on a Battle.net account yet, you'll see that message about non-personal information. Battle.net users, however, won't see the message, but they will be sending info up the line. Yet another in a long line of injustices for us B.net account holders: no flickering message! I demand a free month of WoW in compensation.
Authentication problems continue
We saw it last night, and the problems have once again appeared this afternoon. Authentication isn't working as intended for non-Battle.net accounts. This means if you haven't transformed your WoW account into a Battle.net account, you're probably not going to be able to get into the game easily.The transformation process can be initiated at us.battle.net. It only takes a few minutes and is relatively painless. Converting your account to Battle.net is not required at this time, but I don't think anyone should be surprised if it is soon.Malkorix has said that there are problems, and they are aware of the problems, but don't have any ETA on a fix at this time. He also makes a point to note that converting your account to Battle.net is only a reported and unconfirmed by Blizzard solution. However we can say that we haven't seen any issues with Battle.net accounts.We'll update this post when we have more information.Update: The issue is fixed, for now.
The Queue: You can't take Spell Power away from me
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com's daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Adam Holisky will be your host today. There's a great question about the mechanics of spell casting when a proc / buff is or is not active. It's a very fine point that most people don't consider, and it's a mechanic that has been reiterated by Ghostcrawler and company recently. Take a few minutes to read it, you'll be glad you did.Today's reading music is Frank Sinatra and Natalie Cole singing They Can't Take That Away From Me.I love the way we dance 'till three.Mortur asked... "Now that the Battle.net conversion has been released for a while and bugs have been being dealt with, do you feel that there is much reason anymore for holding off on converting your account to Battle.net? Have the authentication issues after a patch been going away?"
BlizzCon Pro Tip: Setup your Battle.net account now
You want tickets to BlizzCon 2009?You want to enter the queue to purchase them tomorrow?You've heard the horror stories about how it all went haywire last year?Well, here's the pro tip of all pro tips, even better than Turpster's Tips: make your Battle.net account now and make sure your credit card / check card has enough money to cover the $125 cost of the ticket. While Blizzard has done a lot to make sure that the system will be smoother than last year, if you've already bought a plane ticket out to LA and have the hotels booked, etc., you'll want to be 100% sure you do everything you can do get these elusive tickets easily.The whole process takes just a couple of minutes, and you don't have to tie your World of Warcraft account to the Battle.net account unless you want to. They can remain entirely separate. Head over to the Battle.net account creation page and do this now!
