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Free Authenticators
niceguy3978
Member UncommonPosts: 2,051
I'm not sure if this is open to everyone or not, but apparently they are giving away free authenticators. I got an email from them, then went to Blizzards website to verify that it wasn't some phishing scam and sure enough it shows a Blizzard authenticator for 0.00, in addition the 24 hour shipping is free as well.
Comments
Wow thats a lot of units to pay for & to ship!
To be honest i didn't think the price was too bad & well worth paying for, especially for
the likes of my step brother who's been hacked 3 times (idiot) lol
Everytime ive checked they were always out of stock.
The Deathstar destroyed planets...Lucas Arts destroyed Galaxies
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That's really nice, coz those are not cheap to make. As I didn't want to wait I just downloaded the iPhone app, but free for these should make them a no-brainer!
Why is this happening now? The hacking issue has been a fairly large problem for a while. There were those that argued that Blizzard was purposefully allowing the game to be hacked to sell authenticators, which seems a bit silly now. But I am interested in what has changed that led to Blizzard giving them away for free. Also the email I recieved said that this was available to me for 14 days, so I don't know if it is a special promotion and/or this was limited somehow to only those who recieved the email, which in turn raises the question of how they determined who they would be giving them to for free (if they are not doing it for everyone, which I am unsure of at the moment).
I could only speculate that someone did the math and it'd be cheaper for blizzard to give the authenticators aways compared to the customer service nightmare they've been having for restoring accounts and player retention.
add: I know after my account got hacked while I wasn't subscribed, then charged for the months once blizz figured out the farm bot used a fake credit card, I just couldn't play any more. Feeling violated by hackers, and then again by blizz. Never again! *waves fist*
I get $6.50 for the authenticator.
agreed - still charging for them on blizz store
http://us.blizzard.com/store/search.xml?q=authenticator
EQ2 fan sites
Blizzard offers a variety of free authenticators for mobile devices: phones, itouch, etc. There are others that are sold in app stores for as little a $1 (assuming that goes to the app store, not blizzard).
Blizzard send links to accounts with a history of compromises. basically theyre telling you, " We've had enough of you failing to maintain your computers security and getting your account hacked, so we made it foolproof for you"
While that makes sense, especially as to why it shows up as the normal price for some, I don't see why I got such an offer as my account hasn't been hacked recently. I did have a keylogger on my computer a couple years ago and had to get things straightened out, but it hasn't happened since so I'm not sure. Unless they've gone back and basically said that any account that's ever been hacked gets a free authenticator, but it doesn't seem like that's the case either. Anyway, mine is in the mail on its way, they even offered free next day air shipping.
Even free is not worth it. My brother had one and 1 week after his account was inactive it was hacked. Now they want him to pay for a authenticators the hackers put on i his account removed.
Because Rift offered a free solution so they have to copy.
I doubt that is the reason as Blizzard already had a free solution (the same one as rift).
it should always be free. It's ridiculous of a company, especially one that's making so much money, to say something like "Well, we try to make our game as secure as possible. But if you spend extra $$, you will be more secure." Total BS. Every MMO should do everything in it's power to make their game as secure as possible. An authenticator like that should be absolutely free to every paying customer.
Sadly the best way these games could make themselves the most secure would be to stop allowing customers to log in at all.
and you think 5$ for 12 million accounts wouldn't be a prob? gotta suggest to do some mathclasses again
blizz have one of the best ways to secure against hacks atm, a blizzard wide account binding (cheat on one account get banned for all of them), and hell, how many speed-, maphackers and other hacking probs did you see lately in wow? :>
i didnt even see a dupe in the last years or anything like it.
but surely, doesn't work, my bad :>
ps: basically it IS free for everyone ^^
"I'll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up! Not me!"
If it's free, what's the $5 remark about? My point is; it should be included as part of the $15 month you're already paying. It should cost zero extra.
The counter argument to yours would be that players should not do things to get their accounts hacked and this wouldn't be an issue.
$5 seems like a small price to pay. Hopefully these will come included in game boxes in the future. Problem solved.
I paid for one when it was $8.00. I thought it was a fair price. . to be honest ..since 99% of security issues seem to be account holder carelessness and not Blizzards lack of security.( although it could be argued that 100% of security issues are caused by criminally minded assholes). Granted there are exceptions and with WOW having so many subscribers...the exceptions seem more abundant just from the pure volume of account holders. Still...free authenticators...downloaded apps or otherwise..is definitely a smarter move toward retention.
Reason is simple. There is an insane amount of phishing and hacking going on. Every time a person get their account stolen, it will take manual work for an employee to fix. Manpower is expensive, producing a few million authenticators is cheap compared to that.
Also, lets face it almost all account thefts are the owners own fault, but Blizz will not refuce to help a customer in distress. So authenticators are the best way for blizzard to avoid paying large sums in vages for fixing customer mistakes.
"I am my connectome" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HA7GwKXfJB0
It's not as much customer carelessness that causes these issues (though that is a factor), but the persistence and tenacity in general of the Chinese (And yes, 90% all account thefts are Chinese in origin) hackers.
They have corrupted entire ad networks with malware, and have servers set up to receive login information for various MMOS and the like.
Microsoft (Internet Explorer) and flash/java being one big security hole after another doesn't help.
I'm betting 50-60% of all multiplayer game related ad servers are tainted, I've even saw a few on ad servers being served up by TesNexus/Fallout3Nexus.
Basically...
If you use Windows you're at risk.
If you use Internet Explorer, Flash, or ever enable Javascript anywhere - you're at risk.