I was going to go into a spiel about how subscribers and Blizzard are both innocent of how motivated account hackers are, but then I remember that account hackers sell those accounts to gold farming businesses who only have money to buy those accounts because of players who are too frikkin lazy to level up their own characters. Those same gold farming businesses save that information that players give them in order to later hack their accounts for the rest of the characters.
And who lets it all happen? Blizzard. How many gold farmers have they actually caught? According to their timeline, three. How many gold farmers are out there? Hundreds if not thousands more. And look, now any of them can come on WoW indefinitely in order to continuing poaching suckers. Yes, that free play to level 20 is a double-edged sword, and is a good reason not to play that game anymore considering all the phisher spam I would have to put up with in the chat. There are probably more gold farmers and hackers in the game now than there are legitimate players. That just kills the fun.
Authenticators are a good idea to get when you take into account that even if you do avoid gold farmers, and keep your pc clean of malware, there are still those hackers who will lose nights of sleep in order to find out your password. Keep in mind they will use those same accounts in order to phish everyone on the friends list. You think you are safe from bogus sites or emails? Wait until you check out that awesome website that your best online friend just sent you.
Baldr said:
Requiring email address as Battle.net accounts was probably a dumb move. Although it makes the service easier and more flexible when it comes to dealing with customers. It pretty much gave access to a ton of accounts to gold sellers and hackers, who had bought(or bought information from) legitimate wow related sites like(supposedly) allakhazam and thottbot for example. This gave them a huge database of email address of people who played wow. They no longer needed to phish for a username, all they needed was crack the passwords. That why there was such a huge amount of compromised accounts after the transition.
Except the email I put in for my Battle.net handle and the email I put in for contact info are two completely different entities. Which makes all those phishers all the easier to tell out.
This, however, is a fine example of how much Blizzard is really incompetent or really doesn't care. They are providing an authenticator which is basically adding a few more characters to your password. They are doing their part to help keep you secure.
Here's a thought for your noggins: Just how many of those 8, 10, 11 million subscribers are gold farmers and hackers? Besides the one that only use trial accounts(which should be made obvious to legit players in chat), there are those who actually pay up the $15 a month in order to access higher level content that they can bilk Blizzard and players for. Eventually there are going to be servers with nothing but gold farmers and hackers. Sad.
It just isn't worth the bother even if you keep your account secure. No point when all you are doing is playing Wall Street with traders screaming in your ears. If that is your cup of tea, there are better ways to do that. In WoW it is nothing but a loss for you and a win for them.
