Monday (12 Oct) - Blizzard Battlenet Account
The Wild Family is on a brief vacation while we have real life visitors staying with us for a few days. I'm sure Happy will get some in game time, but Wild, JB, and company may have a harder time of it. JB's surprisingly swift march toward level 80 is going to be slightly sidetracked, giving DER a short window to pull closer to her. DER, by the way, is level 74 now. Gratz!
Wild's guild has lost a few members in recent days. While sad, it's an inevitable process that the guild has gone through more than once in the past. We've managed to come through it before, and I hope we do so again. I do wish guild leadership would let the guild know officially on our website what is going on with our raids, and get a sign up going again for raid invites, even if they are for ten man raids. Recently a former guild leader still active with the guild set up a guild facebook account which is really cool. This is another way for guildies to communicate with each other in a way that some may be more comfortable with than the guild website, although that remains the source of official guild information.
The raid group that Wild is part of on Tuesday/Thursday took a step closer to re-activating when members were asked to vote on what days the group should run. It appears Lady Hunter and Bd will remain as co-raid leaders, although Lady Hunter is still working out game access issues related to her recent move. The raid group, which began as a guild raid with support from a partner guild, is now under the wing of the other guild, with supporting players like Wild from our guild. Given current raid attendance problems with Wild's guild, this seems to be a good move for the raid group, and Wild hopes we will succeed in getting enough raiders to get it going again. Wild is not changing guilds, and his own guild raids will have priority, but Wild hopes there won't be any conflict in raid days when this all finally gets shaken out.
The Blizzard Battlenet is a feature that I have had little to do with. Before World of Warcraft, when I was playing single player Blizzard games like Warcraft and Starcraft, the Battlenet was introduced as a way for players of those games to compete directly with each other. It was and still is very popular. I did try it, but I was no match for the level of play in those competitions, and preferred playing at my own pace against the computer.
Since then Blizzard released WoW, of course, and the WoW Forums, and then the WoW Armory, plus other features having to do with their other games. All of those things require accounts, user IDs, and passwords.
Blizzard is now building a new Battlenet in order to consolidate access to all their games and features under a single user account. Gamers who play Blizzard games other than WoW already have a Battlenet account, and will simply move over to the new one. However, WoW players have their own account independant of Battlenet. At least we did. Blizzard is forcing (and bribing, or maybe incentivising is a better marketing term) World of Warcraft players to merge all WoW accounts and peripheral sites (forums and armory, primarily) to a single account in the new Battlenet.
Since I use none of the new features Blizzard has planned for Battlenet users, I really don't want to be bombarded with stuff that Blizzard wants to sell me every time to login to the game, which I know is a big reason why they are doing this. I'm also worried about account security. I followed the links to check out the new security features Blizzard says make the new Battlenet more secure than the current WoW, but of course that page was "not available."
There is no choice in the matter, though. As of 11 Nov, accounts that have not merged with Battlenet will no longer be able to access WoW. Oh, and the incentive? A penguin non-combat pet. Non-combat pets are the cocaine of WoW. Useless, but everybody has to have them, and Blizzard plays that hand over and over.
Determined to get it over with, I went to the Battlenet site to merge the account. The site was down.
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Update on the Battlenet account merge - Later in the day I tried the Battlenet site again and was able to login, create a Battlenet account, and merge my two WoW accounts. All looked fine - until I tried to login. Only the first account could be accessed. Both accounts were visible when I went to Blizzard's account manager, but I could only access one of them.
ReplyDeleteI posted the problem on the WoW trouble desk forum, thinking that I would never get an answer, but hoping that maybe some other multiple account schmuck had done the merge and had figured it out and would pass along a solution.
Well, I have to give credit where it's due - Blizzard responded, telling me that what I should be seeing when I logged in is a new screen that offered me a choice of account. I was not getting that screen when I posted the problem, but it had been a couple of hours since I did the merge, so I tried again. The new account selection screen is there now.
I'm still grumbling about being forced into this, but I have to admit that I could come to like the new Battlenet set up. Did I really admit that?