Battlenet? time to quit.

Q u o t e:
Most accounts that report being hacked, EVEN WITH AUTHENTICATOR, are those
that merged with battlenet. I guess your security on your battlenet site is so compromised,
it lends to easy hacking.

Guess i'll call it quits.

thank you for the game, blizzard, it's been fun but i'm not going to switch just to have my account
hacked. laters!

It seems that you've fallen prey to a number of major misconceptions floating around about battle.net accounts.

Please allow me to address some of those misconceptions and rumors here:

First, battle.net has not been compromised; but because it offers an easy method to manage multiple accounts, those who would compromise accounts were quick to take advantage of the features it offers by merging previously un-merged accounts. This is largely why battle.net has become so heavily linked with compromise in player's minds. Accounts that had already been merged are harder for those who compromise accounts to manage and are certainly not easier to compromise. In fact, an un-merged account would need to be compromised before it could be merged with an exploitative battle.net account - an account cannot be somehow compromised as a result of the battle.net service itself in some nebulous fashion.

Contrary to popular belief that has formed due to a variety of misconceptions, merging your account into a battle.net account offers security options that aren't available to a standard account, and battle.net accounts are generally more secure.

We have not yet found one confirmed case of an account having been compromised with an active, merged authenticator. While an Authenticator is not completely fool proof, it can be a very substantial addition to the normal security one should employ on any system they play World of Warcraft from.

I encourage you to reconsider leaving World of Warcraft - particularly over a set of wholly baseless fears regarding a service that it appears that you've never used =(. This would also be a good time to create a new email address that is used exclusively as a World of Warcraft registered email address and for a battle.net account.

Q u o t e:
Please send out free authenticators then, quite frankly im getting sick of having to pay more money to secure my account which should be YOUR job, not mine.

Actually, Mobile Authenticators are available for free with some mobile devices. You can find out if your device and service are compatible here:

http://mobile.blizzard.com/support-compat.html/

The physical Blizzard Authenticators do carry a cost and limited supply. As a result, there is a nominal price to cover the expenses involved in the acquisition of the physical devices and the maintenance of the service. I apologize if you find that untenable.

Regardless, while we offer options and information to help our players keep their accounts as secure as possible, the ultimate responsibility for account security rests squarely in our player's hands - and for good reason.

Q u o t e:
1 Bnet acct hacked.

BUT on the bright side, Blizz did take care of the issue and fully restored the acct...

Show me where the extra protection using Bnet is. Please? I have not seen too much.

It will allow you, to effectively 'change' your account name by changing to a new email address. In turn, this allows for regular changes of all log-in information (log-in and password), as well as help you make your account more secure in the wake of a compromise. The process of merging can allow you to select a new secret question and answer as well. Of course, as an added bonus, if your account is merged then someone else shouldn't be able to merge it into their own.

Why would one account in a household be affected by a compromise when others aren't? That's a complicated question and there are a variety of factors that can play a role in such a scenario. These include (amongst others): who had access to the account, how well secured the system the account is played from is, and what the account was used for. Regardless, whether the account was battle.net merged would not play a substantial role.

It's a very good idea for interested parties to review our How to Stay in the Game articles for advice on how to avoid potential security risks:

http://us.blizzard.com/support/article.xml?locale=en_US&articleId=21506

Remember: the first and most crucial step in keeping your account secure is to ensure that no one else ever has access to your account information.

Q u o t e:
This is the closest to the answer as I have seen. New features coupled with 13 million new email addresses to spam... and share for others to spam...increases that bottom line...what's not to like for Bizzard?

13 million new email addresses? I'm not sure what you mean, especially since every legitimate World of Warcraft account already has a registered email address associated with it. Battle.net, in and of itself, does not represent any kind of profit. Instead, the new Battle.net service represents a means to enhance the features, and products we offer to our fans as well as the infrastructure to offer entirely new features in the future. You can learn more here:

http://us.battle.net/faq/index.html

Q u o t e:
I would think that having an email address associated with the account would in many ways make it more easily phished etc.

Certainly no more so than any other account. The best defense against phishing is alertness and education. Should you ever question the validity of an email message you receive from 'Blizzard Entertainment', please feel free to run it by us. We also have a sticky posted here regarding common phishing scams in an effort to help illuminate these scams for our players:

Fake E-mails from "Blizzard Entertainment"
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=965511383&sid=1

Q u o t e:
Anyway, I just don't like being forced into something that I didn't sign up for...I'm assuming that folks who paid months in advance and don't sign up for battle.net will be getting a refund? Wait, prolly not.

There's no extraordinary security risk associated with a Battle.net account versus an un-merged account. It certainly would not be to anyone's advantage to move to a system that is less secure.

I suspect that part of the reason that this is of such intense concern to many players is at least partially attributable to the nature of 'change' itself. Change has the potential to be scary, and the unknown itself can harbor spectres of anxiety.

Hopefully, we can help lay some of these concerns to rest as time goes on, and as Battle.net becomes more familiar to our players who have not yet merged their accounts.

Q u o t e:
Why is this thread allowed to go 9 pages of the same crap over and over? For the trolls to have their fun on their soapboxes?

It is permitted to go 9 pages, Yiz, because this still remains a discussion. The forums main purpose is for players to be able to discuss the game with other players. As long as this remains civil and on point I have no problem with leaving it open.

Q u o t e:

WoW support and battle.net aren't the same group.

Yes and no. The Battle.net that you may have been familiar with with Starcraft and Diablo II is not the same as the current incarnation. Our Developers have worked to improve the overall functionality to incorporate all Blizzard games, essentially making this a completely new creation. This will eventually include some very exciting features. Those features would not be possible with the old Battle.net.

This thread is getting a bit long in the tooth, so I'm going to be laying it to rest now.

Thank you all for your positive contributions!