Blizzard has blocked the possibility to remove account

https://twitter.com/Espsilverfire2/status/1182001007976423424

by modinfo • 7 years ago

269 67 7 years ago

twitter.com

not_a_cop75• 7 years ago

Wow, Blizzard must be winning after this awful fiasco they started.

greenonions• 7 years ago

This could be : 1. A technical issue preventing people from deleting accounts.

2. An active decision being taken. The response to this from customers motivated by the recent Hong Kong dustup is going to be sheer outrage. Regardless of reality, it's certainly being interpreted as #2. Not a good look for Blizzard.

smitty1e• 7 years ago

Are we crawling toward some broader realization that corporate gaming and liberty are a questionable mix?

allthetime• 7 years ago

Isn't this a violation of the GDPR?

baroffoos2• 7 years ago

Technically the minimum required by the GDPR is that you can send them an email and the company must comply within 30 days.

jiveturkey2• 7 years ago

It's one month, not 30 days (important distinction), and can more-or-less arbitrarily be extended to 3 months. Also, it doesn't require that any specific action be taken, just that the subject be informed within that time period.

Most notably, nothing within the GDPR requires removal of an account, only (in some cases) removal of Personal Data.

Someone1234• 7 years ago

Even with recent events, I'm still leaning towards technical glitch(es).

We've recently used this exact process (to remove an authenticator), and it was glitchy/problematic even before today, with a ton of people trying to use it at once (and I assume Blizzard staff manually verifying IDs?) I suspect Blizzard's verification system has imploded.

Kind of a similar thing happened when "WoW Classic" launched. The first 24-48 hours the whole ID recovery workflow was doing similar things/broken.

It is still on them to fix it, and people are still entitled to complain, this post is more a remark on intent (purposely down Vs. just having a bad recovery system). Although "It has sucked for a while" isn't a great defense anyway.

autoexec• 7 years ago

I agree, it's probably not intentional, would that even be legal?. Is there even a place to see how many active accounts they have/are losing because of this?

The fact that they fail at basic account management/authentication doesn't say good things for them. I wouldn't be surprised if they drag their feet a little getting it fixed, but I doubt it's going to matter.

comboy• 7 years ago

Are there maybe some published historical stats of players online in different games or something like that? I was wondering how this terrible PR is impacting them. Given how attention economy works it's not immediately obvious to me how this will impact their sales short and long term.

dx87• 7 years ago

Normally I'd agree with you, but when we find out that companies like Moviepass were locking active customer's accounts to save money, I'm not ready to give Blizzard the benefit of the doubt.

soup10• 7 years ago

I'd give old blizzard the benefit of the doubt, but there's obviously been a ton of churn, management and culture changes over the years and its taken its toll.

simplicio• 7 years ago

Moviepass was spiraling the drain though, so a desperate move like that didn't seem so strange. Blizzards having a bad week, but they're still a healthy company, and a bizzare attempt to block people from leaving would just amplify their PR problems.

So I'd guess technical issues as well.

bcrosby95• 7 years ago

Some people seem to have been able to delete their accounts without sending in an ID. Some haven't. I have two accounts and I can't delete either of them. One even has zero purchases associated with it, so it isn't related to that.

The main thing that comes to mind is that there might be some kind of global deletion throttle to help catch abuse and it's been heavily tripped due to the recent activity. It kinda lines up with the error message.

munk-a5• 7 years ago

I agree, I'd strongly lean toward a technical reason rather than conspiracy here - especially since, if a dude is deleting their account, you lost them already... if they can't delete it in a reasonable time frame they'll just walk away.

And it's not like they'd be the size they are and not have metrics on people trying to delete.

ineedasername• 7 years ago

Yes, I can imagine a scenario where bad actors gradually built up a database of login/password info, and suddenly launched an attack to delete all of them. It would make sense to have some mechanism in place to throttle them. Hopefully the outrage will outlive that process.

chongli• 7 years ago

There is still one more method: call your bank and have them issue a stop payment on any charges from Blizzard. This is the nuclear option but it is an option.

profmonocle• 7 years ago

This is the account deletion flow. Cancelling a WoW subscription* is a separate process, since you can have a Blizzard account without an active WoW subscription.

(* I'm not sure if they have any other games with automatic recurring payments, but if so I assume it works the same way.)

ct0• 7 years ago

Yeah, canceling was rather easy. I was surprised how quickly I could stop the recurring payments.

geoelectric• 7 years ago

Cancellation still works. I just went through the flow a few minutes ago.

ubertoop4• 7 years ago

You know who else doesn't allow you to delete your account / post history? HACKER NEWS!

rad_gruchalski• 7 years ago

Just send an email to the moderator. It has been discussed many times here before.

ubertoop4• 7 years ago

Who is the moderator? And how do I find them/their email? There isn't a user search feature, as far as I can tell?

BubRoss• 7 years ago

Why is that an acceptable way to handle it?

steve_adams_86• 7 years ago

They're incredibly helpful and nice in my experience. It's really not an issue.

reilly3000• 7 years ago

What about the post history data set in BigQuery? That is a widespread and complete record of HN activity.

vymague• 7 years ago

Just tried to delete my account. Same experience, needs to verify with a photo ID. Kinda shady. I wonder if it violates any EU rules.

edit: Just to be clear. Like the link said, there were other authentication methods, like SMS. Blizzard disabled the other ones on purpose.

dmitrygr• 7 years ago

GDPR requires opt-out as easy as opt-in, so yes

idoh• 7 years ago

True, GDPR requires it to be as easy to withdraw consent as to give it.

munk-a5• 7 years ago

I don't know how good they are with PII - but asking for a photo ID means you own that data-breach now... if that ID information is leaked it's all on Blizzard.

interdrift• 7 years ago

Yeah same, need to send a GDPR request. They're making me even more annoyed

res0nat0r• 7 years ago

Likely this is to protect against hacked accounts and the hackers deleting the account after trading away WoW items or whatnot. I've had an off/on idle WoW/Blizzard account for 10 or so years now, most folks don't want to delete their accounts when they don't play, they just let their subscription expire, so this seems like the most likely reason this is in place.

ikiris• 7 years ago

Normally I'd agree, but they added this due to the huge impact deletion has vs the cost. This is pretty clearly an anti abuse system they added begrudgingly due to real existing problems. I say this because its a huge burden on them to actually go through this process, so theres no way they chose to do it lightly, or recently.

If you got hacked and didn't want this to happen, would you still feel the same way?

xurias• 7 years ago

Why even bother with an authenticator if they're not going to recognize it for something like this? Why should I have to send them an ID? I tried deleting my account multiple times and it still hasn't worked.

freetanga• 7 years ago

It’s so our new Chinese overlords have your mug on file. Same government that has face recognition and cameras all over... Next time you step in China passport control, get ready for a grilling.

thefz• 7 years ago

Just did in the EU, I was sent an SMS.

Shivetya• 7 years ago

Last time I had a friend do this he was told any balance on his account was forfeit, I wonder if this is still true?

EastSmith• 7 years ago

No way this stay like this in EU

tgsovlerkhgsel2• 7 years ago

Most people will be too lazy, but hopefully some will start sending custom-written GDPR deletion requests... which will require human processing.

Blizzard has blocked the possibility to remove account

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