I bought Diablo 3 in a physical DVD in a local computer store. This is Brazil, so the mere idea of managing to line up and buy a game at the same day as everyone else in the world was huge at the time.
I get the game, I install it, and despite not having the best PC it did run well - I also don’t remember suffering with the server issues most people did at launch. However, I need to take a break to study for some tests, and after that, I moved cities so this meant I took a break from the game for a few months.
When I come back, my account is locked. Why? Well, I was playing everyday, but then I was not, and they interpreted this a “suspicious sudden change of playing habits”. They wanted a picture of my ID to unlock my account. Guess what though, their support wasn’t equipped to deal with a Brazilian ID. Of course, being brazilian, my only ID is this one.
So that was how Blizzard locked me out of a game I owned, a game I could physically hold in my hands.
And that’s the story of why I’m never buying a Blizzard product, regardless of medium or store, regardless of quality or hype, regardless of promises or support pages. The game could literally make my computer start ejecting gold nuggets out of the USB 2.0 port, and I would not play a Blizzard game.
They wanted a picture of my ID to unlock my account.
This is inappropriately invasive, and doesn’t even accomplish the stated goal, since an ID can’t prove account ownership when the account wasn’t created with an ID in the first place.
This practice has become alarmingly common for online services. We really do need strong privacy laws.
Activision didn’t have 2fa, my account got hacked and stolen, and sold on the black market (I assume because I had a Damascus skin on cod mw) after months of talking to support with proof of purchase (I think 4 months) they still hadn’t helped, and I realised my steam account was still linked and I regained access.
I changed the password instantly, and I had my account back. Almost immediately I received an email saying “fuck you, you sold me an account and changed the password!” This is how I learned it’s fate, after an argument dissolving into a conversation with them, it turns out he just bought my account from the hacker.
I relay ALL this information to chat support (who take an hour to contact and are only open at 3am) who can see my purchase history and extensive chat logs about the issues I’ve had. They congratulate me on managing to recover my account and help me remove the hackers linked accounts.
And then they ban me within that same week.
They won’t unban me, it’s permanent, they won’t review it or look at the chat logs, they don’t care. They didn’t ban it when it got hacked or when it got sold for four months, but they did once I recovered it.
Fuck actiblizzard
I sold a wow account 15 years ago that was decked out for the time (guild broke up) for $1,000. Kept getting emails for years. Eventually I got sick of it and responded to one saying the account had changed hands and they banned it immediately. They only care about people selling/trading things outside of their system. They get a wiff of an account being sold and they’ll nuke it.
Whoa whoa whoa… if it starts printing good I’d even pay for a WinRAR license.
Joking aside, diablo 3 was the last game I ever pre-ordered. They basically made a wow clone in the Diablo universe, but without a compelling story. They must be desperate for sales if they are diversifying where they sell it.
