now that theere is just as much boosting spam in lfg premade groups as there ever was, are you going to revert your ridiculous authenticator changes you made recently blizz?
I know we all told you it would make no difference but you wanted more info about the rl players. Thats fine, i didnt fall in to that trap but now the people who told you it wouldn’t make the slightest bit of difference have been proven right … are you going to revert the authenticator decision on lfg ?
no?
didnt think so.
I’ve definitely noticed a difference in the M+ LFG. In raid LFG it’s still just as ridiculous as before. What I’m wondering is, are these people getting banned or did they just get one extra phone number for advertising and are still allowed to advertise? Because if the only thing Blizz did was force the authenticator, but then didn’t ban the advertisers, of course it was all for nothing.
The idea was that boosters wouldn’t be able to post the adverts in the LFG without the authenticator, which would have worked, or at least would have made an impact, except Blizzard seems to have forgotten that they need to also ban the advertisers. It looks like they just got an extra phone number and are still happily advertising in LFG without consequences.
All we can do is go into there and report them, what Blizzard should be doing is have an employee go there occasionally and ban the people placing the ads. Maybe 2 or 3 times a day.
I said that before. Also that you can get texting numbers over the Internet, even free ones. There was some chatter on the US forums about those not being recognised by Blizzard, but I dunno.
The question now is whether it’s not as frequent in M+ LFG because of the authenticator, or because raid boosting is much more profitable than M+ boosting this expansion.
I truly don’t know whether that was a goal, and why, and what value it might have had to Blizzard. However, phone numbers are more valuable than email addresses. People typically have many emails, but one phone, and people are reluctant to change number. I attended a marketing seminar not that many years ago where the claim was made that phone numbers are the best world-side globally unique identifiers. Facebook and Twitter, especially, have billions of numbers to match.
However, nothing else makes sense. Blizzard did not accept authenticators on their own. If hacked acccounts were really the reason, authenticators alone should have been enough
My assumption was that Blizzard had a four-phase plan
Loudly announce a ban on advertising in LFG
Carefully do NOTHING to enforce the ban
Claim that they need phone numbers to enforce the ban, because reasons that you are not supposed to ask
Clean up LFG spam just as they could have done in the first place, without all the theatre
The number auth is simple.
Boosters are inevitably gonna run out of numbers even if they keep making new alts. Or make their investment more expensive overtime getting new numbers.
Even tho getting free sim cards is super easy nowadays.
That’s nice and all but what exactly is Blizzard going to do with my phone number? I’ve had the authenticator for years, which means they’ve had my number for years, and I barely ever receive any calls or text messages that I wouldn’t expect, and I am 99.9% confident none of them had anything to do with Blizzard. Now you could make the argument that it’s aimed primarily at US numbers since they can’t really do much telemarketing in the EU, but then why would a video game company be interested in telemarketing? Well they could sell them perhaps, that’s what most people seem to think, but why would anyone buy phone numbers from a video game company when there are much bigger companies with much more “marketable” audience?
I don’t know, I’m just not buying the whole “Blizzard just wants our phone numbers” conspiracy. It doesn’t make any sense.
I’m on Europe too.
You don’t need to use a ID for a new SIM card. Unless you doing a contracted number.
There are a ton of pre-paid cards at stores, all you gotta do is getting one and using it.
To me the story where Blizzard is incompetent is much more believable than any of the conspiracies. They have been incompetent in pretty much everything lately, but somehow when it involves a single and mostly useless piece of personal information, they are suddenly very competent in a conspiracy to collect that data.
I still don’t see any sense in this and any “what ifs” seem like baseless speculation. People will perform all sorts of mental gymnastics to form conspiracy theories like this.
Not to mention they already have a ton of people’s bank details, emails, real names, addresses, zipcodes and whatnot. Why they would go to these lengths to collect phone numbers that can become useless or change within a day, again doesn’t make sense.
I would agree - if I had a reason they want us to give them their phone numbers so badly. (And don’t give me “security”; that’s what Authenticators are for.)
It does give you considerable security boost for your account, that’s the main point, and the phone number is there to verify it’s your phone, because the app is installed on your phone. It’s a legitimate method of verification to make sure it’s you who’s setting it up.
Sure they could have used another authenticator. I’ve seen people suggest they should have used the Google authenticator app, and I mean… seriously?
Yes I know, Google uses a QR code scan to verify. But come on, it’s Google, they literally track your movement by default.
