11 ms·
Blizzard has blocked the possibility to remove account
- not_a_cop75 7y agoWow, Blizzard must be winning after this awful fiasco they started.
- greenonions 7y agoThis 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 7y agoAre we crawling toward some broader realization that corporate gaming and liberty are a questionable mix?
- allthetime 7y agoIsn't this a violation of the GDPR?
- baroffoos 7y agoTechnically the minimum required by the GDPR is that you can send them an email and the company must comply within 30 days.
- jiveturkey 7y agoIt'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.
- xaerise 7y agoWith GDPR you have the right to be forgotten. Therefor they need to remove all data about you that is not protected by any other law ( like billing information or something like that ). According to GDPR Art. 17(2)
- msla 7y agoGDPR isn't global law.
- baroffoos 7y agoIt applies to any user in the EU and since its hard to know if a particular user is or is not in the EU or a citizen of the EU its easier to just do the right thing by everyone.
- msla 7y ago> It applies to any user in the EU and since its hard to know if a particular user is or is not in the EU or a citizen of the EU its easier to just do the right thing by everyone. This still assumes you care about being punished by the EU. A company with no financial contact with the EU doesn't have to care about that, any more than a company with no financial contact with Saudi Arabia has to worry about offending the House of Saud.
- munk-a 7y agoHilariously the fact that they ask for a photo ID suddenly raises the amount of PII tied to your account by like 1000% - Blizzard knows very little of who I am, but if I gave them my photo ID then they're suddenly quite knowledgeable.
- jiveturkey 7y agoOnly if they retain the information. They can just throw it away after "verification".
- Someone1234 7y agoEven 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 7y agoI 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 7y agoAre 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 7y agoNormally 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 7y agoI'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.
- chongli 7y agoThere 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 7y agoThis 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 7y agoYeah, canceling was rather easy. I was surprised how quickly I could stop the recurring payments.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 7y agoMake it easy, and you lose some revenue from customers who want out and could be kept in against their will by making it too painful. However, the customers are happy, and you gain their trust. This will make them much more willing to give you their CC# the next time they're thinking about re-subscribing. Make it hard, and you may keep a small fraction of these customers, but make all of them hate you, make them hesitant to re-subscribe, and make a significant fraction just go through alternative means (e.g. chargeback, cancelling cards, letting a prepaid credit card run dry) that end up costing more than that.
- plorkyeran 7y agoTaking a break from the game for a while is also just a super normal thing to do. It's a 15-year-old game and the people who have been continuously subscribed for that entire time are going to be an infinitesimally small portion. It's much more common to either just play for a few months when new content comes out, or play continuously for a few years, get burned out on it, then come back years later.
- ubertoop 7y agoYou know who else doesn't allow you to delete your account / post history? HACKER NEWS!
- rad_gruchalski 7y agoJust send an email to the moderator. It has been discussed many times here before.
- ubertoop 7y agoWho is the moderator? And how do I find them/their email? There isn't a user search feature, as far as I can tell?
- lazugod 7y agoUsername of dang
- grzm 7y agoNote the Contact link in the footer: you can email the mods directly. In my experience they're very responsive.
- ubertoop 7y agohn@ycombinator.com ??? and how do they verify that the email requesting an account be deleted, is coming from the actual owner of that account?
- vymague 7y agoJust 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 7y agoGDPR requires opt-out as easy as opt-in, so yes
- idoh 7y agoTrue, GDPR requires it to be as easy to withdraw consent as to give it.
- munk-a 7y agoI 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 7y agoYeah same, need to send a GDPR request. They're making me even more annoyed
- res0nat0r 7y agoLikely 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 7y agoNormally 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?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Shivetya 7y agoLast 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 7y agoNo way this stay like this in EU
- tgsovlerkhgsel 7y agoMost people will be too lazy, but hopefully some will start sending custom-written GDPR deletion requests... which will require human processing.