Posts with tag Battle.net

This weekend, some of the most competitive PvP and PvE players in the World of Warcraft (alongside players from Starcraft 2) will be engaging in the Battle.net World Championship. The event, taking place at the Shanghai Expo-Mart in Shanghai, China, is the largest competitive event focused specifically at Blizzard's games. So, in case you're wondering what's going on, where the live streams are, and how to find the events you're interested in seeing, Blizzard has you covered with this extensive survival guide to the event.

Our old friend Zarhym breaks it all down for you. With links to profiles of the players, a schedule of events and everything else you'd need to find the events you're interested in, this guide should help you find the challenge mode, arena, or live raid you want to watch. The event lasts from November 17th to the 18th.

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Mists of Pandaria is here! The level cap has been raised to 90, many players have returned to Azeroth, and pet battles are taking the world by storm. Keep an eye out for all of the latest news, and check out our comprehensive guide to Mists of Pandaria for everything you'll ever need to know.

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The Battle.net World Championship will be kicking off Friday, November 16. If you're interested in World of Warcraft there's going to be quite a bit going on for you. One of the highlight events will be a Challenge Mode Dungeon tournament, similar to the match between Blood Legion and the Blizzard UX team during the Mists of Pandaria launch event.

Arena PvP will be represented as well with the Arena Global finals, and top guilds Stars and Supreme Quicksand will be engaging in a live raid of Heroic Mogu'shan Vaults. Keep your eyes peeled for more announcements and get ready to watch some of the best World of Warcraft players in the world.

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Mists of Pandaria is here! The level cap has been raised to 90, many players have returned to Azeroth, and pet battles are taking the world by storm. Keep an eye out for all of the latest news, and check out our comprehensive guide to Mists of Pandaria for everything you'll ever need to know.

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A much asked for feature is on its way into the game -- you will soon™ be able to set your Battle.net status to "appear offline," letting you have some much needed peace and quiet from the clamor of all those friends playing Blizzard's various games.

Currently, if you're logged in and have Real ID, Battle Tag, or character-level friends, then they can see you online no matter what. While this doesn't present a huge problem, sometimes people just want to go in a game and play by themselves, without the presence of a group. And even though WoW will never be a single player game, this upcoming change will certainly allow you to disappear into the masses when you want.

Blizzard's full release as follows:

Blizzard

In the coming months, we're planning an update to Battle.net that will give you more control over your online presence when playing Blizzard games. Soon, World of Warcraft, StarCraft II, and Diablo III players will be able to select "Appear Offline" as one of their Battle.net social-status options (along with Available, Busy, and Away) for those times when they want to wander Azeroth by their lonesome, dominate the galaxy in radio silence, or slay demons in solitude. When you choose this option as your status, all of your Real ID friends, BattleTag friends, and character-level friends will see you as "Offline" in their friends list whenever you're logged into a game.

The "Appear Offline" status option will be added to World of Warcraft, StarCraft II, and Diablo III separately in future updates for each game. For Diablo III, we expect to add the feature in a patch after 1.0.5. For World of Warcraft and StarCraft II, we expect to add the option sometime after the release of each game's upcoming expansion.

Thanks for your continued feedback, and we'll share more information on the availability of this new feature in the months ahead.

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Not the first time we've seen something like this: Nakatoir of the EU community team posted this account security alert after Riot Games' EU branch warned its users that hackers "gained access to certain personal player data contained in certain EU West and EU Nordic & East databases." This information included email addresses and encrypted account passwords, and more than half of the passwords were considered simple and at risk of being cracked.

Blizzard issues its security alert because many players who play various Blizzard games like WoW and Diablo III or StarCraft II also play League of Legends; therefore, if they use the same email address for Battle.net as League of Legends or the same passwords, those Battle.net accounts may also be at risk.

This is not an announcement that Blizzard itself has been hacked, mind you. It's simply a precaution based on the habits of players of many games to use the same passwords and login information for multiple accounts. If you're not a League of Legends player in the affected EU regions, there's no way for this to affect you.

The full announcement is after the break.

With the advent of transmogrification, void storage, account-wide pets, and lots of other item-dependent features, it's seemed a little odd that Blizzard hasn't been allowing item restores via the GM queue. Well, that apparently ends today -- both the inability to do so and requesting to do so via GM ticket. Now, your Battle.net account page has a brand-new service: Item Restoration. It's a free service that you can perform once every 30 days to retrieve lost, deleted, or vendored items immediately. In the event that you disenchanted an item instead of deleting or selling it, you'll still go through the regular GM ticket line to have your case looked at.

Kudos to Blizzard for finally making this service available -- it was a huge stress on the GM queue and an inconvenience for players. Now everybody's happy. Probably.

Announcing: Battle.net Item Restoration

Starting today, players can access a new system that will allow players to recover World of Warcraft items that they may have sold, destroyed or disenchanted: Battle.net Item Restoration.

With this new self-service option the recovery of an item or items that were recently deleted or sold to a vendor can be restored to a character immediately when using the ticket submission system on our support site. For any items that were accidentally disenchanted the same method can be used to request a review by Customer Support for restoration.

This restoration option may only be used once every 30 days on active World of Warcraft accounts that are in good standing. As this option has a limited availability and use, we still encourage caution when selling, deleting or disenchanting items.

While Customer Service always strives to help whenever we can, with the introduction of this self-help feature we will no longer be able to assist with these types of requests.

Additional details can be found in the following Support Article: Battle.net Item Restoration.

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Matthew Rossi recently discussed the possibility of cross-faction raiding. Those ideas always generate heat worthy of further discussion, so that's exactly what we'll do this morning.

With Real ID, the impending BattleTag system, and the increasing prevalence of social media usage in the World of Warcraft community, it's highly unlikely that all of your friends are on the same faction. In both the real world and the virtual, it has become easier and easier to meet people on the other side of faction lines. Even if all of your friends are on the same faction right now, who knows if that will remain true? You meet new people every day. It doesn't feel good to meet a new coworker, find out they play WoW, only to learn they're on the opposite faction. You'll never be able to play together. Well, you can, but you sure need to jump through a lot of hoops to do it ... like ditching your main character.

The social landscape of the game has evolved, but the binary faction lines remain static. Why not allow cross-faction raiding? I'm not calling for the abolition of a two-faction system entirely. Two independent stories for each faction still makes sense. The conflict between the Alliance and the Horde is still a part of the world we play in. However, if players are on our Real ID or BattleTag friends list, we must know them well enough that those faction lines don't matter. Why continue to use those faction lines in content where they are unnecessary?

Some raids do have unique content based on faction, that's true. It would be weird to fight for the Alliance as a Horde player in a raid such as the Argent Tournament, wouldn't it? I'm sure some creative Orb of Deception kludge could overcome that obstacle.

What say you, WoW Insider?

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No matter how much we may love playing with our guilds and friends, sometimes we just want to take some time off and play in single-player mode. However, with the pervasiveness of the RealID system, is it truly feasible to go off the grid to do this? Syl over at Raging Monkeys attempts to tackle this very problem, arguing enthusiastically that we should be allowed this option, that it would not only be convenient but also would benefit those relationships we have built both in-game and out.

Personally, I'm a bit torn on the issue. On the one hand, I can identify with this situation, as I have been there many times before. My own friends would always want to level alts together, but our goals for those characters never quite lined up. I'd find myself creating secret alts on another faction, sometimes on another server -- not only to experience more of the story and lore than I had before, but to just be alone. Of course, this was all before the RealID system was implemented, because after its debut, I was not able to start a new draenei paladin or blood elf rogue without being flooded with questions and, admittedly, a little guilt.

On the other hand, there is a very simple solution to all of this: Put your foot down. If someone asks why you're on Area 52 rolling a worgen warlock (or why you're even rolling a warlock in the first place, yuck), I think we all can agree that the best solution would be to honestly and delicately state that you need some time off, away from all of your in-game obligations -- including those inquiring minds. But is confronting your pursuers really that easy? For some, this type of thing comes naturally, and I for one am extremely envious of these people. For others, confrontation of this sort is not something we want to deal with, and the option to hide from RealID becomes a safe, albeit passive-aggressive, option.

What do you think? Is this a feature that Blizzard should be working on, or should these players find other means of enjoying the game in solitary peace?

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We already knew that real money would play a role in Diablo III, but we didn't have a great deal of official word. Now, Blizzard has released a FAQ about the Battle.net Balance providing a much deeper look at the upcoming system.

Essentially, you have a Battle.net Balance made up of points. Adding value to your Battle.net Balance is executed through charging up. You can charge up your Battle.net Balance using debit or credit cards, or sales from Diablo III auctions. Be aware, though, that you can't convert Battle.net Balance back into cash; once you put money there, it stays there. (There is an exception in some regions using PayPal, but details are scarce on that right now.)

Some of the Battle.net details are a little fuzzy right now because Blizzard is forced to deal with a lot of regional-specific laws. For example, in some regions, it'll have to empty value from a Battle.net Balance that hasn't been accessed in three years. Which regions? We don't know yet.

The most exciting bit of this news, however, is that you'll be able to purchase World of Warcraft prepaid game time using your Battle.net Balance. So if you're pretty good at the Diablo III Auction House, you might be able to kiss your subscription fee goodbye.

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Blizzard debuted the new World of Warcraft community site a while back, and it's definitely a huge improvement over the old one, which was really outdated and rarely helpful. The new site has a built-in Armory, better forums, a fairly robust Game Guide, and even regular dev blogs to give some insight on the development process.

Apparently the improvements don't stop there, though, as Blizzard recently announced a laundry list of updates for the site, including:

• Rotatable 3-D models for gear in the item database
• Boss info pages, loot tables, and ability information
• Improved, easier-to-read search results
• And more!

Check out the full list of changes and updates after the break.

Those of you pulling your hair out over not having gotten your BlizzCon 2010 tickets by email have some good news today: Blue poster Bashiok confirms that you now have the ability -- finally -- to print tickets via your Battle.net account.

If you have not yet received an email with your ticket barcodes, you can now view and print your BlizzCon ticket by:

1. Ticket purchaser logs in to their account at http://www.blizzard.com/store
2. Then visit https://www.battle.net/account/management/orders.html
3. Select the order entry containing the BlizzCon tickets purchased
4. Click on View/Edit Attendee Details button
5. Below each ticket a PRINT TICKET button is now available

This will bring you to a printable ticket page which includes that ticket's barcode. It's important to bring this barcode with you as it will expedite your badge pickup once you're at the event.

For those that have already received emails with barcodes this page has the same information as the email, and isn't necessary to view or reprint them if you already have.

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For those unfamiliar with the process, it's not necessary to bring printed tickets with barcodes to the BlizzCon site, but they sure as heck make the badge pickup process easier. If you haven't already printed your ticket, now is an excellent time to do so -- BlizzCon 2010 is a mere 8 days away!

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World of Warcraft: Cataclysm will destroy Azeroth as we know it; nothing will be the same! In WoW Insider's Guide to Cataclysm, you can find out everything you need to know about WoW's third expansion (available Dec. 7, 2010), from brand new races to revamped quests and zones. Visit our Cataclysmnews category for the most recent posts having to do with the Cataclysm expansion.

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Blizzard is changing up the security on their authenticators a bit. This isn't a major change and shouldn't affect that many people. Starting now, if you happen to have multiple Battle.net accounts (not multiple WoW accounts under one Battle.net account), then each account must have its own authenticator. This means if you have separate Battle.net logins for zergrush@somedomain.com and taurenfever@example.com and you want to use an authenticator, you'll need to buy two. If you've just got taurenfever@example.com and all of your games are under that Battle.net login, then you're perfectly fine.

This is not retroactive. If you already have two accounts linked to a single authenticator, everything will still work as it does right now until you unlink that authenticator. The full blue post detailing the changes is behind the cut below.