[WoW] Dear Spoofy, it's past your bedtime, love Blizzard

Games
1

So I was awakened by an automated call from my company’s helpdesk the other night while I was at my in-law’s “beach” place (not sure 3 miles away really counts as a beach place but that’s not the point.)

Imagine if Moviephone called you to tell you that the servers weren’t responding…that’s exactly how this voice sounds…just more computerish.

It starts out like this:

“Hello, this is an urgent message for Spoofy. If you are Spoofy, press 1 to deliver your message!”

So I press 1, then get on the line with the overnight operations desk and get the guy who knows how to solve the problem. After realizing that I’m now wide awake, I curse the dude who’s supposed to be primary on call (I was only the backup!) and load up Wow.

I type in my username and password and Wow says, “Sorry, but we’ve detected a change in your login habits and your account has been locked. Please go change your password.”

So I’m awake enough to want to play Wow a bit but too tired to really understand the instructions which managed to fluster me until the next morning.

And I don’t know whether to be glad they do that or annoyed. I mean, I already have an authenticator. Couldn’t they just have asked me some more verification questions instead of locking me out?

Sigh.

It’s all the stupid hackers fault.

2

Yeah, I’ve had the same problem. I went on a trip out of the country, played WoW, had to change my password. Then went I went home again, it locked me out again and I had to change it back, to the original password. Their system is not very smart.

3

Took me a while to figure out that you were not in fact being called up to fix the wow servers.

With the authenticator you should have no problem fixing the issue quite quickly though. But their algorithm seems strange. When I was in Brisbane I was on the phone with a friend who logged into my account which I had been using just a while earlier, and he logged off and me in again, and my account worked as normal. But when I moved back to Norway, i.e. account had been idle for a few days, and then activated in a new location, I got the same lock you experienced.

The Coin Lock in RIFT is a bit more invasive, but I believe it works quite nicely versus the russians.