The Ancient Gaming Noob

And Now I REALLY Want That SWTOR Authenticator July 22, 2011

Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, Need for Speed World, Star Wars: The Old Republic.
Tags: Account Security, Lord of Ultima, SWTOR Authenticator
22 comments

I held out for a bit.

I played coy all morning.

But by the time I was eating my lunch, I decided I would wait no longer.

I had to pre-order Star Wars: The Old Republic.

I went with the standard edition, via Amazon.com.

$150 for the Collector’s Edition was too much, and I didn’t even want to start with Origin, EA’s attempt to clone Valve’s digital distribution platform Steam, so the digital deluxe edition was off the list as well.

Amazon emailed me my pre-order code immediately, and I ran over to the SWTOR site to plug it in.

EA/BioWare is working a scarcity angle with SWTOR, claiming they will only let so many players into the game initially, and of course those who pre-order get in first… allegedly in the order in which you registered.

Or that could all be BS.  Or maybe I just dreamed it.  I cannot seem to find the source for that at the moment, so we’ll see.

Anyway, I went there to activate my code, but I had to stop for a minute and think about my account there.  I knew I had made one, but had to try to make the association in my head with which email address I used.  And then I had to try to remember which seed and pattern I used for the password.

Getting old sucks.  Memory loss is a real hazard.

But I figured it out, quicker than I thought I would.  Association games in your head help.

I put in the code and was registered.

I was now officially standing in virtual line for the game.  Amazon says I should get my game box by January 4, 2012.

The day went on.  Work was accomplished.  Eventually I went home.

Later that evening I went to go check on my wee empire in Lord of Ultima. (World 31 now, one of the small continent worlds.)

I am not so concerned about LoU getting hacked, so I told it to remember my password at some point in the past.  It has its own password, so even if somebody could get that, it would not impact anything else.

However, LoU seemed to think my password was now incorrect.

I tried typing it in again, just in case, but no luck.

So I tried to get it to do a password reset.  It sent me the email, I followed the link, and it totally failed to reset my password.  It gave me a errors about it being the wrong account.

Odd.

Still, I thought, maybe LoU was down or having some issue.  I was not too worried.

I decided to check this by logging into Need for Speed: World.  EA let me use the account I created for LoU to play NFSW, so it was the same ID and password.

NFSW also rejected my password.

And, as with LoU, trying to reset the password failed with similar errors.

Now I was beginning to wonder if my account had been hacked.

I was sitting there looking at my inbox and the password reset emails on the list, when something in my brain noticed that they were right above the registration confirmation email from SWTOR.

I had not realized that I had used the same email address for both until that moment.

I went back to LoU and tried the password I had used earlier in the day to get into the SWTOR account management page.

And it worked.

Which was, to me, disturbing.

First, at some point since I created my account for SWTOR, EA decided to merge everything into a single account scheme.

That I do not want.

Second, for whatever reason, their system rules decided that my SWTOR account information should override my previous information, without telling me, which seems to me to be at least a somewhat dubious way to run a railroad.

Now, of course, I am stuck.  My pre-order code has been registered, the accounts have been merged, and now I log into a throw-away web game with the same account information as SWTOR.

Which made me go from wanting one of those SWTOR authenticators at some future date to REALLY wanting one NOW.  Or at least on launch day.

But not so much that I would go back and pay $150 for the collector’s edition.  That wall is still too high for me to consider climbing.

And I know that, at some point, EA is likely to sell the authenticators directly.  But I remember how that went with Blizzard, where they were out of stock for months at a time, or how things went with Square Enix and FFXI, where they up and stopped selling them at one point.

So I will wait and wonder about what other accounts EA has linked up to my SWTOR account.