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.
If you use the same e-mail, I believe EA will link up every EA game you’ve ever registered for with that e-mail including things like Dragon Age which aren’t online games but require you to log in to access all the game’s features. I think it’s a terrible idea, and probably another thing we can blame Blizzard for setting the precedent for with their Battle.net master accounts.
Yeah, EA is really pushing the “omg, get the game while you can, 1st come 1st serve” angle pretty hard. I had to laugh when I purchased a pre-order through Origin and was told my “request” would be processed and if they had enough copies I’d get an approval e-mail. It’s a digital pre-order. How, exactly, could they run out?
“Crap, Bill, we’re out of bits! Turn off the pre-orders! We can’t take any more until we get a new shipment of bits from China!”
:P
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@Warsyde – I think SOE actually beat Blizz to the punch on that “one account, many games” angle. Blizz just went a step further by making your login name your email address. And now EA has all of that, and it is lumping together games a varying types and, no doubt, of varying levels of internal security.
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Similar feelings here. It didn’t take me long to decide to pre-order SW:TOR. Most of the delay (and quite a bit of time afterward) was spent having allergic reactions to EA’s vague, incomprehensible plans for incorporating all accounts and passwords into a badly explained borg collective.
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@Wilhelm, That’s true, although I have multiple SOE games scattered over multiple Station accounts, and I was never forced to merge anything together.
Admittedly I could have used an empty Battle.net account for the WoW merge rather than my real one, but either way I had to use a real e-mail account as my login :P
That’s one trend I really wish companies would buck, and in this case EA is a worse offender as you could lose proper access to even single player games!
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Bastards to pull this “scarcity” crap at the end of the month. Some of us are on budgets. Grr.
Hopefully waiting a week or so to purchase won’t kill my chances of playing at launch.
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Hopefully they’ll provide authenticator apps before or at launch. I’d rather not mess with a key fob.
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I’m going to pre-order SWTOR when I am good and ready, not when EA tells me to. If I can’t get in the game, no biggie, I can always play DAoC
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The key fobs are made by the same company, couldn’t you just get the seed for one and use it for all your games?
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@UFTimmy – As part of an earlier post about the SOE authenticator, I asked the same question. I got an email directly from somebody at VASCO, the maker of the system, saying that the fob ID on the back of the unit was exclusive to a specific implementation.
So despite the fact that SOE, Blizzard, CCP, Square Enix, and now EA all use the same basic VASCO Digipass GO 6 unit, you cannot just get one and use it with all of the systems.
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NFSW acronym is a little too close to NSFW. I wondered what sort of account you were talking about for a sec there. ><
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When I registered my pre-order key I noticed my account was associated with Mass Effect 2 and a Battlefield game. One on PC, one on Xbox. I don’t know how they got associated, especially the X-box game.
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I seem to recall the EA account being a pita with Warhammer. Something about a Warhammer account, or a Mythic acocunt, and an EA account from when they bought UO, and the accounts had different names, and I had to do some things in one account and some things in the other account… I think if I wanted to play Warhammer again it would require an archeological expedition,
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More outstanding work by a large gaming company. Merging without warning you first is simply pathetic. I can’t think of anything nice to say about this.
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Hey, at least you guys aren’t in the “red zones” and will actually get to PLAY at launch
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Weakling! *sigh*
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I have a tale for you, and it’s a crappy one specifically about BLIZZARD’s totally retarded (apologies to genuinely retarded people) registration process.
Yesterday morning I received an email from Blizzard Battle.net on my personal email account thanking me for joining their service, and that if I wanted to continue using their awesome service all I need do is click on verify link and zoom, I would be able to use extra awesome features. The propaganda threshold of the email text alone was hardly bearable.
The problem is I never signed up for battle.net, and the email was addressed to someone named ‘zhang’.
Sort of aggravated that this happened I figured I would go ahead and approve the account then log in and disable it.
Big Mistake.
I clicked the link and battle.net thanked me for approving the account, then I went over to their new password retrieval form and ZING, it REQUIRES your First Name, Last Name and email address used to register the account before proceeding with the password recovery process. Trouble is the email did NOT send the Last Name used to register the account.
Yeah.
So after grousing about crappy Blizzard and clicking around their site for 15 minutes trying to find a better online solution, I fired off an email to their billing@blizzard.com detailing the exact issue in diplomatic terms.
About an hour later I received one of those nifty automated replies, kindly informing me that I need to actually use their web site to resolve the issue (already tried that) and that, quote:
** PLEASE UNDERSTAND THAT THIS ADDRESS IS NO LONGER MONITORED AND WILL NOT RECEIVE AN EMAIL RESPONSE **
Seriously, WTF. Why is it on your site as a valid email to submit account support requests if you are NO LONGER MONITORING IT? WTF.
So now I have someone named ‘zhang’ running around with my fully activated battle.net account, to do what, I have no idea, but there it is.
Again, WTF.
Today, I tried to call Blizzard support directly as apparently this is the only way I am ever going to resolve the issue and get my *personal* email released from their system and received the wonderful ‘wait time is 45 minutes’. I didn’t have that kind of time, especially on my mobile plan, so I hung up. I bet the queue was full of a good 20+ other people with the same problem I was having. I am now not looking forward to a 60+ minute hold time call with Blizzard on Google Voice this coming work week. Joy.
So, in summary, Blizzard’s registration system is HORRIBLY INSECURE:
1. Blizzard does not TRULY authenticate an email account. It semi-activates an account, regardless who you say you are.
2. Blizzard sends an activation email that does not allow the actual email recipient to recover the account access or password after being deceived into confirming the account assuming they might be able to recover the true account access.
Obviously some smarty pants somewhere discovered this amazing hole in the system and is probably exploiting it en masse, to what end I have no idea.
Anyway, thanks Wilhelm for covering this topic today. I don’t actively blog anymore so I was debating whether to rant on my Twitter stream, or dig up your most recent Blizzard post to tell my tale, but lo and behold, this seems to be just the tip of the iceberg.
I’ll let you know how it ends out this week, if I find some sort of resolution.
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“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.”
You mean Stephen Reid’s tweet? “Your #SWTOR Early Game Access start time is solely based on when you redeem the Pre-Order Code, not based on edition.”
http://swtor.gamingfeeds.com/2011/07/22/early-game-access-dependent-upon-pre-order-code-redeption/
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@ ellori – yeah that. And Since Keen is on about it as well, I guess I did not dream it.
Sometimes when I am focused on one thing and something else odd happens, some part of my brain captures it while the rest is “wait, what?”
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It was also in the “buy me buy me eat soylent green reproduce watch TV” email they sent out. I know because my memory is also emulating Swiss Cheese these days and I had to go searching for it.
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More outstanding work by a large gaming company. Merging without warning you first is simply pathetic. I can’t think of anything nice to say about this.
Best regards,
Peter
http://diablo3area.com/diablo3-barbarian-skills.php
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Umm what about Adroid/iOS authenticators?
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I really hope they do an app for the android phones like my blizz authenticater i use and it was free never mind having to buy one when i have a 450 dollar phone can do it also
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