so blizzard closed my account (not banned)

[Nekrus]

Not trying to be insulting but what 18 year old cant use a simple scanner? Don't most printers come packaged as printer/scanner/copier?

[Shoekron]

So here's the deal.

Yep, Bliz closed your account and is making you jump through some hoops to get your account back online. You might even choose to not do it! And do you know something - that is partially Blizzard's goal.

See, Blizzard doesn't like bot players, gold sellers, hackers, any of that any more than you guys do, and the villains of these pictures use compromised accounts to do their dastardly deeds. You know all that of course. What you may not have considered is that Bliz has run any number of metrics on the TYPES of account compromise, and the types of ACCOUNTS that have been compromised. There are trends in types of player, internet behavior, and likelihood of account compromise. Guess what! Based on statistical analysis, there are accounts out there that are actually unprofitable to keep on the books, based on their impact on other accounts or Blizzard's bottom line through time wasted on chasing down hackers and botnets.

Of course, Blizzard can't ban you for being a lying 15-year-old who spends half his time surfing porn sites and his Blizzard profile on the same browser with no security systems going - there's no way they can know that prior to the account being created. What they CAN do is set up barriers to re-entry for accounts found vulnerable to compromise. This will ideally cause one of two things to happen:

1. You quit. Your account is no longer providing Blizzard with money, but you already gave them the box purchase money and you're not going to negatively impact other, more profitable users with a dead account.

2. You jump through the painful hoops and re-activate your account. In doing so you hopefully learn something about the importance of online security and intelligent decision-making, and you start being more responsible with your surfing habits and what exactly you're doing online.

[lordjust]

they closed it just because they thought it would be safe to do that because ive had my account hacked before that. well to get it back appernatly i have to print out a sheet and fill it out and mail it to them or scan it and email it to them. why such a hassle ? couldnt i just fill it out online or something. who here thinks this is stupid as fuck? i mean im not a huge fan of wow anymore but leveling is at least always fun with a friend and pvp is always fun like dueling

Did you try to write the support and ask them if you can send them the infos through the online support page? When my account was hacked I was asked to do the same and I told them, that I don't have a printer or a scanner at hand and they said that I can write the questions+answers in the online support page and attach a photo of my ID.

It took like 1h to get my account back and that's including making a new email account, full scan for malware, quick virus scan, chatting with the support and everything.

Also as a tip. Use an authenticator. There are 0 confirmed cases where an account was hacked with an attached authenticator. Or activate the mobile service thing they introduced some months ago. When there are suspicious activities on your account and it gets locked you get a SMS and you can send a code to Blizzard to unlock it.

[Elysia]

Closing this. The original purpose of the thread wasn't much more than an "everybody agree with me" topic, and the responses are mostly people just attacking each other. Plus nobody here can actually help you with your problem. Take it up with Blizz.