World of Warcraft requiring Battle.net registration Nov. 11

By Tor Thorsen, GameSpotPosted Oct 13, 2009 4:26 pm PT

All players of MMORPG must log on via Blizzard's online gaming service starting next month.

During August's BlizzCon 2009, Blizzard vice president of game design Rob Pardo laid out his vision for the future of Battle.net. After nearly six years without major changes, the online service is in the midst of a major overhaul--an overhaul that was partly to blame for Starcraft II being delayed until 2010.

Soon, Battle.net will be giving impatient Blizzard fans another reason to grumble. Blizzard has announced that, starting November 11, World of Warcraft will be accessible only through Battle.net. According to a post on the game's official Web site, players who do not have a Battle.net account must register with the service--at no charge--before they can join the 11-million-plus players in the massively multiplayer online role-playing game.

"A few months ago, we unveiled the Battle.net account, our new way for players to log in to World of Warcraft and future Blizzard games, sign up for upcoming beta tests, shop the online Blizzard Store, and more with just one username and password," read the Blizzard announcement. "This was just the first step in the rollout of the brand-new Battle.net; in the future, players will be able to use Battle.net to participate in cross-realm chat in World of Warcraft, create real-life friends lists, communicate across different games, and a whole lot more."

To compensate WOW players for the inconvenience of having to register with Battle.net, Blizzard will give existing accounts who sign up with the service an in-game penguin pet. After November 11, new WOW players will have to sign up through Battle.net to access the MMORPG. To answer user inquiries, Blizzard has posted a FAQ with more details on the process of--and reasons behind--the mandatory merger.

88 Comments

  • Captinkidd

    Posted Oct 17, 2009 5:15 am PT

    I think Mr. Chilly is worth 10 minutes of your time to actually go to the website and just merge the mailing address with your WOW account, plus everyone is doing it (peer pressure)

  • SeargantGoat

    Posted Oct 16, 2009 8:47 am PT

    How big of a hassle is it? Not very big, I'd wager, and it's a one shot deal.

  • AceCometh

    Posted Oct 16, 2009 12:06 am PT

    A Penguin pet is all we get for going through that hassle? Really?

  • Vulpis

    Posted Oct 15, 2009 3:11 pm PT

    @majere613
    Indeed--I mean, the loss of LAN-play isn't that important to me *personally* as I'm all about the single-player campaign, but as far as I can tell I'm in the minority of SC players. :-) It seems really stupid for Blizzard to alienate a major portion of their SC1 market like this. :-/

  • Vorodor21

    Posted Oct 15, 2009 2:47 pm PT

    @FoeCrusher

    This isn't about them wanting more control, and this isn't their version of Steam. Playing their games that have offline versions shouldn't be affected at all. WoW is a different animal because you can only play it online. They're simply consolidating their online versions under one log-in.

    People that are expecting some sort of apology for the inconvenience need to return to reality. This whole "the customer is always right" has gotten way out of hand. We're lucky to even be getting an in-game pet, Blizz could have just made the change and not given out anything. Take your free penguin and stop complaining.

  • Megamanx266

    Posted Oct 15, 2009 10:49 am PT

    @FoeCrusher

    How is this in ANY way pushing advertising? Granted any company wants to generate as much revenue as possible with as little risk to themselves or their customers (unless they have no soul like Craptivision).

    I'm sure you'll still be able to play SC2 and D3 offline, you just wouldn't be able to go online if your internet was down

  • FoeCrusher

    Posted Oct 15, 2009 8:12 am PT

    Face it they want more control, they want to be able to push advertising and they are looking for ways to generate more revenue. Downloadable content is the future of all gaming and they aren’t going to let a little annoyance like accounts getting hacked stop them from going that route. I also see these portals as a way of limiting piracy. If you have to log into Battlenet to play the game it adds one more layer that has to be altered by hacked copies.

    My biggest concern is that when my connection is down that I can’t play the games I want even if they aren’t online games.

    Foe

  • majere613

    Posted Oct 15, 2009 6:04 am PT

    @Vulpis
    Hallejujah Brother! I know SCII lost at least 4 sales amongst my LAN posse, and I doubt we're the only ones.

  • Swampthing

    Posted Oct 15, 2009 5:10 am PT

    Really now... who DIDN'T see this coming months ago when they began offering the option? It was pretty obvious to me that Blizz was going to consolidate everything sooner or later. Now the time has come...

  • 02sfraser

    Posted Oct 14, 2009 11:28 pm PT

    i changed my WoW account to battle.net about a month or 2 ago. can't remember why i just did. only thing that changes is you use your e-mail address instead of a username and you can access everything blizzard has to offer with that one account. it just makes things easier for Blizzard and only takes a couple of minutes to change. it's not big deal

  • Leonagard

    Posted Oct 14, 2009 11:19 pm PT

    well I didn't see anything wrong with that... and they will take care off issues if those come up... don't worries btw Im not playing it anymore...

  • Sliveron

    Posted Oct 14, 2009 8:08 pm PT

    The biggest thing I see this doing is actually PROTECTING the game world. Users will no longer be able to sell accounts, Correct?

  • NuKkU

    Posted Oct 14, 2009 6:50 pm PT

    dude they will lose alot of business i think people who stop playing the games for a few months will come back to it and be like WTF

  • PhoenixHawk06

    Posted Oct 14, 2009 4:48 pm PT

    lol whiners. A MINUTE OF MY LIFE IS GONE, BLIZZARD. GONE.

  • Vulpis

    Posted Oct 14, 2009 4:21 pm PT

    Heh. There *is* a lot of whining here--but so far, I've only seen two particularly valid complaints--and one of them's not so much about WoW players at all.

    1) Account security. Definitely a 'putting all your eggs in one basket' thing here, even more so than on Steam (though I'd be rather upset to have my game library from Steam stolen. The achievements, I don't care so much about). OTOH, this *may* be, as some claim, a bit of greed on Blizzard's part to sell those authentication keys...

    2) The removal of LAN play in favor of requiring internet access. This..pretty much kills one of the popular points of Starcraft (as well as many FPS games), the ability to have 'LAN parties' where everyone's in the same physical location, playing over the LAN and most importantly *not needing outside access*, just the routers. Internet-only kills this, since in order to host something approximating a LAN party now, not only do you need to make sure that the site has an accessible internet connection, that connection would have to have sufficient bandwidth to support all the players playing with minimal/no slowdown--which rather severely limits the number of people that can actually participate--and splitting up the site defeats the entire purpose of the LAN party in the first place. Granted, there *is* some reason to understand Blizzard's 'Waaah, but most of them will be using warez copies anyway!' stand, but still...

  • majere613

    Posted Oct 14, 2009 3:30 pm PT

    I've long since left WoW behind, but this really does sound like a security problem waiting to happen. Doubtless at some point soon we'll be told Diablo III requires Battle.net too.
    I also have to wonder whether the chat functions will effectively allow cross-faction chat, or if that will continue to be blocked.

  • cyborg100000

    Posted Oct 14, 2009 2:52 pm PT

    "as long as it's not running in the background taking resources away from the game, I could really care less. But if performance drops because of it, I will be pissed."

    Same.

  • J0nGalt

    Posted Oct 14, 2009 2:34 pm PT

    Big freaking deal. You need to sign up for battle.net. Waaaaaaah! Steam is an amazing service and I hope Bnet is as successful and user friendly.

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