Monday, August 25, 2014

Blizzards Authenticator

This will be one of my raving moments.

One thing that's been pissing me off quite a while is the usage of authenticators. You all know them those small key chain things that prints a pin code or something like it, to verify you're the owner of the account being used.

I utterly hate that concept and here's why:
Being an old school gamer the nature of ownership with the games I acquire is based on the old thinking that I buy a game, and thereby hold that media or a copy of it to use for my whims and pleasure.
This means I don't believe I be limited by draconian settings like having to authenticate my copy versus a server somewhere to play an offline single player game.
playing an old game should be limited to simple fetching a machine with the needed operating system,and hardware and launch it on that.
I love when the games are able to run in more modern systems, but don't expect Command & Conquer 2, which was made for windows 95 to run in windows 7 64 bit, but it should be able to run a windows 95 computer. Always!

Over the ages various concepts have sprung to stem the time of pirated software in a cold war so to speak, where some producers are more or less keen on having you authenticate yourself versus one of their server.
What I hate is that I have no guarantee that server will remain online. So getting an old game like Neverwinter Night I have a problem on the multi player front as there might be multiple servers, but they need to be verified via a Bioware server that has been taken offline a decade ago. Technically I think it's a gamespy server, ad there's fixes for it.

Recently I've unpacked Star Craft. Including Broodwar. A game from 97, and it runs decently with the 1.16 patch from Blizzard. The reason I pulled this out was on a notation from my kid which loves Pylons and consistently needs to build additional pylons. He's 8 now not speaking English, but he's currently going for it.

This made me look into Star Craft 2 again, which is one of the games i have on hold, and the reason for this is that you needed the authenticator to play the game. This they didn't quite tell you and most people I know found out after getting the game that they needed this thing.
Sure they all got one, they are next to free, and they already payed the 20€ for the game. So it was just a minor added cost. But that didn't cut it, then you needed to register with Blizzards gameclient thing called Origin, which I think also was the thing that made me back away from Star Wars Knights of The Old Republic.
At that time I just gotten hold of Dawn of Wars in physical copy, and having quite a problem activating it via not just steam but also Microsoft Live Gaming system.

You see it adds up, slowly they are restricting you further and further, I've noticed sms messages with login codes for games. Come on, why should the gaming company have any contact with my phone number and where would you draw the line.


Back to Blizzard and Star Craft 2, it took me 3 hours searching their support site to find any indication whether this authenticator was still a requirement for playing the games, and it seems this is no longer the case.
In the case where I would feel a need for added security with my accounts, of course they are wonderful options. But it is addons, and not part of the minimum requirements.

These producers seem to fail their community communications, which is why I rarely deal with them.
As an opposed option I often recommend www.gog.com which are very bad for you wallet, but all their content is under the concept of: You buy this, you play it to your hearts content, we'll even help you. And if we should ever go bankrupt, download a copy you can use for ever.
Last thing I got in there was the Total Annihilation packages (of which I have 20 legal copies on disk)

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