Jesus I swear I'm not trying to act like a self-entitled prick, Christ. At least I'm not like pirating the game and playing it on one of those free servers that are incredibly easy to find. And really just the thing that i was complaining about is that the free version wasn't available from the start, only the 10 dollar keychain, and now that its free I'm of course using it, I just feel like they're already charging 15 dollars a month per person, I just sort of feel like as much security as they can manage at a cost effective solution for playing their program should've been part of that from the start, which is the dial-in authenticator now.
Part of this is that I'm being grumbly because of the amount of ways they just want people to pay. 15 dollars a month for access, 40 dollars per expansion pack, numerous optional services for transferring characters, changing names/factions etc., which yes I realize are entirely optional but these are hardly micro-transactions, 25 bucks per character move for instance. That all is fine, i just feel like account security shouldn't be an optional paid service like changing your orc to a goblin.
I realize that they are a business, but businesses also run off of things like customer service, which I suppose you could argue that Blizzard is large enough and has enough players to make one person's complaint meaningless, but I mean, I work for a large, soulless, retail company that sells video games and they actually do try and come up with better ways for taking care of the customer that we don't charge extra for, for instance recent improvements to tracking customers information in case of lost receipts, better ways for tracking individual employee customer experience ratings, improvements to our loyalty program (which for the most part are actual improvements).
And obviously Blizzard is doing this too, since there is now a free version of extra account security an option, which I was never complaining about. What I was complaining about was before, when you're only option was to pay an extra 10 dollars on top of what your were already paying to the service. Now that they have the free service they obviously saw it as something they could implement cheaply and effectively, and I respect as a company for doing it. But up until this point I just opted out of paying the extra money as a discerning customer, which was my choice.
Also Linds the phone I have is just a normal cell phone, not a smart phone, so at least i don't have to worry about an update deleting my information, its just the dial-in authenticator.
