The last 24 hours were interesting. It has been a while since I’ve actively played StarCraft 2 – I’ve finished the campaign on launch and began a second run in higher difficulty (with 38% completion) but other than that, I don’t play the game. I’m not a comparative player, and while I find the SC2 experience very compelling, the high speed high stressed gameplay isn’t for me. I’m the type of RTS player that like to take my time and see everything a faction has to offer. I used to play hours long sessions of Age of Empires 2 and Rise of Nations against multiple AI opponents. I build empires, not frontier bases.
So in order to play HotS I needed to re-download and install the game, which I did right before going to work in the morning, leaving the Blizzard launcher to install the game.
During the day, I’ve got excited about the upcoming launch, especially as twitter exploded with the #SwarmLaunch festivities. Since I was at the office, unable to really do anything with the game, the best I could do was engage in discussion on some Facebook groups of which I’m a member. One of the threads got me wandering about something in my account, so I tried to log into it from my office PC.
What happen? This happen, “due to suspicious activity, this account has been locked.”
You know what the “suspicious activity” is? Logging in from a new computer; this has happen to me before, and every time it does I need to reset my password. Now, people told me it can be fixed if I add the authenticator service to my account, but I refuse to do so. This is because I once had an authenticator for my Star Wars: the Old Republic account, and due to replacing my phone’s ROM, the authenticator was lost and my account locked. In order to unlock it, Bioware / EA require that you make a phone call to their support center, and I’m damn well not going to make an international phone call for that.
So, I’ve lost my faith in authenticator services. Yes, I know that Blizzard has better service than EA. Once my World of Warcraft account was hacked and they fixed it with a simple form I filled and provided a valid driver’s license confirming my identity.
You know who has an even better service? Valve. When you log into Steam on a new computer, a validation code it sent to your email. You just paste it in, problem solved – the “authenticator” is on their end, providing a random validation code every time you switch PCs. And say what you will, my Steam account is much, much more valuable than my Battle.net one.
Now that we passed that, to my second hurdle.
As I said before, I left the launcher to install StarCraft II before I left for work. When I got home, I logged into the game to check that everything is alright, and am greeted by a screen prompting me to create a new character.
Okay, a bit weird, but I continue, only to find out that this is a completely new game profile, without any of my old play history, achievements, rewards and friends. It took me about half an hour to figure out that the launcher placed me on the North American region instead of Europe, and that my profile doesn’t transfer between them.
Later that night I discovered that I’ve downloaded the “English-US” version instead of “English-EU” version, which caused this problem.
Blizzard has added the Global Play feature into the game some time ago and it should allow you to switch regions. But, for the Heart of the Swarm launch, they disable this feature. This is of course so that people in different parts of the world won’t get access to the game before the time is up.
Went to sleep, got up around 1:30 and logged into the game. I didn’t even think that because the game put me in the NA region, I wouldn’t be able to play the game, and was shocked to find out that was the case.
Fortunately, people on the Facebook group posted a link to a thread on Reddit with a fix that restore to ability to switch regions. I got back into Europe, my profile restored to its previous glory, and finally able to play StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm.
P.S. the first 3 missions suck, but more on that in another post.