Friday, June 12, 2009

Warcraft Away From Home, or "How to Get Your Fix When You Don't Have Your Game"

So my mom's going to be busy taking pain meds for the next week and won't need her laptop (I hope). She did, however, want to see both WoW and Sims 3, and I'd like to show them to her. So I installed Sims 3 on her laptop and it worked okay, and WoW takes about the same resources. I'll be interested to see if it works better or worse than the Sims, if both are on a low graphics setting.

Anyway, I'll let you know how my mom likes it, but for now I'll give you a brief tutorial on how to get the game on a computer if you didn't bring your disks and don't have your code or anything.
  1. Go to the official website.
  2. Head to Account Management (requires login).
  3. Find Account Information, scroll down to "Account Type."
  4. Click "Download."
  5. Choose Universal (not Trial) and pick PC or Mac.
  6. Click through the "I Agree" stuff.
  7. Do something else for a few hours while it downloads/installs.
  8. Wait through patches.
  9. Play!
By downloading through your account management, you don't need to put in your game code because it's stored in your account settings. All you need is your login information (and authenticator if you have one, or you can call support and disable it). The only downside is how long the download takes. But it's a small price to pay for SUPERAWESOMEFUN away from home.

<3

4 comments:

  1. Actually, you don't need no code to install the game. The code is only used to create the account.

    But, how do you get the authenticator removed without your code? Does that work? That would render the authenticator useless.

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  2. I'm pretty sure you get the authenticator removed by calling the Blizzard service line and giving them your question answer (like mother's maiden name). And I doubt they wouldn't let you reapply it after you get home, especially since one Authenticator can be used for multiple accounts.

    ReplyDelete
  3. That would be pretty shit because it removes the additional security of the authenticator to the level of the stupid secret question... which for most people could probably be found in the Internet.

    Accceptable solutions would be:

    a) Your CD key which CANNOT be viewed from within the account page.
    b) A copy of your ID card (or whatever US citizens use to identify themself :-)

    Using an authenticator is called "two level security" because you have two levels:

    1) Something you know (your password)
    2) Something you have (your authenticator)

    If you can, by a small phone call, convert the second layer into "something else you know" (your secret question), you did not gain any additional security, just the illusion of more security.

    A real two level authentication would require you to replace the something you have (authenticator) with "something else you have" (your ID, your CD/game box).

    I have never tried because you can't get the authenticator in Europe and I wouldn't use it anyway because you can't get it removed during the weekend or night and I think, for me, the chance that the stupid thing brakes is higher then the chance that I get hacked.

    ReplyDelete
  4. First off, Birdfall, I just have to say I love your blog, because you're mostly interested in the exact same things I'm interested in for wow.

    I wanted to add that if one has issues installing wow with Vista, this can be a solution. I tried and tried to put wow on my new laptop with the CDs but I remembered this after reading this post and, voila, no issues installing wow on a vista laptop if I just download it all.

    ReplyDelete

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