End of An Era

Today I pressed the button on my Blizzard hardware token and nothing happened. For an hour I sat there mashing the button before I finally came to the realization that like everything else in old World of Warcraft, it’s gone.

The tokens were made by Vasco and I had gotten mine back in 2009 when a wave of stolen accounts washed over the game. Even some officers in my guild had their accounts hacked several times. Seeing naked characters standing around Ironforge was the badge of shame that the player did something stupid to get their account stolen. Their character was naked because the hacker had vendored and sharded all their endgame gear and transferred the gold and spoils to another character for profit.

In most cases, accounts were stolen due to downloading compromised add-ons that contained keyloggers. Back in those days, there was no Battlenet, so the only thing to secure accounts was an old fashioned password and that’s it. So accounts were easily stolen and banks wiped clean. Stealing accounts got so bad, Blizzard started shipping hardware tokens and in 2009, I bought the Blizzard token for $6.50 and a second one for another account an old guildie who quit WoW gave me, to protect both accounts. Luckily, my accounts never got stolen.

Chances are its just the battery that needs replacement, but the case is sonic welded tight and it’s not worth destroying the case just to replace the battery. I figured its been dying for a few years now because it no longer quickly generated codes anymore. Pressing the button already took many taps and it had been that way for years.

The lifespan of the tokens are 7 years and mine lasted 15, so I can’t get mad for $6.50. It did its job for its time and Blizzard has mobile authenticators now which are more reliable since they can’t be lost and can’t die, and can be backed up unlike like the hardware tokens.

But now it comes to an end. I traveled all over the country with this token as I took my laptop to play WoW wherever I roamed. It generated its last code 2 weeks ago and it’s final resting place will be on top of my other WoW relics, never to be used again.