Thursday, February 21, 2008

Mobile WoW?

This seems to be big news on a number of sites that I read or podcasts to which I listen. The basic news is that Blizzard is evaluating and working on mobile solutions to allow interaction with WoW. Let's just state for the record, this will not be the full version of the game that's playable on a phone. I'm pretty sure the hardware doesn't exist for this. Instead it is more likely to be a thin client that allows only social interaction (chat) or (limited) auction house usage.

Everything I'm hearing and seeing indicates that people are pretty excited about this one. For me, not so much. I guess my objections really boil down to two major ones.

Objection the First (to rip a page out of Rat's book)

  • I don't need to be that plugged in to WoW. Honestly, this game consumes enough of my life. The only place I'd even consider using such a feature of my phone is on the bus ride to work. And that's the time I use for listening to podcasts and catching up on sites that I've not been able to read earlier (on my Blackberry). So I don't have the time for such a thing, and with the sort of addictive drug that WoW is, I'm sure there are folks worse off than I am. It might not be such a great idea for Blizzard to capitalize on the remaining scraps of your life that are left.
Objection the Second
  • The bigger issue I see is security. Within the last few months, the reports of hacked accounts have been everywhere. Keyloggers, trojans, and other methods abound for getting at your WoW login. And this still happens to folks that are (presumably) careful in their network security and virus protection. Perhaps I'm naive here, but not knowing enough about phone security works makes me think phones are less secure than my own PC. And there doesn't seem to be a whole lot I could do to improve that
So, for me, I'm not excited about Mobile WoW. I don't need to spend even more time on WoW than I already do and I'm unsure about the security of it all.

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