Whilst it’s quite possible they’re up to no good, it’s also possible that someone is fraudulently using your payment details in Irvine to create a new Blizzard account. It sounds like your bank already blocked your card, which is good, but they may also be able to block payments to Blizzard when the card is unblocked.
I thought about that, but it’s an entirely new card. Even if they had the AN, SC, Card number, they’d still need the new expiry date and security number. I don’t think these are required for business, however.
Is there any chance your new card details got leaked from somewhere you used them? Using stolen details to sign up to something like that and, say, making a pre-order, would be a good way for a crook to validate them without a transaction appearing on your statement.
If it’s not that, then Blizzard definitely have some awkward questions to answer. Good luck!
I suppose there’s a chance but it’s not even my main payment method. I primarily use an entirely different card from a different vendor for the majority of my purchases today.
I’m also wondering what a fraudulent customer would need to do to warrant a test charge. I can’t think of anything an end user would do to invoke an attempt of $0.00 on their first transaction with my details.
Pre-ordering something would usually cause a $0.00 transaction to confirm the card details are valid. It would be a ‘pre-auth’ transaction where the merchant reserves an amount on the card for payment at a later date, when they ship the item. If a fraudster makes a pre-order they xan validate that the card details are valid, then cancel the order, usually leaving the victim none-the-wiser. In your case, the bank noticed the transaction and notified you, but that seems to be rare. Once the fraudster knows the details are valid, they can sell them on.
It’s just a theory, and unless your bank and Blizzard work together to track the transaction, why it happened, and who instigated it, its going to be difficult to get to the bottom of it.
Slime Rancher for $2 is 100% worth it! It’s one of those games where gameplay becomes kind of meandering once you’ve seen the sights and built the things, but it’s a very unique experience.
My impression of it is that you can achieve good performance in UE5, but you won’t be using the newer tools for that in most games. Many of the newer tools, like Nanite, comes with a large up front cost, but scales well after that. So you can make a beautiful game that runs stable 30 fps with some effort, but reaching 60 or 120 is trickier when using the newer systems.
Since there are so many different systems in Unreal 5 it’s also a beast to understand. Understanding a system is in many cases a key to performance optimization. Performance is also something that spans most disciplines, adding more people that need to understand it.
UE5 is targeting capabilities of newer hardware, compared to UE4, so it tends to push the limits more.
UE4 has had a lot more time being refined than UE5, so it is understandable that it performs better.
Making a game look nice and run well on newest hardware and do the same for lower end hardware takes a lot of effort. You may need to fall back to older systems with different visuals and spending time on getting it to look similar enough. Sometimes two systems may even not be feasible to switch between, so then in most cases the newer system with better quality takes precedence.
I could go on about this at length but I mostly want to communicate that people underestimate how hard it really is to make a game that is a good investment, fun, beautiful and performant. There is always a balance to be struck.
It was the only story ever that has pulled me in completely. I wasn’t just playing it, I was living it. It took me 2 more days to come down to earth after finishing it.
Cyberpunk 2077 for me, it has everything, an amazing story with great characters, fantastic gameplay, a banger soundtrack, and an interesting world that’s fun to explore and feels like a real place.
bin.pol.social
Ważne