It’s a fairly nebulous number, it’s going to be different for each individual, and Dunbar was only positing an approximate relationship between brain size and group size. Even if humans can manage 150 or more relationships, it makes sense to keep your group smaller than that to allow for external relationships too.
Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist, found a relationship between primate brain size and average social group size, and extrapolated that to humans, giving a comfortable group size of around 150 people, known as Dunbar’s number. If you work on the principal that that would be about the average size of a tribe in an unstressed hunter society, it would seem quite pkausible that a hunting group would be around 50 people. It’s large enough to take down pretty much anything you’d want to hunt, and small enough to coordinate efficiently.
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.
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!
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.
Fair, stating a time-to-live when you’re paying might make some people think twice. At this point though, I think people need to just not be paying unless they get to keep it permanently. Paying for access to the online portion is fine, but the rest should keep working and you should be able to get your data out of the developer’s system.
If people stopped renting games developers would start selling them again. Until then, the incentive is for them to keep pulling this nonsense.
There’s a difference between a game having online elements, such as a MMO, and games that require a connection just so they can keep charging you. Even in the first case though, you should own the client, and ideally it either has a single player mode, or the developer releases the code for a basic server when they shut it down.