Sinjo

Blizzard have decided that it’s time to force people to merge their World of Warcraft accounts into their battle.net accounts. In itself I believe this is a sane idea, and possibly one that is overdue (the option to do so has been available for quite a while, they only just started forcing it onto users). In itself this has caused a few problems for people. I’ve had a few reports from friends of the site giving some sort of error whenever they attempt the merge, and I’ve been completely unable to access the site on a couple of occasions. Overall, it seems that after a bit of persistence people have managed to perform the merge and log into their WoW account.

My second gripe (and only other so far) is the ridiculous way that account security is handled. Something which is probably never an issue for most people just went straight to the top of my list. It turns out that if you forget the answer to the security question on your account there is no way to change it. That’s correct, even as an authenticated user you can’t change this setting. In itself I wouldn’t have cared about this. I’m not a moron, I can remember my password (although apparently not my secret answer, yes I do appreciate the irony in this). However, in their infinite wisdom they have decided to require this answer to change the email address associated with the account. This leaves me in a rather crappy situation. My account is associated to an email address that I’m trying to move away from and I’m being denied the option to do so.

What infuriated me at this point was the response I received to my support request. It contained the following: “The problem you were experiencing is now resolved and you should be able to use all the features of your account now.” For some terrible reason this got my hopes up, but it turns out it was some canned bullshit. The website has not been changed to allow this, and I’m still in the same predicament. I’ve sent a reply, but I don’t hold a great deal of hope for it getting a proper response. If it carries on like this I’ll give them a call and see if their phone support is any better.

I’ll write more when there’s some advance in the situation, but for now it’s a case of waiting.

With the dust settling on another season of Formula 1, I have one thing on my mind which I certainly wasn’t expecting. After the unfortunate injury that Timo Glock suffered during qualifying in Japan, Toyota drafted Kamui Kobayashi in from his usual (albeit currently inactive due to the in-season ban on testing) role to drive in the last two races of the season. On the whole, there hasn’t been a great deal of success with this type of move this year. Both drivers that Ferrari chose to replace the injured Massa (Luca Badoer and Giancarlo Fisichella, in that order) struggled to get anywhere. Badoer was clearly more suited to his testing role, and Fisichella simply couldn’t adjust to the Ferrari having arrived from the Force India team (which to me seemed like a rather large gamble, and a step in the wrong direction for Fisi).

It seems that Kobayashi decided that this trend didn’t apply to him, and brought the car home 9th (Brazil) and 6th (Abu Dhabi) for his two races, both times ahead of his team mate, Jarno Trulli (although Trulli managed to cause chaos on the first lap in Brazil, and didn’t finish as a result). The results by themselves are impressive, and aside from some youthful exuberance in taking Nakajima’s front wing off, his driving showed that he was worthy of those results. He fought with the best of them (including our new champion, Button) and often looked an old hand. It would be foolish to disregard Trulli’s experience, and it remains clear that there are lessons to be learned for Kobayashi, yet I can’t help but feel that he’s already managed to show Trulli up.

With a bit of luck we’ll get to see how it plays out after the winter break, however it seems the young aspirant may be on the verge of having his F1 drive pulled out from under his feet. There seem to be early indications that Toyota will be withdrawing from F1 (usual reasons, lack of return in terms of success rate and HQ wanting to scale back their participation due to the economic climate), which could spell the end for young Kamui. If he’s going to race at all next year he’ll either need to be picked up by another team or get some sort of new sponsorship deal to continue his racing in GP2.

His other option, returning to Japan to work in his father’s sushi restaurant, is a lot less glamorous and would certainly be a shameful waste of talent. For the moment it’s a waiting game which may end up with Kobayashi searching for any team who’ll keep him in the sport.

UPDATE: It’s official then, we’ve lost Toyota. With a bit of luck we’ll have a Sauber run team appearing out of the also withdrawing BMW.