Should Players Know So Much About Other Players?
One of my Bright Hub writers recently wrote a very interesting article: WoW Character History.
What was most interesting was the sheer wealth of information that is available to players about OTHER players. History of guilds joined and left, gear, last time logged on, and more. Upon reading this article, I was actually shocked and would not want this much information about my characters available to other characters.
Some of these concerns were first raised when WoW went like with the WoW Armory. Blizzard even mocked it in one of their April Fools web pages. That mocking was out of place though when you look at how the armory has evolved. With the invention of Gearscore (a user addon that creates an actual, exact, numerical score for someone’s gear) it became possible for web sites to farm Armory data and develop minimum gearscores for certain instances or content. This in turn affected player perceptions, who would then run the user add on in game (or when looking up someone’s armory data) to decide if they were willing to team with someone. It even goes further than that – arguments on official forums would often devolve into someone looking up someone else’s guild or gear and using that as evidence they were a know-nothing “n00b.” This is just scratching the surface – I am sure readers here have even more examples of such uses.
It seems to me that MMOs are making more and more information about players and characters available to other players. Does anyone else think this is a bad way to go?
Blizzard and Facebook have still not learned their lessons when it comes to privacy. I wonder if really all bigheads at Blizzard are so ignorant when it comes to matters of privacy.
Real ID is at least optional, but they can’t stop it. Every company seems to need their own private social network nowadays. Usually only with ON/OFF option: Either you are part of the network or not. Privacy settings? What is that? So you either share all info about you and your char. When you played what for how long. What you exactly did. Statistical data for everyone that is your friend, or well, for everyone in many cases.
I do not plan to play Starcraft 2 and I don’t play WoW either. I am quite interested in Diablo 3, and how they will handle privacy matters will be a deciding factor for me. It seems you will be identified over your Battle.net account.
I’m not fond of WOW to begin with, but with this much information public I flat out wouldn’t play the game. Guild history in particular in such a group oriented game is a major drama IIlama. I”m pretty open about guild history and such when asked but the idea of being chosen/excluded based on that before even meeting a group is very bothersome.
I find the whole guild history part kinda creepy. The gear thing is lame and the way it affects gameplay and grouping is hugely negative. But the lifetime history of guilds joined and left is kinda stalkerish.
It’s just Big Brother easing into his proper role. Nothing to worry about.
LOL Tesh.
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