{"id":2641,"date":"2013-12-12T04:43:43","date_gmt":"2013-12-12T09:43:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kurn.apotheosis-now.com\/?p=2641"},"modified":"2013-12-12T04:43:43","modified_gmt":"2013-12-12T09:43:43","slug":"hearthstone-battletags","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kurn.info\/blog\/hearthstone-battletags\/","title":{"rendered":"Hearthstone & BattleTags"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well, it’s been nearly a month since I last posted and, thus, last ranted in this space. ;) (Actually, my last post wasn’t too bad and actually included praise<\/em>, so hey, go me!)<\/p>\n

A new Hearthstone<\/em> closed beta patch launched this week (1.0.0.4217) and lots of things changed. I’m in favour of many of the changes, ambivalent about others, but I’m quite annoyed at a specific change.<\/p>\n

“New Feature: Recently played Opponent \u2013 Your friends list now displays the last person you played against, provided they were not a Real ID or BattleTag friend. If you had a particularly great match against someone, you can now friend them for future play!” (Source<\/a>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

How do they do this? By actually displaying the BattleTag of the person against whom you last played. Here’s a (slightly obscured) screenshot of my “friends list” that shows the BattleTag of the person whose ass I kicked to get to rank level 23.<\/p>\n

\"hslastplayed\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It does NOT seem to persist after a logout, so if I played you and then logged out and then logged back in, your name would be gone. (Such was the case with DJNOclue.)<\/p>\n

Kurn,<\/em> you may ask, Kurn, why is this a problem?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Quite simply, I feel strongly that my BattleTag should not be displayed to anyone but me without my permission.<\/p>\n

Uh… why the hell not? It’s not as though it’s your RealID<\/strong> or anything.<\/em><\/p>\n

Excellent point. (Although I should note for full disclosure that I have actually turned RealID off<\/strong><\/a> on my Battle.net account.)<\/p>\n

Putting aside all the issues I have with the incredibly inelegant RealID\/BattleTag chat stuff (and boy, do I have issues<\/a>!), let’s look at how things came to be in order to perhaps better understand my issues.<\/p>\n

Once upon a time, Blizzard created World of Warcraft<\/em>. Then, they added RealID<\/em>. Then, they added BattleTags. None of these things were actually necessary to play this game or, another contemporary of WoW, Starcraft II<\/em>. However, when Diablo III<\/em> was released, suddenly, BattleTags were not only created, but were required<\/em> to be created in order to play Diablo III<\/em>. Since I played D3 for a short period of time, I was forced to create a BattleTag. Even once I abandoned the game, my BattleTag persisted. Even though there is no requirement for BattleTags to be used in World of Warcraft<\/em>, I still have one and I cannot get rid of it<\/em>. (Actually, I just opened a ticket through the website to try to get it removed. I am not optimistic, but we’ll see!) I believe that they are planning<\/em> to make BattleTags required for everything, but as it stands, you can still play World of Warcraft<\/em> without a BattleTag. (I just created a new Battle.net account and was never prompted to create a BattleTag when creating the account, although there was an option<\/em> to do so once I was in my account management.) Further, there is absolutely no way to go “offline” or “invisible”, despite the fact that, more than a year ago<\/em>, Blizzard said Invisible Mode would be implemented “in the coming months”<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Why do I need a BattleTag? Well, I don’t believe I do. So let’s take a look at the Battle.net BattleTag FAQ<\/a>:<\/p>\n

A BattleTag nickname is a player-chosen handle that identifies your Battle.net account in Blizzard Entertainment games, websites, community forums, and more. Similar to Real ID, BattleTags give players on Battle.net a way to find and chat with friends they’ve met in-game, form groups, and stay connected across multiple Blizzard Entertainment games.<\/p>\n

BattleTags are required for Diablo III play, where they are used to publically identify players in groups or when chatting in-game, as well as on the Diablo III forums.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As a player who has been in the Hearthstone<\/em> beta for a few months, I have never once wanted to find and chat with anyone I’ve met in-game. When playing WoW<\/em>, I hadn’t really found a compelling reason to even keep RealID<\/em> enabled on my account and never found a compelling reason to give out my BattleTag, even while recruiting for my guild. (It would have made things easier, but I wasn’t prepared to let potential applicants know where I was in-game, on which server and which character at any given time.)<\/p>\n

Further, I do not want<\/em> to “stay connected across multiple Blizzard Entertainment games”. As of right now, I’m only playing one of them, anyhow, and even then<\/em>, I don’t even want to play Hearthstone<\/em> any longer because my BattleTag is being displayed to every random player I play against!<\/p>\n

My objections largely stem from the fact that:<\/p>\n

a) I was forced to create a BattleTag in order to play Diablo III<\/em>, which I played to level 50 and haven’t touched since (more than a year ago)
\nb) It is always on.
\nc) It is now being displayed to random players without my permission. (Unless, by “permission”, you mean playing the game with another random human being, which is basically all the interesting gameplay in Hearthstone<\/em>. It would be like your BattleTag being displayed to everyone you hit a random dungeon or raid with, in WoW.)
\nd) Further, your BattleTag, in case you were unaware, is publicly shown to people in the Hearthstone<\/em> forums when you post there. (Just discovered that one tonight.)<\/p>\n

But you can always decline the invitations!<\/em><\/p>\n

Due to my various objections, due to the clunkiness and inelegance of the entire system (see previously linked posts about RealID and such), I have no intentions of accepting any BattleTag invitations. Since I will not accept them, I do not want people to bother me with invitations. So I don’t give out the information. Period.<\/p>\n

Is it such a big deal to decline invitations?<\/em><\/p>\n

Why don’t you ask people who are on the receiving end<\/a> of dozens of invitations<\/a> from gold selling spammers<\/a>?<\/p>\n

While you’re probably still being overly weird about this RealID\/BattleTag business, I accept that you’re not going to change your mind on this. So what do you want out of this situation?<\/em><\/p>\n

It’s simple: allow me to remove my BattleTag entirely or, if BattleTags are required for Hearthstone<\/em> (despite the FAQ not saying so), allow me to opt-out of other people being able to see my BattleTag if I play against them in Hearthstone<\/em>, or allow me to turn off BattleTags the way you can turn off RealID. (For all I know, removing my BattleTag would happen if you could turn them off, but in case it’s a different process or whatever, I include the turning off option.)<\/p>\n

It’s been more than 15 months since Blizzard promised various changes to the chat system, including invisible mode, and the fact that they haven’t yet implemented anything gives us the impression that they’ve dropped the ball on this. As such, let us turn the thing off<\/strong><\/em>. I don’t even see why it’s precisely required for Diablo III<\/em> play, to be honest, but it’s not required for World of Warcraft<\/em>, I’m pretty sure it’s not required for SCII and I’m hoping it’s not required for Hearthstone<\/em>, even after this latest patch. I like Hearthstone<\/em> and would hate to feel like I can no longer play it because my BattleTag is on display for all my opponents to see.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well, it’s been nearly a month since I last posted and, thus, last ranted in this space. ;) (Actually, my last post wasn’t too bad and actually included praise, so hey, go me!) A new Hearthstone closed beta patch launched this week (1.0.0.4217) and lots of things changed. I’m in favour of many of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[111,106,80],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-battletags","category-hearthstone","category-real-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kurn.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2641","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kurn.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kurn.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kurn.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kurn.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2641"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kurn.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2641\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kurn.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kurn.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kurn.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}