{"id":2881,"date":"2014-09-04T23:00:40","date_gmt":"2014-09-05T03:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kurn.info\/blog\/?p=2881"},"modified":"2014-09-04T23:00:40","modified_gmt":"2014-09-05T03:00:40","slug":"blizzard-why-do-i-still-have-to-talk-about-this","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kurn.info\/blog\/blizzard-why-do-i-still-have-to-talk-about-this\/","title":{"rendered":"Blizzard, Why Do I Still Have to Talk About This?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Dear Blizzard,<\/p>\n<p>I have been playing your games, in some fashion, since the original PC version of <em>Diablo<\/em>. I played <em>Diablo II<\/em>, as well as at least one expansion. I eventually found my way to <em>World of Warcraft<\/em> in October of 2005 and the rest is basically history. I played until November of 2012 and then took a break for approximately 17 months.<\/p>\n<p>I came back to the game shortly after the <em>Warlords of Draenor<\/em> pre-purchase came out. I pre-purchased <em>Warlords<\/em>, then four hours later, I resubbed to the game.<\/p>\n<p>As I write this, I have about 68 hours on my current game card and, to be honest, I&#8217;m not really inclined to fork over another $15.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s not because of the sexism and even homophobia and misogyny that I have seen in the game &#8212; although those exist.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s not because you nerfed my class to the ground &#8212; although my main raiding character was a paladin for the majority of my playing time.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s not even because it&#8217;s going to take over a year between content patches &#8212; although that&#8217;s a truly abysmal production schedule and if I had been raiding this whole time, I would have surely quit in disgust by now.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s because <a href=\"http:\/\/www.twitter.com\/yawowb\" target=\"_blank\">@YAWoWB<\/a> on Twitter said this:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-partner=\"tweetdeck\"><p><a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/kurnmogh\">@kurnmogh<\/a> BDA (Battle*net Desktop App) also does this when adding a friend. For those wanting to protect their identity, this is unwanted.<\/p>\n<p>\u2014 Rooster (@YAWoWB) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/YAWoWB\/status\/507699022090747904\">September 5, 2014<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" async=\"\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><br \/>\nI wasn&#8217;t exactly sure what Rooster was talking about, until I opened up my own desktop app. Now, let&#8217;s be clear: I have precisely <em><strong>0 <\/strong><\/em>BattleNet friends and my RealID is turned off. But I still clicked on &#8220;Add a Friend&#8221; and was rewarded with this piece of nonsense:<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-2882 aligncenter\" src=\"http:\/\/kurn.martindaley.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/addafriendblog.jpg\" alt=\"addafriendblog\" width=\"500\" height=\"491\" srcset=\"https:\/\/kurn.info\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/addafriendblog.jpg 500w, https:\/\/kurn.info\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/addafriendblog-300x295.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Now, to be fair, because I have RealID turned off, those are all BattleTags. But that&#8217;s my brother&#8217;s BattleTag, my friend Majik&#8217;s BattleTag&#8230; and the guy above Majik? That&#8217;s one of his friends. Something like two years ago, I played <em>Diablo III <\/em>with Majik and his friend, for a period of approximately THIRTY MINUTES.<\/p>\n<p>Then, Blizzard, I <em>gasped out-loud<\/em> at the possibility that <em>my<\/em> BattleTag is floating around out there like that. See, you have a flag in the BattleNet account options to not show up like that&#8230; except that it&#8217;s for RealID, not BattleTags (click for a bigger version):<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/kurn.info\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/friendsoffriends.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-2884\" src=\"https:\/\/kurn.info\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/friendsoffriends-300x31.jpg\" alt=\"friendsoffriends\" width=\"300\" height=\"31\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Now, one might think that, possibly, since there <em>are no preferences<\/em> for one&#8217;s BattleTags, that perhaps they follow the rules laid out for RealID, but, honestly, I have no idea if this is the case.<\/p>\n<p>As my brother is the father of a newborn and I don&#8217;t actually <em>know<\/em> Majik&#8217;s friend, my thought was immediately to get him on his computer and then have HIM click &#8220;Add A Friend&#8221; and see if I showed up. Unfortunately, he was asleep when I texted him (multiple times), since he has to be up at 5am and I think I might have woken up his wife with my constant texting&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>So I&#8217;ll have to post again with the results of this test.<\/p>\n<p>But, honestly, Blizzard. It&#8217;s 2014. Why do I have to be angry with you about your complete and utter lack of social controls?<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s been nearly two years since <a href=\"http:\/\/us.battle.net\/wow\/en\/blog\/7315729\" target=\"_blank\">you posted<\/a> that &#8220;Appear Offline&#8221; was &#8220;coming soon&#8221;. TWO YEARS, Blizzard. That&#8217;s longer than <em>Mists of Pandaria<\/em> has been out! And your inelegant (to say the least) &#8220;privacy&#8221; controls are still absolutely laughable. I say this as someone who has been in the online community industry for over a decade. In this day and age of Facebook privacy screwups, of cloud hacking, of nations spying on their own citizens, you&#8217;re really going to continue to deny your users the ability to properly manage their online\/offline statuses? You&#8217;re going to make it easy to find people who don&#8217;t want to be found?<\/p>\n<p>Look, I get that community makes your product stickier. Believe me, I do. People come for the games and stay for the people. I know! And you want to compete with Steam, I&#8217;m guessing, right? Guess what? STEAM HAS AN OFFLINE MODE. And a variety of ways for users to manage their privacy. And Steam <a href=\"http:\/\/ca.ign.com\/articles\/2014\/01\/15\/steam-tops-75-million-users\" target=\"_blank\">hit the 75 million active user mark<\/a> last January.<\/p>\n<p>Why, why, <em>why<\/em> do you continue to eat away at the privacy of your gamers? Why don&#8217;t you understand that, when I play your games, I don&#8217;t really want to announce to a dozen people that I&#8217;m on a rarely-used alt on a server I never visit? Why don&#8217;t you understand that I don&#8217;t want people to know all of my alts? That I don&#8217;t want prospective recruits to know all of my alts? That I don&#8217;t want people to necessarily know that I&#8217;m in one of your games?<\/p>\n<p>These are fundamental questions for me. I am increasingly disturbed by each and every privacy issue that comes up when it comes to BattleNet and Blizzard&#8217;s games.<\/p>\n<p>You know, Blizzard, there was a time when I <em>loved<\/em> BattleNet. Those times were back in the late 90s when I was playing <em>Diablo<\/em>. Ever since RealID came out, I have learned to loathe BattleNet. I resent it. I resent people <em>expecting<\/em> me to share my RealID\/BattleTag with them. I hate that people I barely know are all &#8220;hey, whats ur btag???&#8221; because &#8220;lol its just ur btag&#8221;. I hate that I can&#8217;t even post on the Hearthstone forums without my BattleTag being exposed for all to see. I cannot believe that I cannot <em>remove<\/em> a BattleTag from my account and I am just as incredulous about the fact that <em>there are no distinct BattleTag privacy options<\/em> available to me.<\/p>\n<p>Blizzard&#8230; it&#8217;s time. It&#8217;s time to fix this mess.<\/p>\n<p>Yours sincerely,<\/p>\n<p>Kurn<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Dear Blizzard, I have been playing your games, in some fashion, since the original PC version of Diablo. I played Diablo II, as well as at least one expansion. I eventually found my way to World of Warcraft in October of 2005 and the rest is basically history. I played until November of 2012 and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[111,3,80],"tags":[117,118,119,120,121],"class_list":["post-2881","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-battletags","category-ramblings","category-real-id","tag-add-a-friend","tag-battlenet","tag-battletags","tag-privacy","tag-realid"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kurn.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2881","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=2881"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kurn.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2881\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kurn.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2881"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kurn.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2881"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kurn.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2881"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}