Blizzard Exposes Detailed WoW Character Data

Gavin Scott writes "Blizzard has introduced a new web site called the Armory which lets you get information on any World of Warcraft character, extracted from their live databases, in near real-time. This exposes a great deal of information that was not previously obtainable including profession choices, skill levels for all skills, and the character's complete talent specification and all faction reputation data, along with all gear currently equipped. The complete roster of any guild or arena team is also available. Some players are upset about this, such as arena PvP teams who now have all their gear and talent choices exposed to the world, or players with non-standard or less-popular talent choices who fear they will have difficulty getting into pickup groups now that people can instantly find out everything about them. Are these complaints fair? Blizzard claims to own all the data and the characters, but at what point does this data represent personal choices and information about their players which would be covered by their own privacy policy? In a virtual society, should people be able to present a view of themselves that differs from (virtual) reality, or should all details be exposed?"

Comments

Re:Bad Idea

[Endo13]

You're misunderstanding what I'm saying. I'm not saying that unusual builds can't be useful. What I am saying is that while a feral druid build is good for some things, it will never work for healing effectively. If I'm the leader of a guild, and my guild needs some more healers, and in particular resto druids, (Note that I'm just using healing druids as an example as they're generally rare and in demand.) I'm going to be looking for a resto-spec druid. If you're playing a feral druid (and refuse to re-spec) while your build may be a good build, and work very well for tanking, you're not what I'm looking for. As a guild leader, this new information is an invaluable tool to see if someone really is what they claim they are, and not just someone claiming to be using the talents that I need.

Or in other words, if you're going to be a druid healer there's about 2 or 3 slight variations of talents that you can use and still be effective. No matter how skilled a player you are, you cannot heal effectively with any spec that deviates much from a pure resto spec.

Contrast this with Guild wars, in which there are dozens of skills and combinations of skills that can be used to heal effectively, some of them quite bizarre and unusual. Every once in a while you'll happen on someone using a combination you've never seen before, even if you've been playing since release.