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Blizzard Adds Timestamps To WoW Armory
Kharny writes "In a move that could cause serious privacy problems for players of World of Warcraft, Blizzard has added timestamps and an RSS feed to the game's online armory site. This new feature will mean that anyone can follow 'real-time' developments in a World of Warcraft character, which display the exact time and date, so that others can see that person's playing habits. Many players have already complained about the fact that there is no opt-out setting, and this opens very big possibilities for online stalking."
Situation: I am being "cyber-stalked".
Solution: Log off WOW.
Solution 2 (If you really need your MMORPG fix): Switch to a different character.
Why would a person knowing where you are in a fictional landscape ever be a problem anyway? Surely there's some kind of ignore button in WOW (correct me if I'm wrong, I only played the free trial before getting bored), so even if they knew where you were, they could... what?
I think there will be two SHOCKING REVELATIONS!
1) Most people play waaay more WoW than they admit
2) There's a lot of botting going on
There, you're shocked now. aren't you! Hello?
I've never understood the draw and allure that WoW provides, and why people get addicted to the point that they drop out of schools. Maybe I am one of the few people that is lucky and doesn't require simulation from an online fake environment to further foster my own mind.
Most of us WoW players are casuals, dropping in for an hour or two each day that would otherwise be spent on television. The rest of the time we work, spend time with our wife/husband/squid/mollusc and lead normal lives. My wife and I are having a child soon, we're moving house, I work too many hours in the office and still I find time for reading books, sleeping relatively normal amounts and playing WoW.
It's just a game. Most of us find balance in our lives.
There's a huge difference between staying at home ill, sat at my desk within easy reach of my bed if I need it (or even in bed if I game on a laptop), staying in the warm, and not having to struggle through a 90 minute commute, and going in to the office, being unproductive as I infect my co-workers with whatever nasty little germ I have.
Just because you're not too ill to sit at one desk, doesn't mean you're well enough to sit at another.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
I understand that that's the popular perception of WoW players... but you do realize it's about as accurate, and kind, as 'lazy niggers', right? That my guild (of 100ish people) has only 3 or 4 players who kinda fit the geeky shut-in mold, and the rest are normal men and women leading ordinary lives? My mother plays WoW, and she's nearly 60. I can list off 10 couples right off the top of my head in our guild. Some players are casual, some are hardcore raiders. It's all a matter of what percentage of someone's leisure time they choose to spend playing WoW.
Sitting on a couch watching TV is a less worthy pursuit, in my mind, than killing undead minions in WoW. But the stigma of watching TV is notably less.
turning down social interactions to instead go raiding with their groups
That certainly can be a social interaction - just because people aren't sat in the same room talking face to face doesn't mean they're not talking.
an online fake environment
What's fake about it, in entertainment terms? In what ways are other forms of entertainment more real?
It's official. Most of you are morons.
There are a lot of things that are "already possible", that are made "easier". It is known as the difficulty of a problem. I don't want to build a terrorism strawman so here is another analogy: It is already possible to perform voting fraud without electronic voting machines. All you need to do is gather your closest 100,000 conspirators and rig the counting process. Introducing a centralized software that you conveniently and mostly undetectably can modify just makes it easier.
The fact is, making some things easier make things more probable and skews "cost - benefit" comparisons towards actually doing the thing. The example you use would require a WoW account and would be limited to a few people tops. The new changes can easily allow monitoring of tens of thousands of accounts from a single ip, with a few lines of Perl.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Then here's a message for management: Sick leave. What's common in US companies nowadays is "leave" or "paid time off", or whatever. It is used for both vacation and sick time, and in the US there's a whole lot less than a European would expect.
What it means is that every day you spend home sick is a day you don't spend up at the cabin in summer, or downhill skiing in the winter, or pitching in on a school project for your child, or whatever you might want to do when you're away from work and well.
If I'm hurting the company by coming in sick, then don't make me give up vacation time to help the company. Make provisions for me to get paid by doing what's best for the company.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes