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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."
This just makes it a little bit easier. One could easily write a LUA script that /who's the player in-game between some intervals and save the info. Or the more geeky ones could write a program that uses WoW's protocol and logins to do the same (and relogins if disconnected).
So it's not like it wouldn't already be possible to gather those playing habits.
but instead I see you got new epic shoulders. gratz.
unlike most other online communities there is no way to show your status as 'Offline' (which makes it very annoying sometimes) In fact all this data is obtainable anyway - just makes it a bit easier for mom to see that johnny got that epic sword last night at 10:30PM - THAT'S PAST YOUR BEDTIME JOHNNY!!!!
You can't expect to wield supreme executive power, just because some watery tart threw a sword at you
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?
Boss: so mr anderson, it seems like you have been livig 2 lives. 1 as the sick employe that stayed at home, and the 2nd as barabas the gnome slayer...
I do believe that stalking a home-bound loser would make the stalker collapse into an infinitely dense (and sad) singularity of loserdom.
Steam shows how much you have played a certain game in total: http://steamcommunity.com/id/robinwalker/ and you can view the inventories of TF2 players ( http://www.tf2items.com/ ).
However unlike WoW, you can opt out as player info can't be obtained from private player profiles. When someone asked Valve why you can't grab "information" from a player who marked their profile as private, they said it was a recommendation from their lawyers. Interesting...
are these people aware that it takes ages to upgrade even a tiny piece of your gear, if you already have reached a certain item level ?
unless you go changing your items for show or for leisure like a monkey, and just leave your top tier items where they are, noone will be able to make out anything about your 'habits'.
and if you are a raider who also does rp or does pvp and you routinely change armor sets, all they will be doing is knowing at what hour you raid. but then again after all there are a lot of guildies knowing that, and you people probably arrange those times on a forum which is probably open to public anyway.
then whats the ruckus ...
Read radical news here
Asked for comment, the involved parties responded "Wait, you thought that information was private before?"
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Timestamps on Slashdot comments? /stalk function on every profile page? I don't think I could handle slashdot stalking, later folks
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.
WoW has changed a lot over its five years. I have been playing since day 1 EU, I started out with 2 real life friends leveling to 60, this was back in my 2nd year of university. Since then I've made many new friends from all over Europe, had one pretty successful relationship from the game with a Swedish girl (I'm English) she moved to England etc etc, and I talk to people from variety of places that I do intend to visit now that I have a job and money. I think anyone who is socially average can balance a game and normal activities. I make sure I am a member of a guild that doesn't raid Friday/Saturday, those nights and my weekend are free and I spend most of it out of the house drinking and doing the kind of things a 26 year old bloke does...
:)
Raiding originally took a lot of hours, Molten Core the first instance was a sprawling dungeon that my guild achieved Alliance first Rag on the server, so we were pretty hardcore back when no one really understood raiding (WoW brought in a lot of people that had never played an MMO before even at the begining). That place would take 4 hours or so to clear, 5+ if you weren't farming it. Then Blackwing Lair, and AQ40, and Naxx, all of it was very big, and very long. TBC cut the instance size down a notch with some more single encounter raids, and the shorter "Eye" and "Hyjal" taking much much less time to do.
Now in WoTLK the first instance was Naxx from Vannilla, easy for any old player, Ulduar was more regular sized, Trial of the Crusader was VERY short (you can do it all in 30-40mins now even in heroic mode) and Ice Crown is being released slowly. All in all I raid about a quarter of the time I used to five year ago.
Anyway, I suck at writing these kind of posts coherently, but my main point is, WoW has been probably the most enjoyable game I've played in 5 years. I laugh, joke, and chat about all kinds of things with real life friends who I drink with on a weekend, and guys I now know from Denmark,Sweden,Norway,Germany and even Greece. Some people will always have addictive personalities, and just like gambling can ruin a life so can WoW. But to anyone balanced WoW can be a great social experience and the game isn't bad either
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.
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.
Just glancing at this cursorily (it's slashdot, after all...), this seems like a WoW character's twitter feed. Blizzard prolly thought that was a cool feature: I mean, who doesn't want to communicate their every activity throughout the day in real time to a thousand of their closest friends, and via a website to a billion more complete strangers? Blizzard has watched a generation replace their privacy with "oooh, shiny" and figures they are just giving customers what they want.
Congrats to Blizzard. Shame on the rest of us.
WOW and most other MMOs are like fruit machines. They are attractive, bright and entertaining worlds that train the user to perform repetitive tasks for the expectation of a random reward (e.g. item drops).
Like gambling some people know when to stop and others don't. Some people play for fun and many more because of force of habit or addiction. More fool them.
You haven't changed your epic underwear for 3 days!
10 min after her bedtime, she is sleeping, every night. She is 20 month old.
You should have trained her to farm you gold by now.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
That's scary, and you certainly shouldn't be playing these kinds of games if that's the effect they have on you.
But other people are not you.
While being a player of WoW, I have:
Gotten 1 of every class, on both Alliance and Horde side, to level 70 (most to 80, still dragging ass on getting my Warlocks and Warriors to level 80 - they're boring), seen the inside of every raid, and even gotten the Lore Master (did pretty much every quest in the game) achievement when it was a little harder.
I've also gotten 2 degrees, started work on a third, maintained a 4.0 gpa in grad school throughout that process, got a fantastic job at university, gotten promoted twice, been an author (and actually did the work) on over 20 papers, given god only knows how many job talks, been party to a dozen posters at events, dated a lot, found someone I like and we live together now, had a social life, and generally all of those accomplishments are VASTLY more good feeling to me.
I have a sense of proportion, I guess - I'm able to make the distinction between wow levels & gear and actually accomplishing things. People who can't do that - you're right - they shouldn't play games like WoW, because clearly they can't handle it.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
Yeah, what he said! We are just social drink... I mean smok... I mean players, we can quit anytime we want. Any time at all. Any time we feel like it. We have no problem, no problem at all... gotta go, there is a raid on.
Ok, I call B.S. Nice troll, but I don't believe in the few days since this came out that you've gotten _any_ requests from employers. Even if said employers were interested, and all knew that you could hypothetically offer this service, there's no way for them to match a WoW Armory Profile with a real name. You say, "it's trivial to correlate email to character info if you, for instance, raid with coworkers," but how precisely would go about doing that? I suppose you might get lucky and have some mention their toon's name in company email, but I have a feeling that would be a rare exception rather than the rule.
So, nice kharma whore. Stick with the truth next time?