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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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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