Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
I do believe that stalking a home-bound loser would make the stalker collapse into an infinitely dense (and sad) singularity of loserdom.
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.
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
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.
then... err. do your job? care for your kids?
I used to bot three toons at once. A couple made it to 80, and a dozen or so to 60. Mmoglider getting shut down is why I quit the game.
Good riddance.
You "quit the game" that your bots were playing for you?
As someone who has seen a number of nasty divorces go down, let me explain something to you:
Has 1 drink with dinner => massive alcoholic in divorce speak
Spanked a child for running into the street => beats the children
Hugs a child => probably molesting the children
Has had lunch with co-worker of the opposite sex => has had a torrid affair
Has had lunch with co-worker of the same sex => almost certainly having a homosexual affair
So...
Spent 3 hours over a weekend late at night raiding => neglects children, wasn't ever there for us, probably having an affair with someone online
I agree, people probably shouldn't be playing or logging in from work unless their workplace allows it during breaks, but the point is that anyone who has an agenda and an axe to grind and would use this tool to support it will certainly also be more than happy to spin things in the worst possible way. Divorce lawyers are fucking NASTY creatures, and people going through a hostile divorce can be psychotic.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.