A fun place to chat about hunter pets in the World of Warcraft.
https://forums.wow-petopia.com/
Yah that's pretty much it really. A bunch of 10 year olds that think gigi is the shit.Saturo wrote:Il a bit worried about Gigi. She does nothing special, and gets a few fans. Then she calls people who wonder why she is praise-worthy haters, and sends her twenty-five trolls to annoy them. The "attacked" person goes all "lol, u serious? haha".
Heh, this. ^Saturo wrote:Any sane person will stay away from those forums, both before and after.
This whole thing makes me wonder.
In the bigger picture, I wonder if this is the wave of the future. As instant communication brings humanity closer together, will we begin to cast off our pseudonyms and false identities? 50 years from now, will our online lives be so closely integrated with our real lives that there is no difference? When the first Internet generation has become the establishment, and our children’s children are growing up with the successors of our own advanced technology, will our global society have evolved to a point where we confidently own all aspects of our lives, secure in our rights as digital and analog citizens?
Perhaps. But that time isn’t yet here. The Internet is to us what the Wild West was our ancestors. An untamed, unstructured place, full of very real dangers. Anonymity is both a sword and shield, giving the malicious the ability to strike from safety, but providing the wary with protection from harassment beyond the scope of the Internet environment.
All of which is preamble for me to say that I’m very concerned by Blizzard trying to enforce a policy like this on their gaming community. World of Warcraft is a great product, and a really fun game, but this isn’t something that I want to see stuffed down people’s throats with no protection given to the legitimate concerns of people who want to participate in the community without having their real information made public.
We signed up for this as gamers, participating in an escapist fantasy. I don't recall "join a social network with poorly designed privacy controls" as a selling point on the box.
I feel like a company that’s trying to force this kind of radical change on its community, even in the wake of such extreme reaction, isn’t a company I want to be supporting. Sure, it doesn’t affect me personally (I neither read, nor post on the official forums, save for this post). But doing this demonstrates a serious disregard for their customers, and that sours me on the thought of continuing to do business with Activision-Blizzard. I like the way they implemented RealID friends and chat. I can be selective about who I make a RealID friend, and better yet, it provides significant advantages (like cross-server communication) that are new features. The forum change has no benefit, and the only “opt-out”; is to not participate in the forums anymore. I think that’s just poor implementation. It's bad business practices. And if the only way to make it clear that I'm not interested in this kind of half-baked social networking garbage is to leave behind years of gaming progress, I suppose I'll have to do that.
You always have one option: cancel your subscription!Kalliope wrote:Yeah, so we really don't have much in the way of options. :/
Wrong, it was Terminator: "Sarah Conner?"Chrizesu wrote:This oddly reminds me of a show where a guy killed a bunch of people with the same name. ...I think it was an episode of CSI.
Actually I never really payed attention to Terminator.Ghanur wrote:You always have one option: cancel your subscription!Kalliope wrote:Yeah, so we really don't have much in the way of options. :/
Hit'em where it hurts the most: into their wallets!
Wrong, it was Terminator: "Sarah Conner?"Chrizesu wrote:This oddly reminds me of a show where a guy killed a bunch of people with the same name. ...I think it was an episode of CSI.
I meant an option that didn't mean giving up.Ghanur wrote:You always have one option: cancel your subscription!
Hit'em where it hurts the most: into their wallets!
Got in touch with my ex-flatmate, whose sister works as a GM for Blizzard, to see what the internal buzz on this was. Apparently, at the moment the employees are largely as pissed as the players, and she stated that despite attempts to keep it hushed, it has become known that the big creative players within Blizzard are pretty much as unhappy about this as we are. Everybody has been told they are not free to comment on this situation outside of specially prepared statements.
It's still going ahead, however (and here's where in-house rumours and hearsay really start coming into play): from what they've picked up, the Blizzard leads have been told in no uncertain terms that the non-gameplay-related direction of the game is working to a different blueprint now. GC and company are free to play with shiny new talent trees all they like, for example, but for the first time the decisions regarding Battle.net implementation, Real ID, and plans for the general acquisition of new players for the business are no longer in Blizzard's own hands, and that's not going down too well.
*Salute*Teigan wrote:Now, now. No killing. A nice handwritten letter to their home and a thoughtful, polite telephone call to a private line, though....