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Author Archive for Julian
Allow me to preface this by saying this isn’t a hateful post. It’s merely an observation.
I’ve got absolutely nothing against DDO. I think it’s a fine game. Not the best game there is, but does it have to be? It provides fun and that should be the basic mandate of any game. I like the visuals overall. It’s AD&D which, despite its DDO-specific splashes of flavor, is basically a known quantity and familiar waters if you’re into that kind of swimming. It treats its F2P players well and the Eberron setting is interesting.
However, after coming back to the game and playing it more or less steadily for the last couple of weeks something rather ironic stuck out at me: The RP scene is quite barren. The sadly ironic part of all this is that we’re essentially talking about D&D, kickstarter extraordinaire (however you wanna slice it) of Roleplay Gaming, paper or not. So it should have a more or less healthy RP community, but I haven’t observed it (and yes, I know where to look. Us RPers are like dogs sniffing each other’s butts when it comes to this).
So where’s the disconnect?
I promise this is my last post on the Real ID debacle at this time.
That said, I shot some questions to Randy Farmer about this whole thing while it was still raging. This was yesterday. Since then, Blizzard recanted and the sun is apparently shining again over the green valleys of WoW. However, I think Randy’s answers are very good info regarding community issues, regardless of the final outcome of all this.
My questions and Randy’s answers after the break, brought to you by Left Click. Powering the Internet, one Left Click at a time.
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=25968987278&sid=1
“I’d like to take some time to speak with all of you regarding our desire to make the Blizzard forums a better place for players to discuss our games. We’ve been constantly monitoring the feedback you’ve given us, as well as internally discussing your concerns about the use of real names on our forums. As a result of those discussions, we’ve decided at this time that real names will not be required for posting on official Blizzard forums.”
Recanting this failure was a good move.
Next time do what most polite, centered and sensical people all over the world would do: ask.
Some gems from Blizzard’s privacy policy, as certified by the ESRB:
“Blizzard Entertainment and its affiliate companies (collectively “Blizzard”) respect the privacy of its on-line visitors and recognize the importance of providing a secure environment for them.”
Great start. We’re off to a good one.
“Blizzard Entertainment adheres to the Safe Harbor Principles that were established by the U.S. Department of Commerce in consultation with the European Commission to comply with the European Commission’s Directive on Data Protection that went into effect in October 1998.”
Not really. at the very least, once the proposed changes go live, I imagine Blizzard would be breaching the third Principle: “Onward Transfer – Transfers of data to third parties may only occur to other organizations that follow adequate data protection principles.”. IANAL, though. You can read about the Principles here.
It gets better.
http://forums.battle.net/thread.html?topicId=25626109041
The gist: Real ID will be required to post on the Starcraft 2 forums. This will go into effect sometime before the game’s launch, July 27th.
In related news: Facebook stalking and trolling mysteriously expected to go up in August.