Authors CurseForge

Oh hai guys.

This is another one of those Bluspacecow!Bored posts. Otherwise known as incoming-wall-of-text-for-something-i'm-curious-about :D.

As you may or may not know the Armory now has RSS feeds on it. Wait. You didn't know this ? Go have a look now.

Any Armory page now RSS Feeds of what your toon has been doing. Everyone has them. Basic stuff like what gear you've obtained and what bosses you've done. Nothing that wasn't in the achievements but now it's right there on the right hand side of the page.

Here's my Druid I'm gearing up atm :

http://www.wowarmory.com/character-feed.xml?r=Muradin&cn=Fuzzyelf

Yes I know. Fail gear is Fail. Note that if you click the orange RSS icon you get to make a custom feed you can throw into a RSS reader.

Now Blizzard have a Terms of Use agreement and a End User License thingy both that state they own all your toons and the information about them.

Here's the relevant sections of both agreement

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/legal/termsofuse.html

All rights and title in and to the Service (including without limitation any user accounts, titles, computer code, themes, objects, characters, character names, stories, dialogue, catch phrases, locations, concepts, artwork, animations, sounds, musical compositions, audio-visual effects, methods of operation, moral rights, any related documentation, "applets" incorporated into the Game Client, transcripts of the chat rooms, character profile information, recordings of games played using the Game Client, and the Game Client and server software) are owned by Blizzard or its licensors. The Game and the Service are protected by United States and international laws, and may contain certain licensed materials in which Blizzard's licensors may enforce their rights in the event of any violation of this Agreement.

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/legal/eula.html

A. All title, ownership rights and intellectual property rights in and to the Game and all copies thereof (including without limitation any titles, computer code, themes, objects, characters, character names, stories, dialog, catch phrases, locations, concepts, artwork, character inventories, structural or landscape designs, animations, sounds, musical compositions and recordings, audio-visual effects, storylines, character likenesses, methods of operation, moral rights, and any related documentation) are owned or licensed by Blizzard. The Game is protected by the copyright laws of the United States, international treaties and conventions, and other laws. The Game may contain materials licensed by third parties, and the licensors of those materials may enforce their rights in the event of any violation of this License Agreement.

I suppose my enquiry is :

Given the fact that Blizzard owns your characters and all information about them....

Can we really claim privacy concerns about the new RSS feeds on the Armory?

Do we have any right to complain ?

Can we force them to do anything about it ?

Is the ToU and EULA I've linked above legally binding ?

I mean everyone has to agree to both in order to play. You agree by scrolling down a document then clicking a button. The button does not become active until you've scrolled down the document fully implicitly implying you have indeed read it and are agreeing to it by clicking OK.

See IMHO we don't have a right to complain. Information about your toon is Blizzard's property according to 2 legal documents that we agree to for evey patch that comes out. We can complain about it and request that they change it but that's about all we can do. There's still privacy concerns there
but I don't think we can do much about it considering the Tou & EULA both of which we agree to before playing.

What are your guys thoughts ?

Please if you tell me I'm wrong please outline why I'm wrong with citations if possible :)

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/items/tinfoilhat.xml

Quote from OrionShock

Im sure there is a way to have them remove it if you have issues with it being displayed

I've seen cases where people have pulled out their armory profile on request.

Really ? Got some citations / URLS about that Orion :)

Are you aware you can inspect someone else's achievements in-game? Should they take that out too?

It's your toon, not your real life. I don't get the privacy concerns. If you're playing more than your should (parents, playing at work... etc) and don't want anyone to find out, well... quit playing so much. That's one of the concerns I saw posted around other forums.

I don't see the issue

You can see when a fictional character did certain things to the minute. Wheres the link between WoW and reality?

hi,

in my opinion it is illegal. Blizz owns your char but they cannot do whatever they want with it.
Deleting your char or other things they can do are perfectly legal but making sensible data (and yes i count the new RSS Feed to it) public accessible is not the same thing.
Making a link between your character and your real name is (in many chases) not that much of a problem with the new social web 2.0 features such as facebook, twitter ...

i don't know the status in other countrys dann germany, but we have the right to "rule" over our data. we can force a company to delet all collected data (or parts of it).
saying "oh your data belongs to us, so we can do whatever we want with it" is not part of the agreement between me and blizz. imagine Facebook or google would give out their data about login times to the public. They would be sued to the gound ....

the base for this argumentation is that it is okay to share all the data within a closed community (your server) but not with everyone cappable of using a browser^^

But, but I told my gf I wasn't playing :o
Damn you RSS, DAMN YOU!


The only people you probably don't want to see it are those who you probably don't tell you play already (boss, coworkers, friends?).

luckily i never posted my char name with my full real name together, but many others do e.g. in guild applications and so on ..

i just get the point of what is the true benefit of this feed? a huge amount of players don't care about it so where is the problem of providing an option to disable for those who care ... blizz is strange :)

Quote from Xinhuan

Achievements doesn't go down to "hours and minutes" detail, i.e inspecting an achievement doesn't reveal that you play at 3pm-6pm everyday, but the armory reveals that.

And the difference matters why? They still both provide info about what you do in the game, even if one has more info than the others.

If the concern is truly the time, then a lot of people are playing when they shouldn't be. And they should probably address that instead of worrying about privacy concerns over a character name that's not linked to any real life information unless THE PLAYERS provide that link THEMSELVES.

Sorry, but I have to strongly disagree with a lot of people in here and I'm really frightened to see how many people don't think this isn't a privacy concern.

Just think of it like that: Would you really want everybody (and I mean it) to know, what you did yesterday between 12 and 2 am? Really? It may not be WoW, but it's a matter of perspective... So next time you get to think of that, it's not your free time, in which you're getting observed and logged, but something of more importance to you.