BellaStrega
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Posts
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Joined
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Quote:I think this is all true.Originally Posted by Liquid
Yep. I absolutely loved the Diablo series, and I think Starcraft was the best RTS ever made.
I still don't plan to ever buy another game from Blizzard. I no longer trust them as a company, and fully expect them to use customer information in whatever way possible to make money, with no care about our privacy.
But I'm going to wait and see. I don't trust them now (and I think it's funny that people are lecturing me as if I do trust them). -
Quote:In this case, I make of it that anti-virus programs have a talent for false positives.Originally Posted by RaiderRich2001
Just as a footnote to this discussion, I am in the Starcraft 2 Beta, but I haven't ever downloaded the client (because I don't really feel like playing), so I tried to download it on a lark. Guess what Norton did:
That's right, Norton Internet Security, one of the leading antivirus and security software programs, thinks the Starcraft 2 beta client is malware.
Make of that what you will.
I ended up replacing my last AV because it kept trying to kill legitimate programs.
Let me tell you, internet, about how much false positives annoy the living hell out of me...!
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Quote:Cataclysm's still months away, and I did say maybe.Originally Posted by Defenestrator
I'm betting this is an appeasement so as not to disrupt the immediate sales and pre-orders of Cataclysm. As others have pointed out, RealID is still going to be used as a Facebook integration and in game for friends lists. It simply won't be used on the forums.
Seriously, DO NOT WANT.
I still will not be buying Starcraft II or Diablo III, no matter how good those games will probably be.
I can deal with RealID in-game, if they close the plugin loophole. They can't possibly integrate me with facebook because I have no facebook. -
I'm down from potentially renewing this month or next month to maybe buying Cataclysm.
Not forgiveness, but a wary approach. -
Quote:Yeah, I think when people talk about innovation, it sounds like they're going off in some random direction. You know, doing something different to be different, and not necessarily better.Originally Posted by LiquidX
"Inovation" does not necessarily mean "better".
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I think that has been brought up, although there's no reason to structure the whole world around it. Starcraft II's pretty strictly divided into regions with no ability to cross over.
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Quote:Then this is irrelevant, because an MMORPG could never be real Star Wars.Originally Posted by Golden Girl
No, real Star Wars are the 6 movies - anything else is just fake Star Wars - books, games, cartoons - they're not really part of the saga.
I'll just say that the first KOTOR game was very good about giving you the sense of being in a Star Wars film, and felt fairly authentic to the movies, and that's all that really should matter. -
Quote:Thanks. I was a bit volatile about this when I posted my response. I've had some sleep since then.Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Actually, I'm making the stronger statement that I don't think it needs to be proven necessary. We don't sit around trying to logically prove beyond all shadow of a doubt that free speech is necessary. Contrawise, even if you could prove free speech had a statistically negative impact on the death rate in America, that wouldn't be enough to revoke it. Some things we accept as the price for living in a free society.
I dare say that even if you were to discover a totalitarian society on earth where violence against women was five percent what it was in America, you wouldn't be tempted to emulate it. Well, I'm assuming anyway.
The "grotesqueness" of Venture's world to me isn't that he considers the loss of anonymity to have statistically insignificant consequences, but rather that Venture seems to be suggesting that I should base my disclosure decisions on what I can statistically prove. That would be like asking me to base my preference for not being mugged on the street on the ability to prove society isn't better off allowing muggers to attack me rather than potentially be forced to commit other crimes. If I were a Blizzard customer affected by this decision (at the moment, I'm not) and if my personal information was disclosed without my permission (which I cannot say with certainty it would be under this policy) whether I feel violated by that decision has nothing to do with the statistical likelihood of someone misusing that information. That that probability is non-zero is a separate, general fact worthy of social discourse. But it doesn't inform my personal feelings on the matter.
It should really be enough that I decide to keep something private, and someone else decides to violate that decision. In fact, you could argue that in a world where privacy is increasingly becoming a technological impossibility, its really values that have to pick up the slack. Increasingly, our privacy is based less on what we can personally enforce, and more on what others elect to grant to us. From that perspective, someone that decides that privacy is meaningless and those who desire it deluded simply because it can be technologically revoked is actually something of a sociopath. -
Quote:... they lost me as a customer.Originally Posted by Sir_Noir
I really think its a bad thing but I dont think blizzard will lose any customers, the addiction is too strong with WoW. (comes from that deal with the devil they made)
I personally know several other people who have canceled their accounts.
I know this is anecdotal, but you said any customers. -
Quote:No, he argues like that when he reads your posts too.Originally Posted by JKedan
He could have her on ignore.
This is ironic:
* Game implements an in-game feature (the ability to change your character's sex with the science pack). Venture argues vociferously against it because it could encourage people to ERP kinky sex.
* Game implements invasion of real-world privacy with potential for harmful real-world consequences, Venture argues vociferously that such harm is statistically insignificant and should play no role in Blizzard's decisions. -
Quote:Yeah, it really does reduce a lot of stress.Originally Posted by Smersh
...I think I'm with Kali in just talking past Venture, now.
I just wish he had been using his real name here when I first joined, because while I had learned to ignore him by his real name years ago, I didn't realize that Venture was the same guy for a couple of months. Sucked in! -
Quote:The forums actually are useful if you're not haunting the favored trolling spots. Even then, server forums are a good place to recruit for your guild (even when they're troll infested). Class forums are generally a good place to find advice and stickies about playing and speccing your class. The role forums have a lot of constructive conversation. Other parts of the forum are pretty constructive. The general forum has a lot of trolls, but also has an informal chatty atmosphere like the general forum here, and again people get stuff out of it.Originally Posted by Carnifax_NA
Well technically if you don't post on the WoW boards then that doesn't happen. So you've the power and control to prevent it.
Something I think the WoW suits are thinking of, they don't WANT people using their boards. Official forums are costly to run and that place is a dank hellhole. I think all of this is mainly an excuse to let it slide into obscurity and become obsolete.
"Dank hellhole" is far from accurate. Yes, trolls are a problem. No, trolls are not every poster on the forum. A lot of people are inaccurately labeled as trolls because of the characters they post with.
In a lot of ways, you can get out of the forum what you put into it. -
Quote:Hey, thanks.Originally Posted by Defenestrator
Oh, I know. This is anything that's happened here magnified by thousands, and invasion of privacy is a big issue for a lot of people (not just gamers). I used my analogies because there is NOTHING REMOTELY COMPARABLE and used the next best thing. In other words, lighten up, Francis.
Here's a fun link.
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/view...opic_id=128252
It's a brief history of Activision/Blizzard and should show how we got to this point. (And how a historically great gaming company may be on the road to ruin.)
I'm not only talking about this here, and some places are a lot less reasonable so I will freely admit I'm kind of on a hair trigger about this. Sorry for jumping on you. -
Quote:This is not comparable to any of the situations you're talking about. Generally speaking, outrage over nerfs and such doesn't really impact a game, but this isn't about nerfs, and nothing any MMO has ever done has prompted the response that Blizzard is getting now. The thread on the official US forum? Up to 37,025 responses as of the moment I write this. There is nothing comparable to this and your comparisons are invalid.Originally Posted by Defenestrator
This is quite true, so it will be interesting to see what really happens. How many times has their been outrage on these forums with people saying they're quitting, only to have subscriptions increase? Most people will not care about this change.
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Quote:I have no problem with not playing WoW when I don't want to. I don't find it addictive, though. I do have fun playing with it, until I don't, and then I take a break.Originally Posted by Defenestrator
Two links so far on the Fark.com Geek page.
This comment cracked me up:
It will be interesting how a gaming addiction interacts with nerdrage.
Also, this isn't nerdrage. Nerdrage is fandumb, or "they changed it, now it sucks" or "ruined forever" or "they nerfed my favorite class or buffed my most hated class." These are people who are legitimately upset with the way Blizzard is trying to do business. -
Quote:You should pay attention to me. I always said the only thing that could kill WoW was Blizzard.Originally Posted by Golden Girl
So is this the mythical WoW-killer? I always thought that it'd come from another company, and not Blizzard
I think Bioware wil be quite happy with this situation right now
I just meant, you know, another MMO or something. -
I know you're trying to say it doesn't matter if Venture or I is correct for access to anonymity to be necessary, but I should point out that what Venture is arguing is pretty grotesque in a civilized society and that increasing potential danger for some people is only a sacrifice he's willing to make because he's not one of the people who may be in danger. But it's okay for other people to be in danger because he doesn't think there will be that many, even though fewer will be in danger without such a policy in place. On a purely humanitarian level, there's no justifying his argument.
I agree that there should be no justification necessary, but an enforced lack of anonymity on the WoW forums will drive people away, there's no arguing that, and of course there's no justifiable reason for Blizzard to do this. -
Quote:haha, how did I miss this? Thank you for the payoff.Originally Posted by RaiderRich2001
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Quote:Like I said, I wasn't talking to you. The fact that you're objectively wrong only gives me the smallest amount of schadenfreude because I expect nothing from you.Originally Posted by Venture
That's because people are a sea of statistics. Social policy is not established by the fact that something bad happened to someone somewhere. Bad things happen to good people, and that's unfortunate, but we don't stop the world on account of it. It would be hard to find some aspect of our existence that did not have unfortunate consequences for someone somewhere attached to it. Cars kill 45,000 people a year and injure 2.5 million more (roughly), not to mention the long-term environmental issues, but just try even raising the standards for a driver's license, never mind getting rid of them.
Rian Frostdrake's response is correct. And it is a fact that decisions are made at all levels of society to minimize dangers, even dangers that are statistically unlikely. This is why civil rights legislation is passed to protect minorities that have a relatively small population, even though, statistically speaking, the discrimination they experience is not relevant to the vast majority of people, it is still relevant to those who do experience it. -
Quote:I have so many stories, but I think that people don't understand how the internet anonymity that makes it easy for people to lash out works. It's not really about having your name visible. It's about having the internet between you and your target.Originally Posted by LiquidX
In the case of the boy, I have to wonder... would he have acted the way he did had he NOT had anonymity in the first place?
I'll say right now that I have seen so many people on usenet behave as badly or worse with their real names hanging out right in the open. When I first got onto usenet? Just about everyone was using their real names. Trolling and harassment still happened. -
Quote:+++winOriginally Posted by Marcian Tobay
Let us all make note of a moment when Cryptic while running Champions made a smarter move than Blizzard.
It was noticed on 07/07/10 6:50 PM Pacific -
Quote:I totally got the joke! I just wasn't sure if the joke was poking fun at people who don't want to or was just self-deprecating, sorry.Originally Posted by Chad Gulzow-Man
*points to his username* It was a joke.
Yeah, you don't need to have real names forced to make meaningful connections. People make connections anyway. I've connected with a quite a few people through City of Heroes and WoW both, and I don't know everyone's real name, but in some cases, I know a lot about their day to day life and many know about mine. I've made some enduring friends this way.Quote:In all seriousness, I can understand why people wouldn't want their identities to be known on the internet, even if they never break any rules at all. And the reasons that Blizzard seems to be giving for why they're doing this--"It's so players can develop more meaningful connections!--are horsehockey. A good third of my CoH friends talk regularly outside of the game, and we've all shared at least our first names and in many cases our last, but that was all due to our own choices.
Quote:I don't mind using my real name online, even though I've received my share of cyber-bullying in the past, but I'm also not a terribly well-known person on these forums or any other. I can understand why one of the more prolific CoH personalities like Snow Globe, Golden Girl or BeefCake might not want people knowing any of their personal information; despite the fact that they're all awesome people and generally respected around these parts, they've each attracted some troll attacks now and then. 
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Quote:It's not a question that some do, but rather that some do not.Originally Posted by Chad Gulzow-Man
QR: Pfffft, who would want to use their real name on an internet forum? That's just dumb... ... >_>
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I know that someone said that the CM was not really tracked down, but here's another example. Not a CM, just another user.