Nethergoat

When you are stupid enough to float a ridiculous, insulting, invasive and downright insane policy like this one in the first place you've cut your own throat.

They aren't repenting because they realized the error of their ways and are genuinely sorry and rededicated to the privacy of their customers, they're repenting because to do otherwise at this time would negatively impact their bottom line.


IMHO anyone who ever trusts them again is a fool. They've laid their cards on the table for everyone to see.

uh NO. Not even close.

I can ticket cap an MA map in less than 30 minutes, roll bronzes and reliably make 100 million inf on the result. I've done this day after day, week after week for several months.

No other gameplay option aside from pure marketeering delivers that level of profitability for such a small time investment.

/edit
in an effort to leaven my disdain with education, here's why MA pwnz everything else you can do:

tickets are nothing but concentrated drop potential.
if you run a mission that potential is spread between generic recipes, salvage & IO recipes.
in MA you can focus ALL of that drop 'energy' on the most valuable payoff, which is set IOs.
Furthermore, you can pick your level range.

MA > everything else for earning power.

lol wut.

MA's reward system is ASTRONOMICALLY better and more efficient than anything the rest of the game has to offer.

*shakes head wonderingly and wanders off*

people keep saying this and I keep wondering WTH they're on about.

I've played on Triumph my entire CoH career, hero & villain, and haven't noticed it emptying out to any meaningful degree.

I also have characters on Freedom, which is as clogged with humanity as ever, and Virtue, which if anything seems to have increased its population over the last year or so.

Maybe there are servers out there that have suffered some sort of catastrophic population die-off, but the ones I play on are doing great.

why?

they only changed course due to massive public backlash, and their mea culpa is full of enough half-***** lawyer speak to stop Clarence Darrow's corpse from spinning in its grave.

Not sure why we should congratulate them for stopping at the edge of the abyss- it was simple self preservation. And they're explicitly reserving the right to jump off the edge at some point in the future (presumably when the heat dies down), so, uh, yeah. Gratz?

while in an ideal world an employees every waking moment would be dedicated to Mother Company, in the real world desk jobs come with a lot of down time. Most people I know do most of their internet stuff 'on the clock' so to speak.

as long as the job gets done, so what.

and me.

I thought the new expansion sounded pretty cool and was gonna re-up my account to poke around and sightsee, but now they can eat it.

As can any game of theirs that incorporate this privacy shredding tech.


Bummer, cause I was looking forward to Starcraft.

TG, you've had an epic run in this thread and I just wanted to thank you for collecting all these links and placing them in context.

*thumbsup*

which is what will kill them in the end.
they're creating the market for their eventual successor, the same way Myspace created the market for FB after Murdoch took over and 'monetized' everything.

nothing is overpriced, it all sells for exactly what it is worth to customers.

And if you're scared of spending your pretend-time play money on salvage run a couple of MA missions and get it with tickets.

Hah, brilliant!

They should take this idea and run with it.

Will you ever stop talking nonsense?

IRL harassement, persecution, stalking and yes physical assaults of various types have been a consequence of the internet almost from the moment there WAS an internet.

Yes it happens in a small % of cases.
Just like ANY crime of ANY SORT happens in a small % of cases.

Using your bass-akward gibberish thought process we shouldn't bother fighting crime since it doesn't happen that often. Also, everyone should smoke 3 packs a day since it will only give SOME of us emphysema, lung cancer and heart disease.

I'm not sure if you're mental, not very bright or just a sociopath, but whichever the answer is you're profoundly wrong.

holy cow, I can't believe I didn't think of the gold farmers.

posting on the WoW forums after this change would be like an engraved invitation to every shady gold farmer on the internet to ad-bomb your life into rubble.

"The South Korean market must make a ton of profits for Blizzard and unlike Google they don't have revenue coming in from other sources."

that makes more sense than all of Blizzard's BS justifications combined.

It's a whackadoodle policy, their justifications are hooey so it's gotta be a money grab.

Dunno if that's the real money grab, but I'll bet my house there is one in the woodpile somewhere.

If this rumor is true I hope the Koreans treat Blizzard with the same hospitality and respect the Chinese treated Google when they sold out their customers and principles for a few bucks*.



*okay, more than a few...but Google and Blizzard need more money like The Bronx needs more inf.

no, not at all.

You know what removes that worry from the minds of the gaming public?
Not broadcasting their real names to a large population of strangers with unknown motives.

Observing the last decade or so of non-gaming history, I am completely unsurprised by this.

and by the same token it also frees people up to interact with others in ways that may be difficult or impossible in the real world due to various 'real life' factors.

online we are largely who we present ourselves as, which is a powerful attraction for many, many users. Some a-holes, sure, but mostly just 'regular' folks who want to step outside the confines of their day to day reality.

Why not?
Creeps and predators have been using the internet to find victims for as long as there's been an internet.

Given the size of the community I think a bad result of some sort is nearly guaranteed if they actually roll out this plan.


Also, while most of the focus has been on some kind of edge case where the crazy stalker gets violent IRL, there are many, many, many ways to harass, annoy and terrorize someone you have a beef with without even being on the same continent.

As the WoWies have shown with that poor GM, there is a LOT you can find out starting with just a name. Stuff that's widely available like address and telephone numbers are just the start of it. A malicious person armed with a name, address and phone number could cause a perceived "enemy" all manner of harm without ever having to leave their keyboard.

Just a tremendously awful idea.

The more I think about it, the less sense it makes from a community standpoint. It's got to be about somehow leveraging their playerbase for more profit.

Opening up your players to these kinds of problems in the interest of a few more pennies on your bottom line is truly disgusting.