UberGuy

I don't get that one either.

Do you distrust people you walk by on the street? Like actively look at them and wonder if they're out to steal your money or kill you?

No? I hope you don't.

Even though you hopefully don't distrust people, do you carry your money in a wallet, possibly with no cash at all? Or do you carry it all as cash while sticking it, unfolded, so that just one of the short edges is tucked into the middle back of your pants behind the belt so that you have like a horse tail of 20 dollar bills above your butt? No? Why not? If you answer, please assume the dollar bills won't just fall out when you sit down. Base the answer on the intended area of focus - how easy we make it for people to do things we don't want them to do.

Having trust and having blind faith are a matter of degrees. If we let people do things, then eventually someone will do them. I'm well aware that as customers, in practice, we may have no voice over all this other than to walk away. As I've said elsewhere in this thread, I would much rather not walk away - I like it here. I would prefer NCSoft to present terms that let them do what they need to do and don't make me want to walk away.

I would hope someone noticed that I didn't frame this in any of those things terms. Not that I think you said did. The closest real-world comparison I made for this was website tracking, which is still a step removed from the EULA, since it assumes NCSoft might use the freedoms granted by the EULA to collect non-game-centric info about their users from their PCs.

Despite my position being pretty much what I've quoted you describing, FFM accused me of having a tinfoil hat on over my position. Anyone described wearing a tinfoil hat is being described as a nutcase. The inference I find clear from him is that even someone with an otherwise moderate position on this issue who doesn't ignore the issue entirely is a nutcase. That's what I think that is disgusting, and pretty ignorant to boot. "I don't agree with you so you must be insane" is a nice twist on ad homenim.

Yeah, because anyone who worries about erosion of their privacy is a conspiracy theorist. Clearly if you care at all, you're some sort of nut.

It disgusts me that people act like this.

Yeah, because, you know, the logical extreme is the only place that could go, right?

I feel the same. I will miss it. Not desperately, but I'm sad to see it go.

FFS, read what you quote.

I was responding about websites.

No, that's an oversimplification of something that, yes, is not very complicated, but by oversimplifying it you're creating a kind of strawman position.

Look, I want to play their game, because I like their game. I don't want the terms playing their games to allow them to do things I don't want them to have the right to do. Giving up your protections on the basis that no one is currently abusing that access is just asking later people to take advantage of the protections you gave away.

I understand fully that, say, for NCSoft to use these EULA terms to install a keylogger, find my banking login, and steal money from my bank account is clearly illegal. The EULA would not even begin to protect them if they did something like that. On the other hand, using their malware/bot detector or some diagnostic tool to find every piece of software I have installed on my PC or my browsing history is not illegal, but it's an invasion of my privacy.

Even if they do nothing overtly illegal with information gleaned from my PC, they could potentially sell it to folks who desperately want to try to monetize such personal data. Zwil tells us they would never do such a thing, and I take his word for that, but the EULA does not disallow it, so someone later on could change NCSoft's direction regarding it. Such data, once obtained, is theirs forever. Even if they don't sell it, it might be stored on an unsecure server and then stolen by hackers, to be sprayed all over the internet. See Sony's recent joys.

To which some posters here will probably be all like "oh, NOES! Not a list of installed software!" And for most people, that's probably a fair (if IMO naive) response. Preserving privacy is often about a lot of "what if" scenarios, and its very easy to dismiss the whole bag if you think none of those "what ifs" happen to apply to you. I like to err on the side of safety, and greater privacy. Maybe I don't know what the "what ifs" that apply to me actually all are. Maybe there are other people out there with more applicable "what ifs" than me. If I don't give away my right to privacy, I don't have to think of everything, and if my privacy is invaded, I can fall back on "hey, I never gave you permission to do that!"

I think people who live in wealthy, safe countries are often complacent about their privacy (among other things) and waive control of it too readily. There's a notion often trotted out that you have to live in a cave with no electricty to try and be smart about this stuff, but that's not true at all. But keeping on top of it takes effort, and people are lazy. Giving up our protections is convenient, unfortunately.

Because, as I've explained, I mostly trust them to not do what's overtly illegal, but not everything that is both legal and permitted under the EULA is something I want to grant them permission to do. Something doesn't have to be illegal or somehow overtly evil for me to not want them to do it. This EULA grants them permission to perform extraordinary, non-illegal invasions of privacy. If they later change their minds about how they use this permission, they're protected by the EULA unless they actually do violate a law.

I don't want to give them such permission, but I want to play the game. Because I want to play their game, I don't want to have to choose to not play the game in order to avoid granting them this permission. Therefore, I find it preferable to have a less onerous EULA than to stop playing the game. Is that really so hard to grasp?

If this type of privacy discussion is foreign to folks reading this, do some searching about user user website tracking and the debates around it. There are people who object to the notion of companies like Google (and many others) tracking uniquely identifiable individuals across the websites they visit. Bear in mind, these systems don't directly identify the users; they say "user X went to foo.org and bar.com", not "user X is John Smith". But it turns out that determined people are really good at using that sort of data to figure out that user X is John Smith. There's enough concern about this sort of thing that laws are being enacted around being able to opt out of this sort of tracking in the EU, and laws like that are at least being discussed in the US.

Now, in light of people not wanting their website visitation patterns to be tracked by third parties, even if the tracking data cannot (directly) identify the person being tracked, do you really think it's that big a stretch that people would not want to permit a service provider open access to their computer's memory and storage?

Hyper, you completely do not understand the context of my post that you quoted. As a result, what you replied with was irrelevant and, because of the condecending way in which you posted incorrect info, pretty dumb. You can go back and figure that out or not, I don't really care, but don't expect further effort on my part to explain it to you. The info you need to figure it out is right there in plain text.

Yeah, I don't. I was responding to someone who said something about websites. Jesus.

Outside the OP itself, I don't think this thread is very "toxic". Oustside that one post, there's really not much doomcrying. There's just some "yeah, I really dislike this" and some "I don't see the problem" Outside the OP, this thread is less harsh than some of the ones about ATs and powersets.

Grok context, much? I was talking about EULAs for websites. You also conveniently ignored the part where I said I install software when using the software is the point of visiting the site. CoH's client kind of blatantly qualifies.

I understand it too. That doesn't mean I think it's justified. It's overly broad for what I understand them to want and need to do. I also understand why it's overly broad - its because they don't know what means they may want to use in the future to monitor the game, its use, etc., so they're allowing anything and everything. I don't agree with that. I am not enthused to (ostensibly) consent to giving them the right to do more than they need in order to save them from having to write a more specific EULA and then modify it at a later time.

I'm sympathetic with their cause, but I'm still not interested in abdicating my privacy to them to support it.

I don't understand why people think are so completely incapable of separating these two concepts.

• I think NCSoft will do things I would not want them to do to my personal computer and/or the data on it.
• I want to give NCSoft permission that would allow them to do things I would not want them to do to my personal computer and/or the data on it.

"I don't think they'll abuse it" is not satisfactory to me.

They do not need permission to have the program send back its own memory. The main objection I have is to the clauses which, in theory, could allow them to view any memory or files on the computer.

I'm a savvy computer user. If it came down to it, and I really wanted to, given the way this game works currently I could run the game in a way that couldn't do or see much outside its own files and process space. I'm not particularly worried. I still don't like the wording.

I have never seen a website EULA that makes the kinds of claims we're talking about. Among other things, it's not possible for most of them to do without installing software. I never install software unless the point is to use that software, and I have never installed software with this sort of EULA.

Edit: Just to be clear, I'm not going to go quit over this or anything of the sort. Weighing my awareness of what they probably mean to do with this against my interest in continuing to play comes out in favor of staying. That doesn't mean I like this new EULA terminology - its far too broad, and I dislike on principal giving people permission to do things that I don't actually want them to have permission to do. I'm looking around to see if there's anything besides unsubscribing that I can do to apply useful pressure to get them to change it. Probably not, but it's at least worth looking into.

I do, and only the ones I have to unblock to use. Any site I visit only once gets a temporary unblock only, and I never unblock ad tracking or google/yahoo APIs unless the site won't work without them. Mostly, I leave sites that won't work without those APIs, and don't go back.

But notably, these sites (well, other than this one, soon) do not have terms of use that state that they can do anything they want with data on my computer because I visited them.

Their software does indeed have free reign to look and, modify, and possibly upload anything from my computer. However, their terms of use do not state that they have my permission to upload data to them. (I can set the software to upload infected files automatically. I do not.) They might be lying or omitting details, essentially going behind my back - that's a risk I take in running their products, but if they are caught doing that they are doing it without my express permission. If they asked for that express permission (edit: In the EULA, not in the program's settings), I would use a different product.

Yes. Post AE. When the AE first came out and practically everyone was in there farming*, there seemed to be sort of an attitude shift towards charging for PLing. At the time, so many people were doing it, and so few charging for it, anyone charging for it (on Justice) that anyone who paid for it was being silly, because they could get in on a free one so easily. Since then, paying for AE doesn't seem to have picked back up as a norm.

Even before then, though, people would commonly advertise for fillers in PI, and rarely were asking for money. Back when level 41 anchors were the rage, I think I saw them charge more often than the farmers!

*The AE is still really good for leveling. When it first came out, though, it was so much better than it is now that I think the perceived opportunity cost of not using it was so much higher that way more people used it for rewards.

Ticket farmers and XP farmers have different motives. A lot of people don't bother with the tickets, and are just leveling up their own 2nd account or some such. They're the ones likely to be charitable.

Afriad isn't the right word. Annoyed would be a far more accurate word, and using that word instead, the answer is "yes". I consider it unfortunate, but I am willing to accept what I consider a subpar experience for a new, unsubscribed player to avoid what I consider a subpar experience for myself. Given that the barrier to bypassing the subpar experience is so very low, I am not deeply concerned about the negative impressions that limited communication in particular will create.

Of course, I was happy playing this game with my communication with other players limited by my own choice for quite a long time. Take that for what it's worth.

Dude. Calm down.

VIP-only zones would do the trick.

I've no intention of switching characters who happen to be ranking members of SGs to some other server, losing all their history of earned prestige and the like. Of course, those characters who I would bother with such minutiae on are the ones I do things like badge with.

Now, if I can send any character over, because it's an account-wide reward, then fine. I still won't transfer anyone - I'll just create a disposable character on Exalted.

I've spent seven years on the same server. All my investment in server-specific things is there. I am not going to uproot to avoid the "unwashed masses" of F2P players. (I learned how to avoid the unwashed masses long ago!) As such, I certainly don't expect to be left out of anything VIP-relatd just because of that server loyalty. I am not predicting that outcome from this event, but if that does end up happening, they're going to be getting some nastygrams from me.