http://games.slashdot.org/story/10/01/19/0231206/Blizzard-Adds-Timestamps-To-emWoWem-Armory
“In a move that could cause serious privacy problems for players of World of Warcraft, Blizzard has added timestamps and an RSS feed to the game’s online armory site….”
For those of you who dream of making the most successful game of the world, remember that what comes hand-in-hand with that: everything you ever do will be mercilessly and endlessly criticized and picked apart, as soon as you do it or even as soon as you announce that you’re thinking about doing it.
You can even have a team of people spend weeks or months adding a new feature to a peripheral feature of your game, for the sole reason of helping your players to keep up with each other’s progress in the game better and have more fun playing together… only to find that people respond by being shocked that you could be so irresponsible as to do such a thing, and posting headlines about how the CIA can now track their raid schedule and what will they do with that information? I don’t know but the consequences are sure to be dire.
But seriously… although I make light of it as typical tin-foil-hat conspiracy-theorist alarmism, in fact this criticism is pretty valid, or at least inevitable; Blizzard will have no choice but to add an “opt-out” option, or some sort of permissions system linked with the in-game friends and guild lists. (Another few weeks or months of work, by the way.) That’s the other thing that comes with success: everything you do really does affect millions of peoples’ lives. (I’ve heard that in the tool that Blizzard GMs use to log player issues, one of the values of the Issues Type field is “Suicide Threat.”)
When you have 11.5 million players, the problem isn’t “dealing with your players”, it becomes “dealing with human nature, and in fact a big chunk of humanity itself.” All though it’s arguable whether games always should be so deeply wound up in players’ lives, the fact that they can be is why I love them.