BBQ Blog

Edit: Thank you for continuing to listen to and respect your customers, Blizzard!

You’ve been under a rock in Blizztown if you haven’t heard about the uproar over the recently announced changes to Blizzard discussion and support forums in the coming months.

Theres alot of opinions out there on the matter so I’ll try make mine rather brief and try not to repeat what the nearly fifty-thousand people on the official forum have already pointed out.

I have made many friendships in the years I’ve played online games, many that have turned into bonds of lifelong trust. Trust is not created by instantly divulging my name and life details with strangers, despite what social networking sites like Facebook would have you believe. Trust and friendship is created slowly on day to day interactions and communication until people feel comfortable enough with one another to start sharing things about themselves. The internet and online gaming have created new avenues and opportunities for developing friendships but they have not changed the way friendships and trust develop.

Coercing customers to provide their personal information to strangers will not instantly create bonds of trust. I would dare say it puts the trust your customers have for your product and company in jepardy. It most certainly does not make a safer or more productive environment for discussion by adding threats of real life dangers in place of harsh words. (Not that I believe that’s the real reason they are making these changes at all.)

Personally, I’ll still try to enjoy Blizzard games and disable* the Real ID features until they either make them less intrusive and give more privacy options. If the other path is taken and the system becomes even more intrusive, I’ll surely find other games to play with my friends that offer similar entertainment without the privacy intrusions and annoyance of forced social networking.

We here athe BBQ crew are a very social group of gamers but I’m not even sure we can agree with the direction Bizzard is taking with it’s social integration.

*There’s a great article on how to disable Real ID on your battle.net account here. For an optional service, they have made it very difficult to disable after automatically enabling it for all users of the battle.net service. Kinda reminds me of that time Google turned Buzz on everyone’s gmail accounts without asking.. Y’all remember that?

So I found this cool short film on youtube today, and thought I would share it with everyone… the effects are really cool. The filmmaker made it in only 4 days which is quite impressive.

BBQ Runs are back!
Any players on Drenden-US Alliance are welcome to join us for some fun and relaxed ICC-10 action. Sign up on our spreadsheet if you’d like to come!

I’m an old-school gamer at heart. I grew up in the 16-bit generation and my favorite games still reside there. Every now and then I break out my A320 and play some Super Metroid or Final Fantasy and it’s always relieving to realize that time has not caused the charm of these games to decay. I’m sure nostalgia has a lot to do with why I still love these games, but I also think that somewhere between the transition from cartridge to compact disc, and now to DVD and Blu-Ray, gaming no longer inspires your imagination, but bombards it; giving it little room to form images of its own.
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