Opinions from my guilds raid last night.

So I dug up some information for several people on the raid force last night from the app I am developing, there were a few that were shocked and didn't like the data being there, I calmed that down quickly telling them how to opt out and how quick it worked. A lot of people were glad it is coming back and excited that there is some competition in the delivering of the data, because competition breeds quality. Here are some things from them about the security end of it, some may have been discussed already, I was late in the game getting here, but I felt they were all very valid points, (and Dan I hate when one of my clients says all you have to do is... not doing that here ).

I do however think that what was discussed could be easily implemented, some things were available on the old EQ2 players site as well, and this is far superior, and it would be a shame to have people turned away because of limited options.

Every complaint was about something in particular node, some wanted to block spells, some wanted to block AA, some wanted to block gear some wanted a block of everything except toon and bio. This is very stuctured and to implement players being able to put a filter on each node of the player data shouldn't be too terribly difficult on either end short of 'wrangling' the time. Some wanted guild members to be able to see (maybe more involved here) but I though that was on the old site.

It isn't just about the audience here, without a doubt this will be a desire in the other games and it will help others to embrace it, and certainly wouldn't trun anyone away.

 

I hope I'm not being too anti-PC here, but some also need to just get over it.  They play a MMO, they are already fairly public.  It's not like we're posting their bank account numbers or credit scores.

 

Yeah, we already had one person raging in the comments about how we were invading their privacy and basically called us unethical for creating our site.

As for guild members, that might be possible on EQ2Players, but fansites can't prove someone is who they say they are. Well, I have an idea for that actually but since most people will keep their Alts locked away, I'm not sure we'll even mess with it.

 

Create a guid and ask player to put in bio, crawl/api call (if thats available)?

 

We are working on a way to incorporate identity into requests.  I would prefer to do it correctly instead of embedding something into a field (like the bio).

One change we made was filtering out the guild motd field from the feed as we found that many guilds were including phone numbers and ventrillo passwords in there.  

-dan

 

That was precisely my plan. But since most people will leave their alts opted out, I don't know if we'll bother.

It's interesting how many people want to use our site, but also want to opt out some or all of their character details from others seeing it. Never mind that it's all available at <a rel="nofollow" href="census.daybreakgames.com/"]census.daybreakgames.com/[/url] .

 

One big problem with the whole privacy debate is many people are being completely irrational (on both ends of the debate) when the question of privacy comes.  Some people will request 100% privacy, while failing to give any good reason beyond "I want 100% privacy, because I want it!".  Some of them will go on their Facebook or Twitter feed to rage about how their privacy is being invaded.  (Yes, I am being sarcastic.  Because the Internet is such a 100%-privacy ensured medium.)  And others will say that "this is virtual data, which belongs to SOE, not you, so quit playing if you don't like SOE's policy".  The thing is, both sides can also have valid arguments ("I want to avoid people marginalizing me based on my gear or guild affiliation", or "it makes the whole game more fun for those of us who loves comparing statistics and trying to learn more about the game").  The thing is being able to sort out the irrational from the rational arguments, and then finding a balance that will please the majority (because pleasing the totality is totally impossible).

I think the current balanced approach is probably good enough: allow everyone to fully opt-out - people fully opting out will be such a minority that the remaining dataset is large enough to be useful and entertaining.   Take out or control access to what is most likely to cause REAL (not imaginary) issues, such as coin (to avoid harassment from beggars), motd (personal info often posted there) and alts (because some people want us to threat their alts as separate characters, not just extensions of the same one).

In the end, if the solution satisfies 80%-90% of the playerbase, it will already be a higher ratio than what is often encountered when a game team does major game mechanics changes <img src="/station/images/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" />

But, as in everything, there will always be the extremist who often fails to bring any rational argument.  That's probably what you encountered there Feldon, and I'm sure by now you have learned how to filter out these from people bringing up valid issues.

 

I ended up adding a Privacy notice on the front page of EQ2U. Hopefully that will reduce the "How do I opt out?" e-mails.