Posts Tagged ‘ Blizzard ’

Blizzcon: A much better apology

October 28, 2011
Blizzcon: A much better apology

I said yesterday that my next post would be about happy things, such as Pandas or Monks. It IS a happy post. As an update to yesterday’s post, it seems something has finally filtered though. I appreciate the apology, it’s worlds apart from what I actually expected to get from Blizzard at this stage. Thank you Mike Morhaime, I will be optimistic and hope that this is a sign of continued improvement on Blizzard’s track record when it comes to their record on handling QUILTBAG issues, sexism, and hate speech in general. Bashiok Community Manager Dear members of the...

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Distinctiveness: When is an MMO not a book?

March 8, 2011
bombs

Hot off the heels of my first impressions of RIFT, I now want to touch on another broad MMO topic. In my last post I compared Warcraft and RIFT to two similar but rather different books by Terry Pratchett. However, this post at Massively  touches on the long-standing criticisms of WoW and it’s influence on the MMO industry at large. The problem appears to be that all these MMOs have similar mechanics, and different ‘window dressing’. I rather take issue with this, because while FPS and RPG singleplayer games evolve and change, they’re still recognizably of a type and what changes...

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Real ID Redux

September 30, 2010
Communication Preferences - Battle.net

So I was a bit upset about Real ID on the forums, back in July. I’m still not particularly pleased with the in-game functions either, although I do carefully make use of them. Today I’ve noticed a change. Pointed out on twitter by @NDMiko, the change enables users to hide themselves from friends of friends. As you can see from the image above, under ‘Settings’ in your battle.net account there is now a simple toggle for enabling Real ID. Like facebook are wont to do with their privacy settings, the Real ID system is toggled on by default. Not so...

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Some Jokes Just Aren’t Funny (a thank you to Blizzard)

April 29, 2010
Some Jokes Just Aren’t Funny (a thank you to Blizzard)

Blizzard finally steps up with zero tolerance on offensive names. To ensure all participants in the Arena Tournament have the best experience possible, there will be a zero-tolerance policy for any inappropriate character or Arena team names created on the Arena Tournament realm. Characters with inappropriate names will be deleted. This means that you will need to customize another template from scratch and re-earn all personal and hidden ratings. Keep in mind that in a later phase of the Arena Tournament team rosters will be locked down. If your character is deleted during this time, no exceptions will be...

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