Part of the WoW community (mostly from overseas, go figure) is up in arms against the latest revision of Warden, Blizzard’s tool which scans your memory for running bots and other cheating utilities while you play World of Warcraft.
The pattern is always the same (and you got the same self-righteous BS spammed ad nauseam back in the day when the Armory was announced in Spring): spurred on by the programmers of the botting / cheating software, their users and their shills, thousands of so-called privacy advocates will rush to jump on the overcrowded bandwagon to try and get a go at flogging the poor horse which isn’t just dead but has been mashed to a bloody pulp ages ago.
Why the whole argument is particularly stupid is that if you don’t trust Blizzard not to run code you don’t know about on your box, you shouldn’t be playing in the first place. Because, Warden or not, do you know exactly what happens on your box when you install WoW? Did you bother about the possibility that TBC might go and gather the information pertaining to your socks subscription and send that back when you next log on? Did you ever ascertain that every single patch isn’t actually compromising your privacy?
If Blizzard wanted to execute malicious code to go steal your financial statements, you gave them ample opportunity from day one, Warden or not, and keep doing it every time you download a patch. This doesn’t seem to be an issue to the zealous defenders of the Sacrosanct Privacy, oddly enough.
As all the other reasonable commentators keep pointing out, if you do not trust Blizzard with your privacy, there’s only one solution, uninstall the game and quit now. What Warden does is totally irrelevant in that context, and focusing your ire on it at the exclusion of the rest of WoW basically just shows that what you’re really after is posturing on message boards.
Plus, face it, it’s not as if your private data was interesting anyway. Nobody cares about your secret pr0n stash on your home computer, least of all Blizzard. If it’s professional data, even simpler, you shouldn’t play WoW on a work computer no matter how lax your employer might be about that. The only thing Blizzard may want is your credit card number, and chances are, you gave it to them already.
So just stop wasting virtual ink over this. The whole argument is ludicrous. Uninstall and shut up, instead of carrying water for all the cheaters who have at least a serious (if despicable) reason to complain.
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7 Responses to “Strawman of 2.3 - the Pointless Debate around the Improved Warden”
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/agreed.
I’ve always been an advocate of having everything open: if I don’t have something to hide, why should I?
You want to look at my armory profile? Be my guest! You have constructive suggestions to make about my build or gear? Go ahead PLEASE! I can take constructive criticism to improve my playing experience!
Blizzard wants to scan my PC for illegal botting software? By all means! Please come right in! The sooner those get out of the system, so much the better!
Of all recent Blizzard changes, only one has me baffled a bit: you can now send no more than 10 /s in a period of 10 seconds. Why?
It’s not to stop those gold spammers that throw up half-a-dozen lines at once: they still do it. Were players that much annoying spamming /s? Other than the very occasional /s train or car or whatever someone playing around with macros was trying to “draw” using ASCII characters, those gold seller spams are much more annoying… I tend to “let go” when they throw up a single line, but each and everyone that repeats the same thing half a dozen times gets reported EVERY time.
Great post, Gwaendar.
If blizzard really wanted to scan your box i’m sure they had more than enough ways to do it if they really wanted to afterall we all run their software. I’m sure they doing it to fight all the bots that plague running WoW.
If Blizzard getting rid of my trogans for me i’m fine with that at least i don’t have to go out and buy more software to get rid of software as software is not my thing anyway.
People don’t think. They hear even some vague clue that something in WoW might maybe be monitoring their computers and go all self-righteous, touting the right to privacy blah blah blah.
People like to argue on the internet.
ZOGM TEY BE WACTHIN MEE
(note: The above was much easier to type out that the security word.. I mean xrevol..? C’mon, why must the v’s look like they are humping every other letter)
I had one once that I believe was something along the lines of “lhtilih”…I don’t know for sure because I couldn’t read it…and anything with Rs, Ns, and Ms is pretty tough too.
On that respect, the most annoying thing ever is when you post on your own blog (so you’re signed in) and then go to comment on another blogspot, yet you still have to type FfijILlmk and similar stuff.