forgotten_aria

This is about World of Warcraft, but it's more about a social issue, which is why I'm not putting this behind a filter. It is however a useless rant, so it may not bear reading.

It's already been known that WoW looks at the titles of all your windows and if one of the windows is named with the name of a third-party cheat, it will report you. We'll today's patch notes talk about that it will now scan for trojan viruses, third-party cheats and will provide the benefits of "additional anti-virus protection."

1) I'm glad they are being open about it, instead of just doing it in the background
2) I'm glad I'm playing on a semi-dedicated game machine, so really, WoW can be as intrusive as it wants.

The real issue here is that here is this game made by a reputable major developer taking these rather intrusive steps. It transmits the names of all your windows, and now it's scanning for who knows what.

My issue isn't that they're doing it, but that they can mostly get away with they're 4 million subscribers shrugging and saying "whatever, just let me play."

Plus every time they do this, it means it makes the machine slower if you are using your machine for other things, which is our guess at why

binkbink gets 4 fps sometimes.

I think this is just twinging all those nerves that are already raw from machine gun weilding special task forces in the subways and shoe removal in our airports. The public as a whole is so willing to ignore this little losses of privacy and freedom in the same of safty. I don't know about you, but machine gun weilding people make me feel less safe.

I was kind of hoping that my escape could be free of these things. It's a game! It's supposed to be fun! Not a slowly closing shroud of Big Blizzard.