Nephele said:It sounds like the best option here is simply to make it an option? Have it default to tracking only character name and allow people to choose whether they share an account name instead? Since we're talking about a friends list/LFG tool, there's presumably no negative interactions where we would need to worry about accountability.
I like the idea of adding someone elses character as an account wide friend, but would be careful about the concept of sharing your account wide characters automatically as an 'option'
Things you have to consider:
Though this is veering abit off-topic, no company in their right mind would intentionally violate their subscribers privacy, so its best any system like that is very mindful of how it is implemented.
To add to the social list, I am also an advocate of 'circles', or more specifically sub groups. Being able to message / shout-out to someone in the context of a specific group of friends. Say a RL buddy group, or any other context you can come up with.
Dediadeis said:I would not put it past some guilds to make account wide shares a requirement.
While I'm sure it could exist, in MMOs with the option of account-wide friending I've never personally seen anyone have such a requirement.
I'm not sure how you could have account-wide friending without it being apparent in the UI which of your friends are account-friends and which are not. It would become obvious when you change characters.
Certainly no one should be able to account-friend you without your approval. No one should be able to FRIEND you without your approval, either.
There are two main points that are at odds in this discussion and like most real discussions neither is 100% right or wrong.
The first is the need for player accountability. I do not want to be in a group with a known ninja looter or someone known for spewing hate speech or sometimes even someone who goes afk a lot in groups. If a player can just switch characters to avoid the consequences of ninja looting, change their character name to avoid a hateful reputation or switch characters because they got kicked out of their third group for being afk more than 50% of the pulls it severely limits what a server population can do to self police antisocial behavior, if not anti-ULA behavior.
The second point boils down to victims rights which is a pretty nasty global social issue that we are currently struggling with as an entire society in this relatively new information age. When does someones right to privacy violate someone elses right to protection. If a person wishes to more of less play a single player game for a few hours, or a very well known and sought after healer/crafter who doesn't like turning people down just doesn't want to deal with the requests, or even more personal a real life acquaintance is acceptably but awkwardly attempting to court another player who just hasn't decided how to respond yet and wants some time. All of these are fair reasons to want some personal anonymity while the other party is doing nothing wrong.
I believe there are a few compromises that can be made to mostly satisfy both needs. We, as players, have the benefit of not actually needing to know all the characters on another account to benefit from account wide actions, VR as a company can do it for us from the background.
Active Privacy Controls:
You do not show up as online until you log into a character or join an account level chat channel from the account screen
You have 3 privacy settings per character that can be changed each time you log in:
A) Account anonymous: Account Friends cannot see that you are on.
B) Character anonymous: Character Friends cannot see that you are on.
C) Searchable: Is your character able to be found using in game search tools
If you are character anonymous but not account anonymous your account friends can see that you are on but not what character you are logged into. If you are account anonymous but not character anonymous then a player who is an account friend but is also on a character that is character friends then they can see you on the character friends list.
Active Relationship Controls:
Each action has a character level setting and an account level setting with the exception of Character Notes.
The Relationship flags are as follows:
A) Friend: A character must accept a friend request for the link to be made. From the character friend screen an account friend request can be sent.
B) Ignore: An ignored character does not show up in chat or searches with the exception of group chat or raid chat and you do not show up in theirs.
C) Block: An account becomes blocked. No character on that account can interact with any character on your account except in group or raid chat, you never show up in searches nor can you see each others details. When you see a character that is blocked by you you do not see which character caused the block but you do have the option to remove the block for a specific character but only at the character level.
D) Note: You can create a note for a specific character that shows up on your note page but only for that character and not at an account level though all your characters can see the note.
At the guild level there should also be both an account and character level guild remove and a guild blacklist that is at the account level but the officers cannot see which character caused the block.
Even these two sets of controls will not solve everything but I feel like its a pretty good middle ground.
zoltar said:Sabot said:I also may want to be in different guilds with different characters and dont want either of them to know i am in the other.
Then join guilds that allow players to have characters in other guilds. If a guild want to have a policy of exclusivity, I don't see why the game should protect your ability to violate that agreement.
If you can show me anywhere that says anything about joining a guild that would not allow me to be in another guild I would love to see it. This is about personal freedom. I would never join a guild that wouldn't let me join other guilds.
I think your idea is great for control freaks and others that dont want people to have any freedom to play as they like.
The other issue is that you're only looking at it from the perspective of policing griefers and jerks.
What if the griefers decide to use it to prey on people. Have a bad interaction with someone and want to log to your alt, only to find they tracked you down and decide to kill the mobs in your area once again. It's not unrealistic.
zoltar said: Two responses to that. 1: putting a person on ignore should prevent them from messaging you or getting info on you from the system 2: if they somehow do track you down and continue to harass you, that behavior can be reported and should lead to a ban.
The free trials that Pantheon will have along with a VPN will pretty much nulify both of those points. There are some really persistent (and sometimes creepy) pests out there at times. It is the funky world of the Interwebz.
Kratuk said:zoltar said: Two responses to that. 1: putting a person on ignore should prevent them from messaging you or getting info on you from the system 2: if they somehow do track you down and continue to harass you, that behavior can be reported and should lead to a ban.The free trials that Pantheon will have along with a VPN will pretty much nulify both of those points. There are some really persistent (and sometimes creepy) pests out there at times. It is the funky world of the Interwebz.
Honestly I think that's a bit far-fetched and you guys are exaggerating the impact of the social system being account based. Hell, if someone is that dedicated they could create a character, become your friend, and spy on you or get info in a number of other ways. An appear offline toggle and a toggle to hide your level and/or location would provide plenty privacy IMO. But I recognize that at lot of people disagree strongly, so I'm okay with compromise. Here's how I would try to do that:
Does that satisfy your privacy concerns?
Couldn't there be happy medium here? I mean we do have the ability to add features. It doesn't have to be an 'All or Nothing' when it comes to privacy settings.
Why not have a more robust system that lets you add accounts to your friends list, but then be able to sub group your friends into groups that each have set permissions. So you could add your close family to a group called 'Family' that can see all your Toons when they come online. Then you could have a group called 'Battle Buds' and give them permission to see only 2 of your 5 characters. So they can see when you come online using one of those 2 toons, but if you log on with one of the other 3 they don't see you. You can then create however many groups you want/need with whatever set of permissions you want/need. You could even have it so friends could be part of more than one group.
You could then also have a way to post a status and then select which groups can see that status. You could even have it be able to set up multiple statuses and have a different one for each group. So 'Family' could see 'Who wants Pizza tonight?' but 'Battle Buds' see 'Ready to slay some Orcs! Hit me up.'
You could then have a way to set your online appearence also based on groups. So you could have your global 'Online' status, but then toggle your 'Battle Buds' group as 'Appear Offline'.
There are other features you could add to this... You could have 'Invite to Party' and 'Invite to Raid' option that lets you select a 'group' on your friends list and auto-invite all of them into a party or raid group. There could also be ways to set ranks to your friends on your list and then be able to sort by rank, so that your best friends always show at the top of your list. You can have 'notes' where you can put in text like 'This guy can craft high level potions' or 'This girl likes to Roleplay'.
Sabot said:zoltar said:Sabot said:I also may want to be in different guilds with different characters and dont want either of them to know i am in the other.Then join guilds that allow players to have characters in other guilds. If a guild want to have a policy of exclusivity, I don't see why the game should protect your ability to violate that agreement.
If you can show me anywhere that says anything about joining a guild that would not allow me to be in another guild I would love to see it. This is about personal freedom. I would never join a guild that wouldn't let me join other guilds.
I think your idea is great for control freaks and others that dont want people to have any freedom to play as they like.
Some guilds 100% disallow members(alts) belonging to other guilds. Even on different servers. This was a guild rule(among others) for BotS in Vanguard. And frankly few members found enough time to actually spend on other characters after the rigorous raiding schedule BotS kept.
Obviously BotS had no tech to enforce it, meaning no way to identify what alts and guilds they might be in.
There was no game functionality that blocked having each character in a different guild.
zewtastic said:Sabot said:zoltar said:Sabot said:I also may want to be in different guilds with different characters and dont want either of them to know i am in the other.Then join guilds that allow players to have characters in other guilds. If a guild want to have a policy of exclusivity, I don't see why the game should protect your ability to violate that agreement.
If you can show me anywhere that says anything about joining a guild that would not allow me to be in another guild I would love to see it. This is about personal freedom. I would never join a guild that wouldn't let me join other guilds.
I think your idea is great for control freaks and others that dont want people to have any freedom to play as they like.
Some guilds 100% disallow members(alts) belonging to other guilds. Even on different servers. This was a guild rule(among others) for BotS in Vanguard. And frankly few members found enough time to actually spend on other characters after the rigorous raiding schedule BotS kept.
Obviously BotS had no tech to enforce it, meaning no way to identify what alts and guilds they might be in.
There was no game functionality that blocked having each character in a different guild.
Obviously some guilds operate like that. I was just pointing out that that has nothing to do with what I was saying.
The default position should be that the (character) gets added to the friends list. The (account) version would be the exception, not the rule, and therefore should not be established as the default option. You should have to opt in to anything that compromises a degree of account-wide privacy, not opt out. I know this might not seem like a big deal because the end result is the same ... it's just a matter of how many clicks it takes to get there. Either way, the "standard" should be set that you add a single character to a friends list, not the master account. If I befriend someone, there should be a gradual phase. If I trust someone enough to upgrade the connection to account based it should feel meaningful.
oneADseven said:The default position should be that the (character) gets added to the friends list. The (account) version would be the exception, not the rule, and therefore should not be established as the default option. You should have to opt in to anything that compromises a degree of account-wide privacy, not opt out. I know this might not seem like a big deal because the end result is the same ... it's just a matter how many clicks it takes to get there. Either way, the "standard" should be set that you add a single character to a friends list, not the master account. If I befriend someone, there should be a gradual phase. If I trust someone enough to upgrade the connection to account based it should feel meaningful.
Lets keep some perspective . The "compromised privacy" you're talking about is people knowing your character names in a video game. This isn't an issue like with facebook where a relaxed privacy setting exposes tons of personal information to the entire world (photos of family, when you may or may not be home, personal views, etc). This isnt' an issue of your real-life details (name, address, phone, SS number, etc) getting exposed. I get wanting the option to restrict info, but lets not act like this is super-sensitive information here.
Having the majority of the player base using account-based communication is going to lead to a better overall experience. It makes communication simpler, and won't cause issues for the vast majority of players. I feel like the players who are sensitive (overly IMO) to this privacy "issue" will be sure to adjust their settings. It can be a highly-visible privacy slider at character creation, making it super easy to adjust your setting.
My perspective is pretty straight forward. You will never convince me that account-sharing should be the default. You can cite me as being overly sensitive all you want but the incessant push that account-based communication is going to lead to a better overall experience is extremely subjective. I stated that I see merit in the idea and even support having it as an option. I think it's absurd to use it as a "default" option that players have to opt out of. If I send someone a friend invite, there should be an opportunity to "upgrade" that to account-based. I shouldn't have to "downgrade" a connection to "character friend" for any reason. The best compromise I can think of is that the "default position" is turned "off" and players can toggle that to on if they so desire, and then continue to toggle individuals as needed. To be blunt, there are a lot of people I simply wouldn't invite to my friends list if it had to feel awkward when I had to downgrade them because of some CAN-SPAMMY opt-out clause. Again, I think the "account-based" connection should be more meaningful and earned, like most things in Pantheon. I think it's fair to assume a gradual phase from friend > good friend and this feature should support that rather than contradict.
oneADseven said:My perspective is pretty straight forward. You will never convince me that account-sharing should be the default. You can cite me as being overly sensitive all you want but the incessant push that account-based communication is going to lead to a better overall experience is extremely subjective. I stated that I see merit in the idea and even support having it as an option. I think it's absurd to use it as a "default" option that players have to opt out of. If I send someone a friend invite, there should be an opportunity to "upgrade" that to account-based. I shouldn't have to "downgrade" a connection to "character friend" for any reason. The best compromise I can think of is that the "default position" is turned "off" and players can toggle that to on if they so desire, and then continue to toggle individuals as needed. To be blunt, there are a lot of people I simply wouldn't invite to my friends list if it had to feel awkward when I had to downgrade them because of some CAN-SPAMMY opt-out clause. Again, I think the "account-based" connection should be more meaningful and earned, like most things in Pantheon.
Just to clarify, in the system I'm talking about you wouldn't be "downgrading" connections. What you do is select whether the handle that other players see is your character's name or your account name. This is a general setting for your character, not something that you decide on a case-by-case basis when "friending" someone. Also, just like in Twitter, you don't actually send friend requests to other people. Following a player doesn't require any confirmation on their part. However, the connection is limited until they follow you as well, so the equivalent of confirming a "friend request" would be following someone back.
So, for someone who has chosen character-level rather than account-level social communication, things would work exactly like you are talking about here. When you and another player follow each other, they only see your character name. You would be able to later go in and upgrade them individually to account-level access.
I absolutely do NOT want people being able to friend me without my permission. I have endured some serious online stalker problems in the past (not an unusual experience for many women, unfortunately), and having complete control over who can add me to their friend list and which characters people see me on is a first line of defense against that kind of thing.
@Zoltar
I don't like the idea of seeing some people (we're talking non-friends here) based on their character name and others based on their account name, or allowing people to switch between them. I definitely don't like the idea of people being able to "follow" me without consent. To keep things in perspective here, I don't ever want my in-game status updates to function like Twitter. My preferred playstyle is to use /anon. I don't want people to be able to see what zone I'm in (unless you /who while in the same zone and see my name on the list), know what level I am (unless you physically inspect me, and this is another option I should be able to control so this shouldn't be possible by "default"), won't know when I log on or off, and won't see any status updates I share (unless you are on my friends list, at which point I would want to be able to control whether the status message is broadcast to friend level / account level connections, or both). I understand, appreciate, and support the idea of implementing tools that allow friends to connect in more meaningful ways. I do not support any of the other stuff you alluded to, particularly:
"No doubt privacy has its place, but there are often instances where it's in the public's interest to not have privacy."
"However, the privacy to keep your identify secret on certain characters is a lot more difficult to justify."
"Having the majority of the player base using account-based communication is going to lead to a better overall experience."
"It makes communication simpler, and won't cause issues for the vast majority of players. I feel like the players who are sensitive (overly IMO) to this privacy "issue" will be sure to adjust their settings."
You made a proposal a few posts ago and asked at the end "Does that satisfy your privacy concerns?" My answer to that is simple. I don't like any of those bullet points at all. I strongly favor what Trasak proposed as nothing jumps out to me as something that doesn't seem completely reasonable.
You also need to consider that GDRP, General Data Protection Regulation of the European Union, will likely force international companies to change how user data is tracked, both by the company and other users of the company. One of the purposes of GDRP is actually to prevent tracking user activity without the permission of the user. One user friending/tracking the login history of another user absolutely must be at the consent of the user otherwise Pantheon would likely come under fire for GDRP violations should anyone choose to report it.
While the actual enforcement and scope of GDRP is still unknown as it only went into effect a little over a month ago, any company that wants to do business within the European Union must consider the new law. It is also likely that other areas will pass similar laws with varying amounts of State Government exemptions.
Trasak said:One of the purposes of GDRP is actually to prevent tracking user activity without the permission of the user. One user friending/tracking the login history of another user absolutely must be at the consent of the user otherwise Pantheon would likely come under fire for GDRP violations should anyone choose to report it.
There's a huge difference between a company tracking it's user data and what you are talking about here. If the company is storing my personal information along with data about what I do, that is a GDPR issue, and could be a problem if they did it without consent.
But the idea that GDPR would require individual permission (not just TOS notification) between users to see any information about each other, including non-personal information such as the name/lvl/zone of a character, is pretty absurd.
zoltar said:But the idea that GDPR would require individual permission (not just TOS notification) between users to see any information about each other, including non-personal information such as the name/lvl/zone of a character, is pretty absurd.
Absurd or not it is one of the possible interpretations of the new law as technically all user data is encompassed by the law. No one wants to be on the losing side of legal precedence so they are being conservative on the line between user data and game data. Online status and a list of character names belonging to the player most definitely would count as user data and not character data and would need to be protected.
Trasak said:zoltar said:But the idea that GDPR would require individual permission (not just TOS notification) between users to see any information about each other, including non-personal information such as the name/lvl/zone of a character, is pretty absurd.
Absurd or not it is one of the possible interpretations of the new law as technically all user data is encompassed by the law. No one wants to be on the losing side of legal precedence so they are being conservative on the line between user data and game data. Online status and a list of character names belonging to the player most definitely would count as user data and not character data and would need to be protected.
Think about what you're saying. This would mean that in order to do /who in a zone, the game would have to get permission from EACH player in that zone every single time a new player types /who. Hell, this would basically mean that even being able to SEE a character in the game would violate GDPR under that interpretation. There is no way anyone would reasonably expect GDPR to protect non-personal data (such as a character being online) in this manner.