There has been some controversy in Blizzard’s official World of Warcraft forums lately over the concept of privacy. After some players started asking some pointed questions in a now-locked message thread, an official Blizzard post from community rep Caydiem confirmed that the company scans players’ computers for hacking programs. He tried to address the issue of whether the scans are ethically appropriate, as well as being legal and allowed by the EULA, assuring the player base that Blizzard was collecting no personally identifiable information, just looking for the cheaters.
Of course, the controversy hasn’t stopped there.
Questions arose about certain clauses in the WoW EULA which note collection of certain demographic data, some players wanting to know just what information is being collected, some not caring at all… the usual gamut, but running more towards "keep your filthy fingers off my hard drive!" This isn’t the first time we seen this kind of reaction here. Although such cheat scanners are commonplace for Asian games, their presence is still a source of outrage in US an European games for a variety of reasons, not theleast being questions on whether the guardian needs guarding.
Which brings us to the subjects of trust and ethics. As someone who has been on the commercial side of these games for almost twenty years, I can tell you that having such a scanner on the players' PCs would be a huge help to finding and banning accounts that use cheat programs. It isn't the end-all and be-all, but as part of a defense-in-depth strategy that includes PC scanning, data-mining alarms and some other techniques I won’t talk about here, it would be enormously helpful. And we aren’t interested in collecting personal data here; believe me, we’d rather have a root canal every day than be forced to sift through the digital detritus that is the average existence.
I can also tell you that every time I've broached the subject to players in the US, singly and in groups, they howl like banshees. Players are funny like that; they’ll literally scream at you that you must do something about the cheaters, but the second you propose a solution that includes scanning PCs for known cheating applications, the pitchforks and torches come out. I can hardly blame them, considering some of the bug-laden crap that we as an industry have foisted on them in the past and the general business tenor in the West, which I can only describe as “consumer hostile” (I sometimes think the unofficial motto for companies in the West is “Hi, we’re <Insert Company Name>; now eat me.”).
Yet it goes beyond that; technology we can get right, after a few iterations, and in the end it wouldn’t be a great hardship on players. The players know that and a significant portion of them don’t care. MMO players, as a group, have little trust in the ethics of publishers and don’t want them poking around in their private hard drives.
The questions become, then: Is there anything inherently unethical in scanning PCs for cheat applications? Should we do it anyway, knowing that some players will leave the game? And finally, if scanning is part of the solution, how do we go about gaining enough trust among Western players to make it happen?
