Nelson

Wow, two responses with tacky comments about a woman in a photograph. Stay classy, Warcraft community.

Hey, I'm in that photo; that's me in the watermelon shirt. Even better, I beat Joi to the Media Lab by some 14 years. Way to catch up, Jonkichi! I kid. Joi's a great leader and a very interesting guy. Looking forward to see how he shapes the Media Lab.

I'm genuinely surprised at how people here don't see any problem with Blizzard handing over the information. Key thing here: the requester had no legal right to demand the data. He just asked politely and Blizzard said "ok". Maybe this guy needed to be arrested. But what if it was a P.I. asking for that same information? Someone's mom? Someone's abusive ex-husband?

Two key points from the article for the tl;dr crowd. One: he's a wanted fugitive, not a convicted felon. Two: there was no subpoena. Blizzard had no requirement to comply with the request, it chose to. They may have made the right call in this case, but do you want to trust them to do that in every case? Does Blizzard want the liability?.

Wait, Blizzard violated a customer's privacy to an unauthorized law enforcement agency? That's outrageous.

What, a hot alien girl with impossibly round breasts who wants to do whatever you ask of her? Way to break new ground, BioWare.

Is anyone really buying this crap? It must be possible to do a survey of people's avatars to see.

I've been wondering whether there'd ever be an announcement of major expansion content. I guess this is our answer.

It's easy, CCon99! See, the major game changing bug was unnoticed because it was masked by the major game-destroying server lag!

Alternately, you can buy a retcon for $12.50. What you can't do is easily retcon entirely in-game; a full retcon is too expensive in game currency. It's a pretty gamer-hostile way to do microtransactions.

I sure wish more games would distribute via BitTorrent. It's very good at downloading giant files over several days, much better than the gamer-hostile sites like FilePlanet. The Aion installer is 9 gigs; wow.