Any discord that takes part in this I’ll be leaving. Your intention was clear from the start, no amount of re-wording things will change that.
To me it seemed more like an idea pitched by the community team, it got green-lit and sent to legal. The spirit of the idea was to bring Blizzard into community servers officially to partake in community events (be it QA, giveaways or other fun things). It sounded like Blizzard wanted to partake more in the scene. This perhaps to finally bridge the gap between EU and NA in the communty’s mind.
Then the corporate stink happened. Legal team got tasked to make sure Blizzard or even Activision Blizzard would be ‘safe’. So they went all overkill mode - threatening legal actions, formatted to cower all bases. It became extremely onesided. Then you had the don’t talk bad about blizzard or its friend clauses, and so much more, piled on…
Yet, all the negatives aside, that has been talked to death. I really don’t believe that was what the community team wanted out of this.
So let us wait and see what happens, hopefully the corporate legal team will be brow-beat to make an actual balanced and fair agreement, that doesn’t involve any censorship within it’s framework. To make it safe for the discord community Admins to join without having to look over their shoulder in fear of Blizzard having a bad day.
Trust in the community team, distrust the corporation, their goals are not the same.
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Alright, this was a long thread to read. Fortunately, this doesn’t affect me but if I had a Discord community that could potentially be affected, I would definitely show Blizzard’s contract to a lawyer to translate it for me to a non-legal language. And, it is already bad enough when a Discord community owner has to go to a lawyer. This costs money and damages company and customer relations (trust).
I haven’t seen such a big scandal in this game since RealID. A lot of people voted with their wallet back in the day because of it. Blizzard, you should really be more careful with customer relations. The RealID scandal as well as the public armory feed (now it doesn’t exist anymore) as well as the traceable accounts (identifying characters across the same account), allowing people to add other people to their friend list without their consent and abusing it shows that you aren’t too big on protecting the privacy of your customers. No wonder that people don’t trust you in this case either when you want to install who-knows-what on their Discord servers. Why would they?
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Hello.
Is more information still planned on being released, or did this get dropped?
Been almost a month since this was “getting to the end of this process”.
Probably none of the big servers are interested given the stuff you have to agree on and none of them willing to follow suit while getting nothing out of it.
Hello everyone!
After listening to your feedback we have updated Community Discords Program (EMEA) Legal Agreement. A link to the updated agreement can be found in the Program blog.
Thank you for your patience and thank you for sharing your thoughts with us!
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ASUS Bios vibes all over it 
Negligible changes with the entire thing still mainly being in Blizzard’s favour. All those extra hours the lawyers put in was probably a waste of money, can’t imagine people will be flocking to this with the “update”.
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I think you just have to take the fail on this one Blizzard 
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Plus the “you have to abide our code of conduct 101%” which completely nullifies one of the points why people have set up community discords in the first place.
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You should have listened to the employee who said: “Nothing we are going to change will change the mind of the community… We already f up”
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No thank you. It still looks virtually the same to me … until I got bored of reading, that is. We use Discord as a social space - it’s not a company that requires members to sign legal agreements before they can join - which is just as well, because if it were, it would be empty!
I have problems enough getting members to read basic “be nice” rules - I wouldn’t add anything like this to our guild discord without running it by them first, therefore it’s never going to fly.
Anything that involved you forcing a bot onto a server that is essentially going to sit and scrape information off conversations by members, irrespective of what you claim, sounds like a massive invasion of privacy.
If you want to do ANYTHING with WoW related discord servers, I think you’re going to have to completely rethink how you go about it.
Honestly - initially when I heard about it, I was all for it and rather excited to sign up to increase our WoW connection and encourage feedback - I thought it might be a bit like the Community Council but actually out in the community rather than cherry picking those that fit your parameters. Silly me.
Blizzard … please remember that you were gamers first. Think of it from our perspective, and try again. Nil points. Must try harder.
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Pretty sure that in Europe at least, that bot is a GDPR violation unless every member knows about it before they agree to connect to the server, including the profile information it collects.
Disclaimer: Not a lawyer, I could be wrong.
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To quote myself again.
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You should have been redirected to the UK copy I presume. For instance this paragraph would hold no legal value in germany or any other nation of the EU and in fact would make it hella easy to have the contract voided in the first place as the agreement should have never come to pass.
Like Blizzard could state that the jurisdiction would be that of Madagascar for all that one cares but they would still have to abide EU law the moment they make business with anyone from an EU country. Next to the laws of the respective country. So in my case their agreement would have to abide EU and German law whether they want to or not.
At best in that case is that they could bann any license I have that is registered as an Madagascan license. The one im using however is a German one so German/EU law anyway.
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Dear Mr Blue, focus on the forums.
Discord was made for gamers and other types of groups to share their interests and make friends.
You guys just focus on the Blizzard’s official community forums.
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Wahoo, another 16 page legal contract. Again, yall are trying to bring a lawyer into the sandbox playground. Our server are (mostly, as far as I’m aware) non-profit things run for fun by people who have the time and interest.
These servers ain’t run by companies, they don’t have paid staff maintaining it, they don’t have a lawyer on call to read and advice about legal deals related to the server.
It’s a chat room with a bunch of people, a handful of people with the ability to kick/mute/ban people to currate a space that’s fun to be in. There is no law, there is no focus on profit, the server mods aren’t a company. It is nowhere NEAR as formal as this program tries to treat it. In fact, all that formality and legal stuff downright clashes with what the discord servers are generally trying to achieve.
Maybe if you could fit all your terms onto one page, just one A4 with font 12 or something (cuz my faith in blizz is at this point so bad that I’d 100% expect yall to try and cram 16 pages worth of text onto one page) it’d be more likely to get some agreement and approval.
This is just another 16 page contract, and even if it WAS better, it gives off the impression that you didn’t listen at all, because it’s still too formal, it still involves real law and legal consequences for what is meant to be a for fun hobby without obligations or a wage on the line. And it’s too damn long and it’s far from an easy read. It’s not suitable for the intended audience. This is like bringing a presentation of the fine mechanics of a rocket engine to a flower arrangement class. It doesn’t fit at all and shows that clearly you’ve no idea what kind of community you’re trying to join, but you’re fully willing to try and steamroll it to impose YOUR rules and wants onto it, without even knowing it or taking the time to understand what it’s about and what it wants.
Disappointing.
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Here’s a suggestion on what the agreements for joining the program could look like:
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To apply, owner of the discord server sends a summary of what the server is about, an invite link, and maybe a short message about why they want to join the program.
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A blizzard rep joins, then confirms with the server owner that they’re a blizzard rep somehow. Maybe choose a time, both log on WoW and open one of those fancy live chat windows or something. Something only a blizz rep could do. There’s a lot of scams going around with people pretending to be blizzard employees to fish for private info, passwords, or to spread virus links, so confirmation is vital. But it doesn’t have to be real life info like real name and adress.
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Once confirmation is done, Server owner sets up a special role for the rep and either invites them to the mod channel or sets up a separate channel only accessible to the server mods and the blizzard rep.
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Server mod team makes a rule for their server that people are NOT allowed to spam the rep, tag the rep, or otherwise bother the rep, unless the rep is the one initiating the conversation OR it’s kept to a channel meant for sending messages to the rep.
This is pretty standard in big discord servers for WoW and other games that might have a game dev or the like in it that risks getting spammed. Channels can be muted or just read up on later, so keeping things like feedback in one dedicated space makes it easier to avoid missing things without getting overwhelmed from not being able to keep up. One could probably use the Clockwork bot if it’s set to this dedicated channel -only-. I’d leave it up to each server to -talk- with their rep to figure out the best system for filtering information so the rep can keep up in an efficient way.
- If there are rewards to be had, discuss it with the mod team, plan out a course of action. Basically do it as a case by case basis. And keep it on a good faith system rather than involving legal things (unless the mod team are up for that kind of big scale project.)
Keep it simple, start basic and build from there. Discord servers ain’t companies, but you could get a lot of valuable feedback and opportunities to organize small projects that the community you joined might like. But you gotta start small.
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I am a bit worried that you did not specify what you changed and why. If you want to win the battle of opinions and hearts, you must sway them with words most can understand and weigh. So let us say you wanted to remove the “do not speak ill of blizzard” clauses, you say ‘On the part about not being able to talk negatively about blizzard or our affiliates, we have modified this to be that.’ kind of line.
Currently we get two things going. Firstly, people get overwhelmed by the 16 page document slapping down without context to what actually changed. Second, we again must get lawyers from the community to read and break down the purpose of the contract. If it truly have any benefit for the signer, and not just a blanket exploitative piece again.
So I understand you CMs are ballgagged and things move at a glacial pace - yet if we get no real feel of what is your intentions or what is going on, you will get rebuked by the overwhelming majority by instinct.
There is little good will left to this project, it was squandered by you guys not taking the hammer down instantly to clarify intentions and say loud and clear “This contract is clearly a huge problem and we agree it goes against our goals.” It being or not doesn’t matter; community perception matters. Now almost to all eyes are looking for how you twisted the contract to still be the same leash to be bound around our necks as a community.
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Its pretty much the same stuff we have complained about originally. Its effectively worthless. Especially the whole “you have to abide our rules” nonsense. Discords are better off to keep thriving by word of mouth.
Like oh noes one of my users on my discord (probably Dunkiee even) said a not 100% kid friendly word. Better bann that person. Not to mention that certain words on the forums are censored by the system that shouldnt be censored to begin with. But if you would use such everyday word you would be subject of elimination because you broke “dem rules”.
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