Hopefully more than just clarifications if you actually want this to work. You have to understand why these communities are good and why people join them in the first place.
One huge reason is that they are able to have open and honest conversations, whether positive or negative to “Blizzard and their partners”. You have something to learn from both, but if you want to come in with censorship there’s no way anyone in their right mind is going to open the door. Even removing the mature nature of some of the communities may not be welcome, but understandable.
Data collecting tools and whatnot … this … I don’t even know where to begin … this doesn’t even sound legal.
Promises of nothing. Look, no one is really expecting you to be at the back and call of the people in the communities, or to provide goods for giveaways. The giveaways will be at your discretion sure, but your presence has to mean something, like some way of support, even if it’s just laying out some thoughts. Just look at these forums … this is exactly how NOT to do it. If you want to be accepted you have to be part of said communities, not just spy on them.
I honestly like the idea of Blizzard showing interest in our community discords and it could be a win for both sides.
I run a Discord for Argent Dawn where all roleplay events are bundled up from various sources (Forums, Argent Archive pages, the hub and rp community discords), aside that we try to give information and links to sources like aforementioned overviews of other discord communities or resources like roleplay guides etc. Compared to the giant class discord servers with 100+k, we are a joke with our 730 members. Still it is active and there is quite a bit conversation about our wishes as roleplayers or questions/discussions about lore.
I could imagine Q&A for lore with some representatives would be cool.
For a lot of things there is no contract necessary, many things to get in contact with the community discords can be done without and there are already many mentioned. Why not join a few, check out how things go there, offer cooperation on a lower scale and bring their name in there?
I think no discord admin would mind creating a special role for representatives or a special channel/forum channel for questions and interactions with them. Blizzard creating their own discords? If they’d like to make their own, why not get admins/mods from the existing discords as consultants - they know what is wanted and what not. It could be the easiest way for them to get into this as a community feature, but I doubt it will be the same.
The charm of our discords is, that it is made by players for players, which creates a different type of community spirit that can’t be achieved by an official discord.
Edit: I’d love a forum post with a discord server overview! Curious what is out there!
That’s what I would call a waste of resources in my company. The ship already sunk to the bottom of the deepest and darkest sea of getting customer data for free.
well apparently it’s against Code of Conduct if i talk about the ban so i removed the post you quoted, it was a previous one , not sure which one tho. not important anyway i gave up on the game and forums
I think you did great work to voice the concern of this stupid idea. We all did. There are some few souls who did not grasp the issues of the contract, but class discords I’m in won’t join this program. So it a big win as a community I would say
This is twaddle. The green text is a highlight. It is there to be noticed. People who are skimming comments will inevitably zone in on the colour difference. If they changed the text to grey then you would have a point: it is clearly not.
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.
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?
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.
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!
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”.
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.
