That’s a much better point to argue but in the end it is subjective. It’s your opinion that the damage from public profiles isn’t that significant.
If I were in your shoes right in this argument, I would say that profiles should be public by default. So making them private is a choice. This will mean most profiles will be public and only players who are bothered by it will make it private.
But on the PTR, they are private by default and that may have more to do with testing. There’s a high probability they will be public by default when the feature launches.
I’m just gonna stop you there. Because that’s a subjective statement as well. If we’re gonna be fair, Blizzard is probably the most successful gaming company currently. They have the most big game titles out there, so even if they don’t cater towards specific types of people they tend to know what the majority wants.
That’s not saying they don’t make mistakes. Just that they have long earned the benefit of the doubt.
Because in this case, it’s everything. Asking a player and opening up communication means that player is much more likely to be receptive of your input if they choose to delegate you that information.
This is all based on the idea that your game profile is personal information.
I would argue that statistics about your performance and preferred hero pool are not the same as ACTUAL personal information about you.
We are not talking about SSN, where you live, your financial information, or anything else that would actually make you vulnerable.
We are talking about statistics in a GAME attached to an anonymous online handle. We are talking about people who want to hide this information instead of use existing features to ignore toxic behavior. We are talking about robbing non-toxic players of a feature that has helped us out tremendously because it enables us to QUICKLY assess what we need to do to support our team. All for what? So someone can hide information instead of do an ounce of effort to avoid a rare form of toxic behavior.
Any information that pertains to things I do that nobody else does is personal information.
I mean, I can understand that you don’t like the comparison and you went to great lengths to try and draw a distinction, but it’s a pretty by the book case.
The only difference is that the information isn’t incriminating enough for Blizzard to be held legally responsible for sharing it in court.
The thing about this topic is that gaming profiles have almost always been public because of the notion you presented. That it’s not information that’s necessary to hide.
But as gaming becomes more and more mainstream, we’re starting to adapt more psychological elements into its social media structure. Especially in regards to reducing toxicity, which is the ultimate goal of this change.
And many of these changes tend to be echoed through the platform as a whole, so you shouldn’t be surprised if more games start giving you the option to hide your profile over the following years. At some point it might even become standard practice.
your original reply didn’t make sense in the first place. Bigwoof said you are free to play what you want and you tell him everyone can switch in spawn.
Anything you do in a gaming online game is GAMING information. Not personal information. Your gaming profile has nothing to do with you as a PERSON. Looking at your career profile tells me nothing about you save what you are doing in a fictional virtual environment.
Which is an absolutely wrong direction to take online gaming. The entire purpose of having an online handle in the first place is to retain anonymity and keep your PERSONAL life separate from that of your online experience.
Hiding profiles just changes the target from people who play certain hero’s to ANYONE who has a hidden profile which SPREADS toxic behavior. It does nothing to reduce toxicity because the actual reason for toxicity is anonymity. Adding more anonymity to the gaming space will only make it worse.
Once again, this only hurts those who would use that information for its intended purpose and does NOTHING to address the problem it is intended to fix.
if you wanna get truly competitive then make your team and stick with them. True competitive minded people make teams, schedules and strats. Note the new LFG tool available to find like minded people!
understanding you may not want to disclose any further information, I am curious what would prevent you entirely from using the tool to at least try and find some people with similar playstyles and synergistic character pools?
The thing is, i have my best friend and i really like to play with him, he doesnt speak english well. And in our country there are like 3 midmasters… (our rank)
So we can create english six stack but iam
not use how comfortable it would be for him you know :/.
People should work together to play what characters are best for them with each team comp and communicate who the do and don’t want to play.
Players who don’t pick who is best for them and their team will fall down the ranks. I think hiding profiles is a great way to cut down on some of the bullying that happens in comp.
But you don’t have to create english six stack? I’ll admit I’m not super familiar with the new feature since I deleted PTR install before this was implemented but I’m pretty sure you’d be able to stipulate what language you’d prefer in the description? And you could probably serve as an interpreter for your friend? I won’t say that’s a great solution, you do have a special case though. The tool will work for the majority of the playerbase and while I wish it would work for everyone , “most” is what they’re shooting for.
It will cause some problems, I don’t argue that. A lot of people who used to use the info for positive purposes: Filling, planning strats, counterpicking, will lose that capability. However I feel if blizzard was seeing enough reports and examples of people using that info for abuse and bullying then it’s most likely going to benefit more than it hurts.
Also from the reactions I’ve read here most people say they need to see peoples profiles to suggest or advise… and that’s really not up to them. In certain cases a positive suggestion or calm and logical explanation would help, but that just isn’t the norm I or many others have experienced. A lot of the players use it to pull rank : You have far less accuracy than I do on widow, switch off. That’s not strategizing or optimizing, that’s dictating who they get to play. It COULD be you’d do better, but it’s likely because you’d rather play that character and you’ve just found ONE reason to advise they let you play.