I’ve given this a week - but I feel its important to somehow express my frustrations with my CS interaction last week.
A while ago now a friend suggested I enable parental controls to use the feature that emails a weekly game report to track my play time. At first it was great - but I was having a few issues with it 1) despite having the correct timezone selected, it had wildly incorrect times, I’ve submitted a bug report on the forums about this and 2) despite allowing ‘sharing with 3rd party apps enabled’ it drastically messed with my logging and raider io profiles.
Finally I got tired of it and submitted a ticket to remove the parental controls completely from my account. I submit my ID / proof of age and a GM removes the controls. I go into my battle.net online account to ensure things were done and over with. And I still had access and parental controls were still enabled.
After a GM removed parental controls on my account three times they finally explained to me that by simply going to the parental controls dashboard to check to see if it was disabled, auto re-enables it in the system….which okay I guess, but I wish that was told to me at the very start.
Also, I expressed to the GM that, at least to me, the very fact that parental controls can be re-enabled so easily - espeically on an account that self-imposed them - means to me (at least) that parental controls aren’t fully gone from my account. C’est la vie, at least they aren’t affecting my account unless I go to the dashboard.
Then this is where it really starts to get frustrating, cause in the process of all this happening and my account being changed repeatedly three times in a row - the main account (outside of parental controls) got “share with third party sites” disabled. Which, despite re-enabling it, wiped my legion remix’s toon io completely. Which was slightly pesky cause I had put a lot of work into single player io and to see that erased in an instance was frustrating (honestly, I’m baffled that there’s no io / score tracking in game for Lemix, and is dependent on a third party system).
Shout out to the Raider IO team though - they were able to resolve the issue and restore the data!
Anywho - this ticket seemed to attract several GMs - and at one point, despite a GM telling me “entering your email into the parental control access dashboard will auto re-enable parental controls” - another GM told me that “[Parental control] was already removed. If you wanna have a look at this check this link from the parent account: and then gives the link to the parental control dashboard”
It baffled me to no end - that after having to have parental controls removed from my account three times and a GM telling me that “just accessing the parental controls dashboard” is all it takes to re-enable parental controls - that another GM would then suggest (in the same ticket) to go check the parental controls dashboard.
I brought attention to this but they didn’t touch on it.
I also brought attention to my annoyance that there is no in-game / non-parental controls way to get a game time report similar to the one parental controls sends out. A GM recommended I just use /played in game - which does not do what the gameplay report does. At the end of this - yet another different GM from all the above suggested that I use third-party addon to get the information I wanted to get (which is funny with the recent change of philosophy on addons going into midnight…)
Anywho, TLDR - never enable parental controls. Its more frustration than its worth. And its wild to me that different GMs are giving contradictory advice in the same ticket.
ETA - Imagine if an actual parent enables this to monitor their kid’s game time, and the parent gets the Gameplay report with wild times. It won’t be good. At first I thought my account was maybe compromised since I know there’s no way I play at 1-4am. A parent may or may not go to the length I went to in order to figure out what was going on before punishing their child.