It appears with patch 11.1 the ability to hide account wide achievements has been removed. Both the calls for AreAccountAchievementsHidden() and ShowAccountAchievements() have been removed, and when I logged in and out on one of my toons that had them hidden, they now show their full achievement points in the armory. Please bring this back.
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Are you sure that wasn’t intentional?
I’m 100% sure it was intentional (you can diff the 11.0.7 and 11.1.0 code base and very clearly see they removed them). But they have both been there since they were added in patch 5.0.4 (2012), and there was nothing noted in any patch notes regarding this.
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Ok case closed not a bug
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If this was the case, than there are zero bugs as there was an intentional code change that causes every bug. We don’t know why the code was changed, there is nothing in the patch notes, so is it a bug or not is up to Blizzard.
I mean, the removal of those functions tracks with the whole warband achievements and what it set out to accomplish.
And re-adds a very simple way to fingerprint multiple characters to see if they’re the same person. There were other ways with this disabled, but they were much harder.
At the moment I’m not going to login any more characters, as right now they’re still showing the achievement scores prior to this change (per character). The two I have logged into since the patch both show my actual account achievement score.
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Frankly it’s not acceptable to remove an anti-harassment feature like this suddenly and without notice. I only just noticed myself.
I must assume is this is a cost-cutting measure (and a rather pathetic penny-pinching one). It’s one more tiny little thing they can rip out that databases won’t have to handle. The goal I’m sure being to merge all achievements account-wide along as part of the warband feature. I wouldn’t be surprised to see character-specific achievement tracking removed in future as part of this as if they’re not going to allow displaying the separate versions to others I see no reason why they’d keep tracking them internally.
Their reasoning doesn’t concern me so much as the reason we had it in the first place still very much existing.
Some of us have good reasons for wanting to prevent people from tracking all of our alts. Some of us have dealt with persistent harassment, stalkers, griefers, etc.
Some of us just don’t like having very disturbed people making repeated random toons to scream abuse (always careful to avoid breaking tos by not using bad words) in whispers at all of our alts as we log onto them, not giving us any peace over:
a forum post they disliked, over the fact we refused to trade them a piece of loot they felt entitled to in a group, over the fact we bought out an auction they accidentally underlisted and refused to pay them the difference or return the item, over the fact they were kicked from a group we were in and want to take it out on us, over the fact we wiped and they want to rub it in someone’s face that they think that person is bad and should be driven from the game.
These are all real examples I’ve experienced of people who’ve made a character in the past on a server to whisper me stuff, not all of them would have gone to the trouble of tracking my alts and harassing me on all of them but some might.
As someone who plays on RP realms I might add another: people can take In-Character RP actions or just how a character is made (playing a scarlet, playing a character slightly out of someone’s headcanoned understanding of something) incredibly seriously. Ask anyone from an RP realm, there’s always drama, guilds falling out with other guilds, people who because of one RP interaction (in-character, good faith) decide to blacklist a person and spread rumors about them and demand their circle blacklist them as well. It’s crazy but until now at least we had a way of somewhat containing these types of people and their campaigns of harassment, exclusion, drama, etc.
This is a feature that’s been in-game for over a decade and was added shortly after alt tracking websites started to become a thing in 2012 (patch 5.0.4).
Blizzard, give us this option back immediately. At the very least they could allow us to falsify and fuzz the earned display dates via the website and in-game to make alt-tracking harder (e.g. show all the achievements but with an option set the earned dates are fuzzed per character within 6 months to a random date).
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Bad words aren’t the only way to break tos, so you should be reporting them all the same if they’re being abusive.
It’s disappointing that such a great anti-harassment tool was unceremoniously removed. I don’t understand why the change, much less why it went undocumented.
I’m not sure why achievements were changed but pet loadouts and collections can also be used to fingerprint characters, and I have been tracked via this and harassed in the past.
This has been the case for a very long time and I don’t think Blizzard has any interest in addressing it. They recommend using ignore but there are other forms of harassment that don’t require sending messages that this does not help with so you’re SOL.
These are not as reliable, as unless you’re logging in / out actively of these characters, it’s not updating (and the armory has been broken showing collections period since 11.1)
That’s not true. Battle pet load outs (the selected 3 pets and their stats) are updated whether the character is logged in to or not. It’s not precise but when combined with other pieces of information it works well.
I wish Blizzard would just document their changes. I wish they would just take the 2 minutes to explain things.
I’ve learned that this option is no longer needed.
It’s no longer needed because under battle.net account settings in the privacy section there is an option called “Share Game Data” which has an awful unhelpful description but turning it to disabled shuts down any and all API driven scraping of characters on your account via armory.
In other words going to battle.net and logging into your account on the website, going to “Privacy & Communication” and setting “Share Game Data” to disabled will result within 30 days in all your characters being invisible to alt-tracking sites.
This is an all or nothing setting unlike the in-game API here for this but it in theory should protect against matching battlepets and other collections such as mounts as well.
All of this worry and these threads because Blizzard does not document things, does not document removals and does not document settings in your account. All they had to do was include this API removal in patch notes and note that it’s been made obsolete by an option in battle.net account which performs the same purpose in a stronger way.
Except as the prior poster said, you can still look at a characters collections (pets and mounts) right there on the armory on the wow website which completely IGNORES that setting you’re referencing. It just prevents third party sites from accessing the information.
Given this, there is a MUCH more precise way to do this then.
True it’s not a perfect replacement but it does at least address the main concern of enabling anyone with one character name to get a list of all your alts.
There is still the issue of a dedicated harasser who has some suspicions about characters being your alts being able to confirm that by checking the armory for each one.
Which is why I do wish they would give us achievement fuzzing for alts at the very least and as you mention an ability to hide your active battlepets. But I have a feeling this is where they leave it. They’ve ignored calls for years to fix guild permissions after ruining them when introducing communities and I’ve little hope for this short of a favored streamer being bullied to quitting or something but that won’t happen as those get VIP GM access to immediately ban harassers and griefers.
As an aside I had my active battlepets cleared when doing a character service years ago, either a realm or faction transfer I think for some reason did that. What’s annoying is that for some reason once you fill those slots with pets you can’t empty them again if you desire, only replace pets with others. That’d be another solution to at least let people empty the slots when not in use manually.