You did... what... without approval?

Community General Discussion
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Dear Blizzard,

I have NEVER, ever been as pissed at you as I am today.

I find out out that your patch deleted all content from my logs folder… ALL my content. Not just the current logs, oh no. that could be barely passable. ALL content of the folder including any and all archived data and other tools located in that folder.
WITHOUT WARNING, REQUIREMENT OF ACKNOWLEDGEMENT THAT THIS IS HAPPENING, OR ANY OTHER CLUE THIS WAS COMING.

These are more the actions of virii and other harmful code snippets written by less than savory people. This isn’t even something that is pardonable due to backups or anything else. Actions like this cause me to not only walk away from a company but to actively malign, and denigrate that company. In the space of an hour your name and honor to my eyes went to mud.

This isn’t something you can just whitewash away with an apology and an “Oops, these things do happen.” Seriously, this is something that should NEVER, EVER have been allowed to happen. And what’s worse. I didn’t find this out from your company, oh-no, this was found as a result of 3rd party sites and guildies. You have a lovely launcher you could easily have put up huge warnings or notices that something this major was coming. You didn’t.

In the words of kologarn. “You… Failed.”

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I have an obscenely-strong inkling that you missed the General Discussion forums.

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I’m sorry. What? You mean a single topic created by an MVP (not even a blue) that I had to go searching to find? You think that qualifies as “warning”?

A topic so overlooked that a major aggregate site didn’t actually say ANYTHING about it?

This is NOT something that should have been done period slash dot. There is NEVER, EVER a reason user generated content such as logs should be purged wholesale without so much as a single dialog box going “hey, i’m gonna do this, are you abso-bloody-lutely certain this is ok.”

I mean, what if they had made a typo in the installer and instead of the equivalent of rm -rf /logs/ they did rm -rf / logs/
i mean hey it’s just an extra space right? no biggie? who cares that in actuality it’s purging your entire root filesystem without your ok.

This is a task that 100% should have been left to the end user to deal with. Them manipulating their own data folder, that’s their job. My generated data folders? That’s MY job. Not theirs.

And this Isn’t a post for general discussion, this is a post regarding needed customer support. This is something that is going to take actual honest-to-god communication. This is something someone in their hierarchy of people-of-responsibility need to actually address.

I mean how many terabytes (possibly petabytes) of user generated info did blizzard delete today with ZERO official warning.

I’m not kidding or being sarcastic when I compared it to the equivalent of a virus. This is what destructive malicious code DOES. That is what blizzard DID.

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Didn’t say anything of the sort. Only that you’re posting in the wrong forum. Spitting into the wind, barking up the wrong tree, etc. General Discussion is the forum to be as you aren’t talking about an in-game problem, so there’s no dedicated forum for it.

Customer Support does not make or justify development decisions, they assist with account and billing issues and clarify on policies when asked; players and “blues” alike.

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What are you talking about?!? If you mean the folders and them being renamed and moved you give them permission to do that when you agree to the ToU.

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Moving or renaming folders, isn’t the same as DELETING large quantities of user generated data.

Let’s make it clear. MOVING (for example) your addons folder from one folder to another keeps the data and just changes it’s address. THIS would be if they created a new addons folder and just deleted all your prior addons. If you can’t see the difference between a MOVE and a DELETE, please don’t bother responding.

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Posts in public forums get public responses - and correct responses at that!

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They can delete whatever they want in those folders. You agree to this when you agree to the ToU. They don’t support add-ons if add on data is deleted then it is deleted. They don’t have to allow add-ons at all and could delete them all at anytime.

And I will reply when and where I want. You are complaining about something that you gave permission for them to do. You don’t own those folders or the data stored in them.

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Speaking of backing stuff up now is a good time to copy the WoW folder to another drive or external drive. Not sure about anyone else but mine is sitting at 71gigs and I don’t wanna have to d/l that if something goes wrong on my end. :open_mouth:

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Let’s settle down some.

Getting angry doesn’t help anything.

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I can see that in my efforts to make an easily understandable analogy, you decided to latch onto the wrong parts of the analogy and completely overlook the underlying problem.

A program that wants to manipulate it’s own data, it’s own resources, file structure, what have you. That’s kosher, understood and accepted.
What is CREATED by said program by actions of the user, ie USER-GENERATED info. That is NOT something a program should be altering or removing without direct action or understanding by the user.

If I followed your logic on this, it would allow a company like say Adobe to be allowed to purge any and all content you produced with it on their whim. Or take it to absurdity and equate that by your logic Microsoft (or Apple, or whatever your OS distro is) has the right to delete all your documents on your computer because you installed it.

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Umm, can someone please highlight where in the ToS/ToU/Whatever you give Blizzard the right to remove files from your hard drive?

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You don’t agree that Adobe can do that though. You agree that Blizzard can manipulate any data that is in their folders. It doesn’t matter how it was created. They own it. They can delete, edit, change, etc… all of it. You agreed to it. If you don’t like it you can choose not to agree with the ToU and stop playing. As it stands anything in the game folders is Blizzard’s.

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Where in the ToS/ToU/Whatever does it say Blizzard can do this?

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In the end your arguments are made immaterial by posting in a forum where the devs do not collect feedback.

To make your argument you will need to post in either the bug report forum or the General forum, which is mined by the devs for feedback.

Arguing your case in this forum is just tossing pixels to the wind.

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I don’t have the exact wording on me and I’m on my phone. But it would be in the section that says we aren’t allowed to manipulate or change game files. As well as where it says that Blizzard owns everything and simply rents us access to our accounts.

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Autodesk would like to talk with you about what they can do with the content you create with their line of 3D modeling softwares.

Video timestamped to relevant part about licensing and what they can do to files created from their software, they have the same control over files for their own software which WoW also has a similar license agreement.

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Pssst Nok… It was moved to General… :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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Right… no offense, but I think I’ll hold out for a more definitive answer. I’m not saying this isn’t covered… I just personally have not found it yet, so I’d like to see it.

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Ugh… Don’t get me started.

1 Like