Today I’ve learned of a website made for people to find partners for PvP. You can look up a character and see their PvP history, talents, account achievement points and…
Their alts.
If you look up a character, they seem to be added to a database in the website. If another character of that account has been looked up, it somehow knows they’re alts and links them together. Maybe that’s not exactly how it works, but suffice it to say I’ve looked up Altielle and found she has 7 alts conncected to her. All but one haven’t PvPed ever, at all. One is literally level 10.
It even tells you how many times people have looked up that character, Altielle’s been looked up 6 times and me and a friend who was helping me explore this website are only 2 of those 6.
How do I know about this? Guess what the RP community would do with this website in their hands. Yes, my friend told me he found out because another friend of his got stalked by someone using this website.
At the bottom of the website you can see recently looked up characters scrolling through a window. I’ve seen several characters from RP realms with 0 PvP rating getting looked up in this window within a single minute.
You can opt out of having your alts shown, but you have to register with the site and then log into your battle.net account THROUGH THE WEBSITE in order to do this, which is shady as heck.
This presents a serious risk of stalking across alts and other horrible bad-faith actions. It’s already happening, according to my friend. I’m not listing the website on here for that explicit purpose, I don’t want it to be on a public forums for people to find and use. If you want to know what the website is called, contact me in-game and I’ll let you know, though I might ask you a few questions if you’re not someone I recognize lol.
The fact that you’re opted in to have your alts shown by default on this website feels like a massive breach of my privacy and I feel fairly exposed and vulnerable after discovering it now, not going to lie.
All that really needs to be done is to have showing alts be an opt in you log in to do, instead of the other way around. The whole website doesn’t need to be shut down or make sweeping changes. That said, I also think Blizzard should also regulate it so that this can’t happen again, otherwise there’s literally nothing stopping other people from making websites like this one.
But that also requires a bit of exposure and community outreach, so I’m hoping you all can spread the word and help get this ball rolling.
Update:
It is worth noting after several posts that this website and its ability to track alts has its upsides. While stalkers may find you across realms and alts using this tool, other players have been able to use it to track down harassers who are swapping alts often to do said harassment and set them to ignore. And of course, the purpose of the site is to help PvPers find partners and this accomplishes the task.
That said, if you do not wish to be included on this website, Ursuola posted a solution:
Bear in mind the upsides and downsides to this, however, as other websites you have linked to your account may be included and get disrupted. The #WarcraftStory thing in Twitter for instance may no longer work, and Twitch might also break too, which could deny you a chance to earn the Feldrake mount in the upcoming weeks.
In order to clean out alts and characters already listed in the website, be sure to go to each and hit the update button, that will make them disappear.
