Speaking just for myself I feel as if there’s an appropriate and inappropriate method/medium to out someone’s alts.
So for example, before the Spine of Deathwing tumblr left WoW, they provided a pretty cool service. Collect evidence of some superjerk being a superjerk. Out them as a warning to the community at large. And if it comes to it, if they return on an alt, they get outed in the same manner. This can be a good thing as it protects people from serial abusers, aggressive bigots and the like.
But alts are multi faceted. People have them for different reasons. For example I have a couple of alts I use for solo time. Leading a guild can be socially demanding and sometimes introvert me wants to just switch off and do something as just me. I’ve got alts for that. I don’t really want or need those alts outed, nor do I care to give my battle.net details to some random site to preserve my privacy. I’m not some community menace that needs all my alts outed. I’m just someone wanting to chill. While it may be an overreaction, I feel as if this site has the potential to jeopardise that privacy.
So yeah I’m with Altielle on this. I don’t necessarily want the site deleted, I’m sure it’s very useful for PvP, but I think displaying alts like that should be opt in, not opt out.
Thanks for bringing forum attention to this. While I understand the intended use of the site, and positive outcomes of being able to discover single players piloting malicious alts, I fear the negative uses far out way those.
It unfortunately looks like a few of my alts have been “compromised” before I had to link my accounts to have some privacy. I wish that this site allowed the character owner to see the people who had looked up their characters but as it’s a free and public use people can anonymously gather information on you with out risking anything themselves.
My guild and myself were stalked and harassed for 2 years which for now seems to have ended last July. The stalker has a long history going back at least 4 or 5 years with similar problematic behavior which involved using a large amount of alts. I had to kick her four times and make reports to Blizz. We had no idea that people would go to these extremes to infiltrate our guild and circles. It was apparent later on that she had done this a lot and knew to delete the character. If not for this site, we wouldn’t have discovered her the fourth time which prompted an live kicking during a guild meeting.
However, I learned a lot about during those two years and I can track people and their alts using only the armory. I have to after all that she did to us. I know she is still around too and is still doing the same things she did to us and others. I hope one day that Blizz will get enough reports and do something but until then, I am always watching my back.
Your incident is the exact one I was referring to lol.
I feel ya on all of it. And I appreciate the site for making it a little easier to keep track of problem people. As for me, I don’t really mind who searches me. I tell people all the time that I don’t do alts, but if I did I wouldn’t care if they found them on this site. If I wanted some quiet time, I’d appear offline in Bnet and set my status as busy or away in-game. Or I’d just kindly tell people that I don’t have the gas in the tank for whatever they wanted with me at the moment. Or I’d block if they harassed me.
I know people who truly want to harass will still go all out to find a way to do it. But I’d rather have sites like this around to help track problem people than to have it not exist so that I could be a little more elusive myself.
Ditto. I actually have a lot of alts but most of them are just for playing and the fun of making new characters. I totally get the feel of wanting to withdraw myself as a GL as well so I do sometimes go to alts just to relax and breath. People can track my alts all they want.
So if anyone is having issues with stalking and harassment; the ignore feature is account wide but only from the character you are on that you do it. For your character all their alts will be ignored. If you switch to another character, they can speak to you until you put them on ignore on your new character.
So for example, some rando is harassing me on Raton here, I can place them on ignore and their whole account is ignored for Raton. However if I switch to Dahote, that rando can contact me until I place them on ignore on my paladin.
Someone else may be able to add more details of the /ignore system though.
It does still function that way per character iirc, but I vaguely recall there was particular text not being blocked that I had an issue with. Might have been in regards to spamming toys that don’t count the emote as your toon talking, idk, would have to go test this if no one else here knows about the matter.
I sure hope the countless people who have seen me die in WSG because I forgot Sprint was an ability I could use for more than just being too lazy to mount don’t realize I’m bad at PvP.
After a bit of testing i think the way this website is working is that it doesn’t list a character and any alts related to it until it has been looked up once.
I tested it with a few of my alts that had not been linked yet and shortly after I searched them up they would appear on my list of linked characters. I think they way the sight functions is that after a search request is made it the scrapes data from the WoW-Armoury site for the relevant information and while it isn’t publically displayed that data does include the owner account.
As this site as been up for the roughly six years by their own admition I don’t think that Blizzard will be taking action unless it becomes a large enough talking point on the forums. There is a portion of the site where you can contact the developer with your thoughts and complaints so messaging them with the concerns of the tool being used for malicious purposes may be the fastest option to correct this
I hate to say it, but there’s a few websites tracking alts. Checkpvp is just the premiere one. Drustvar is the other popular one and it allows you to hide alts too. It functions the same way as Check-pvp except it has…well a few more features like last login.
Like others have said, double edged sword. I know it has helped me in the past. Better to be aware of what is out there tracking and whatnot.
I haven’t seen anyone mention it yet, but in the Privacy & Communication section of your battle.net account settings, there’s an option to Share Game Data that’s on by default. Turning it off should prevent third-party sites like check-pvp from being able to pull your characters.
I haven’t, like, tested this, and it would also break any sites that you might want to be able to look up your characters, but it’s an option.
I’ll have to check later today if I have that turned off, but I will say I went on the website last night and none of my characters were on there and I know I’ve never logged in with my bnet.
Do you know if turning it off will remove any characters that currently show up? Like if I turn it off, any character that came up together right away are now deleted and unable to be looked at.
Do you all remember when they wanted to integrate Warcraft into Facebook and show our real names? Yeah the outrage shut that dumb idea down quickly thankfully
This worked! Thanks Ursuola, this was a great solution. I don’t mind the site being used for anti-stalking and PvP, but given I am not a culprit of either I didn’t really want to be a part of it. I’m kind of a Ron Swanson when it comes to the internet and prefer to leave as little of a trace of myself as is possible in this day and age of data harvesting. It took me until this year to get Twitter and it’s basically to post pictures of things I draw every once in a while that nobody looks at lmao.
You have to go to each character and hit the update button after changing the setting. That’ll make the character disappear.
