Kwill SOE has sent out another mass email advertising Fortune League, their EQ2-themed Facebook game. I was curious enough to go look. They entice players to play by offering Alternate Advancement scrolls and other in-game goodies.
Sounds great to me, until you click on the “Play Now” button. Up pops a screen asking you to share with SOE and other players all your basic information on Facebook — friends, personal information, and all your contacts. Whoa, hold on a sec guys. I personally appreciate an MMO where all that stuff is revealed on a purely voluntary and individual basis, like, oh, the one you publish now, SOE. Why, exactly, do you want all my information? My life is nicely compartmentalized, thank you very much, and I don’t want to share all my friends, photos, and personal information with the entire EQ2 community. Not that anyone would particularly care, but it’s the principle of the thing. I am already on the grid enough, I don’t need to make my life any more transparent.
It’s a shame, because I might play Fortune League, but not until they change the requirements and quit fishing for details about my life. No amount of incentives can change my feelings about that!
My report on this EQ2 feature is, just: I never got past the login screen.
Just create an account for your EQ2 character, link it to your EQ2 account and don’t worry about it.
Indeed, that way you can never share your personal profile to soemone you dont want (although it does happen i think)
I got all my facebook games on different accounts then my personal facebook
I think it’s ridiculous I would have to do a work-around like that to play their game. Good suggestion, but the idea that SOE is gathering information about players if they don’t take this route is still not cool.
All I have to say its facebook and thats enough to scare the devil out of you. With all the security holes they have. I get friends post on my wall and 60% of the time it sends you to sites that have virus stuff.
No thanks, Im not tying my facebook to any app.
Yup…I already had a hotmail account for my toon for guild communication. I just used that account to create a Facebook account. And since Fortune League is a joke, I log in once a week to see if they wiped my player selection and claim my reward scrolls. Just don’t forget to make up an age older than your actual toon. I screwed up the first time and put down my age as 6 – after all, that’s how old my toon is.
All facebook apps ask that information from my understanding. What I didn’t like was the pita of getting the accounts linked. I don’t really understand the game but the aa scrolls are nice 🙂
All Facebook games/apps give that same popup, it’s just standard and not specific to SOE. I have an account I use for games and nothing else, I suspect most people do by now, for that very reason.
Over 250 million Facebook users have done it. You are playing a FREE game. Allowing basic info access is standard practice – the info isn’t used in some nefarious way, it allows developers to create features that engage with your social graph and help virality as well as understand basic demographics and location of its users. Don’t be paranoid 🙂
Kaufman said:
Over 250 million Facebook users have done it.
Just like lemmings off a bridge . . .
Facebook is the logical progression of AOL if they’d kept up with the times. An internet-lite walled garden.