Back in May, the World of Warcraft community erupted over Blizzard’s announced plans to crown certain fan Discords as part of its new “community Discord” program. As originally announced, Blizzard’s plan included requiring Discord owners to sign an agreement that, among other things, allowed Blizzard to install “sentiment tracking software” in the chosen Discords and forbade the user from making “any disparaging or negative statements or representations, written or oral” about the company in perpetuity, even following the cancelation of the agreement. In other words, Discord owners would be agreeing to never say mean things about Blizzard for the rest of their lives in exchange for joining the Discord program, which… yeah, you can see why there was an uproar – and why Blizzard immediately pulled it.
Well, a month later, Blizzard is back with a new proposed agreement, which is slightly better but still not great and probably not worth it for Discord operators to sign.
As Wowhead correctly points out, the two major changes involve bots and speech. The new verbiage still permits Blizzard to use the “Server Clockwork Rocket” bot in public channels of the Discord to collect Discord profile and messages, but it no longer allows Blizzard rights to install other unnamed tracking bots willy-nilly.
And as for the non-disparagement clause, it’s been tweaked too, but it still requires the Discord owner to “[hold] a positive opinion about Blizzard” and its affiliates, and now instead of forbidding disparaging remarks, it forbids “unlawful, untruthful, or intentionally misleading statements or representations, written or oral” about the company, its partners, and all its services and games, again in perpetuity.
It’s probably still not a great idea to sign up your video game chat community for Blizzard spyware and guard your own speech for what Blizzard considers untruthful for your rest of your life, especially given that there’s next to nothing in it for gamers at all.
