Lots of good reading on the web today. Be sure you check some of these out.

First off, Scott talks about the Armory, and his surprise that the villagers haven’t gone to Irvine with pitchforks.

Blizzard should enforce 100% opt-in for the Armory because:

– Tactical transparency in PvP is important
– The ability to research other players in game is important
– The ability to research message board posters is important
– It’s just a game, who cares, Blizzard is cool and we like them
– stfu noob lrn2ply

Blizzard should offer an opt-out for the Armory because:

– Some people don’t want to have their player’s data open to ridicule or data mining

At first glance, it seems fairly conclusive. And given Blizzard’s stated stance on in-game privacy (they’ve been quoted as saying that an /anon command goes against what they see as the social nature of MMOs) it’s doubtful that this decision would be reversed.

Matt Mihaly wants to talk about WoWGlider, and the recently released court documents.

Your mileage may (and judging by previous Blizzard-supporting comments will) vary, of course but the thing that gets to me is that I feel like a lot of people who are jumping to Blizzard’s defense are doing so not out of principle but because they’re unable to detach emotionally from how much they personally dislike it when users run bots to play WoW (of course, Blizzard hasn’t sued the people actually running the bots and thus actually causing the alleged harm.). If Microsoft put something in a TOS/EULA that prohibited people from creating software to interact with Windows (without, say, paying them a license fee first) I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that it’d be hard to find many internet users who would be backing MS.

Raph points out that the Chinese limits on game play time go into effect this week.

None of this matters much in China, needless to say, where the government is already firmly on the paternalistic side. But the fact is that the more we vigorously defend libertine behavior as exemplars of the sorts of freedoms we want in virtual spaces, the less likely we are to get said freedoms in today’s climate. It’s a lot harder to make the case for freedom of expression and anonymity in the wake of its use for death threats, it’s a lot harder to make the case of freedom to create unregulated virtual currencies when they are used for gambling, and it’s a lot harder to argue for unverified identities when it’s used to simulate pedophilia.

And lastly, Terranova wants to talk about game balance.

Ok. So. We have thought of balance in pvp as a progressive task. The standard model of balancing says that we get “better” balance by introducing new powers, or nerfing old powers. The goal is an equilibrium, whereby everyone has fun and has something of a fair shot in pvp. Even the “rock-papers-scissors” paradigm seeks a stable equilibrium. Mages can kill warriors, can kill rogues, can kill mages, and so on.

My sense is that this is simply not what is happening. Rather, nerfing, buffing, and more is a solution that seeks to DISRUPT equilibria. Any pvp system will fall into stable states, mostly as a function of people’s ability to pick groupmates and select targets. Buffing and nerfing disrupts that equilibrium and sends people back into experimentation mode, as they seek new corner solutions.