RE: [GD-General] Collecting info from players

[Ivan-Assen I. <as...@ha...>]

> Most privacy-conscious users will have a firewall, 
> and if you try to sneak info out of them before they can 
> override the option, they will know, they won't like it, and 
> you won't get the info anyway.

OK, so basically the problem turns into the following:

Do we design the system to cater to the preferences of
a small, vocal minority, severely reducing its utility in
the process?

I'm sure "privacy-conscious users" won't like the simple
hitting of a static URL by our current system.
(by the way: we don't provide a way to turn it off. 
We haven't heard a single complaint about it.
Maybe if our game was a major hit we would have heard
more than one. But we have tens of thousands of
unique IPs hitting that URL, and no hate mail. Google
doesn't find any mentions of it by third parties.)

The argument "but everyone's doing it anyway, why shouldn't we"
is of dubious quality when judging questions of ethical origin,
and so is the argument "but we're doing it to provide better
games for our users".

I agree that there should be a way to turn the system off,
but any visible mentions of it, and especially defaulting to "no",
will reduce greatly the number of submitted reports.
Users have been scared to death by the press about
Big Brother Microsoft, and frankly, I'm not sure that a text such
as "No information except some technical data about your
computer configuration" would be understood by the majority
of users.

Wait, here's a solution. Maybe place in each outgoing packet the text:
"Okay smartass, you got us. Edit config.ini in your game folder and
add the text 'UserType=Paranoid' to turn this off." :-)