Customer Irritation Level

We are now a day and a half into the fiasco that is announcement of what RealID is really for, taking away your privacy. You know it isn't going well when you make the national television news in Canada.

There are now nearly 30,000 posts on the US forum, nearly 10,000 on the EU forum, thousands on every other WOW forum and even videos on Youtube getting ten of thousands of views. The overwhelming response is negative. Some of the defenders are likely trolling, which is ironic.

Now people are starting seeking information other Blizzard employees, they don't have to look very far. Just pull out their Burning Crusade manual and flip to the back. Developers always want people to look at the credits, right? I don't think they intended to be for this reason. This is exactly why you don't publish your information unless you have a good reason. If you piss someone off, it just makes it easy for them to find you.

Markee Dragon made a 30 minute video response to this. I listened to it in the background as I did some work. He brought up a lot of good points like people who are in situations where they handle sensitive information, they can't post. I saw a post saying a teacher would be risking their job because it is against their rules of conduct. He also brought up another good point about the mass discrimination there will be against people with Chinese names. You know, the whole gold farming stereotype.

Towards the end of the video, Markee revealed that he came across an interesting tidbit of information when working with EA. They have a "customer irritation level" metric. It is used to measure the player response to game additions. The goal is get the bar as high as it will go while staying just below the level where players press the cancel subscription button.