Turbine responds to community with removal of Offer Wall

careful, they will find a way to make that income,

this is one small step away from in game advertisement.

Wait till you get to watch a commercial b4 you load your instance. better to let them keep some advertising revenue on their forums.

Get a job

If you had actually read things, you would see that the complaint was not with the Offer Wall itself, but rather with the release of private information by using the Offer Wall. Turbine hasn't said it's gone for good; they've simply made the decision to temporarily take it down while they make the necessary changes to ensure that their customers' information -- your information! -- is protected.

In light of that, your response was more than a little extreme.

It's not the alternative that was pissing people off. Read the god damned posts on the forum. Information, private information that was supposed to be protected under Turbines EULA was being handed out WITHOUT your expressed permission. It was a shady setup with a shady company that Turbine willingly partnered with.

When you visited that wall, your username and password that are associated with your DDO account were sent out without your permission. It's not the stuff that were asked of you, it's the stuff that you weren't asked for that is the issue here.

@Blah?

You're wrong. Nothing was sent. Read the statement, it was sent only to DDO Store system (Playspan). So nothing new was sent anywhere, or in other words, no private information was passed to anyone.

The main problem wasn't that people don't want Turbine to find other ways to make money, it was how this "Offer Wall" was implemented and the company Turbine chose as a partner.

Even Turbine admits the offers that were shown on the first day the Wall was up did not conform to the rules they'd set out to weed the shady deals out of the list. The implication there is that some of the offers were not items Turbine intended to expose their customers to, so I have to wonder why it would be thought a good idea to partner with such a system in the first place.

Beyond that, there was also the concern over what information Turbine had sent to the Offer Wall provider with or without you viewing any of the offer pages themselves. You could, apparently, still be on the ddo.com site when this happened, so would have no reason to think you'd agreed to send any information at all yet. So people felt their option to CHOOSE was taken from them (to make a truly informed choice, one would have to be able to safely look at the Wall in the first place).

I would love to see Turbine partner with other companies to allow for programs that reward users with Turbine Points. I just think they have to be more careful with how they go about it. Play things right and Turbine/DDO may be able to build a lasting system that works to the benefit of all involved without making the customers feel they are being put at risk.

I look forward to seeing what other systems Turbine comes up with and I hope they take the past few days into account when implementing new Point-gathering ideas. :)

The way something is done makes all the difference. To go with an extreme and unrealistic example, world peace sounds like a noble goal but very few people would agree that nuking the entire world and destroying all life would be a good thing even though it would bring about global peace.

Likewise, on paper Turbine's objective was a good idea, but they weren't careful enough in their selection process and ended up with a shady company who was automatically sent a few bits of your personal information, including your email address, before you even looked at any of the offers. I don't think it's hard to understand why that's not a good thing.

True enough.

Turbine was likely on the heals of a class action law suit. gpotato had to get the okay from bosses and investors to lower the prices of their cash shop items to satisfy a bunch of whiners that would probably never spend one single dime on the game anyway. Turbine partnered with a scammer company that was taking your personal information, without your direct knowledge of it, and handing it out to the highest bidder. Considering the extreme difference in the two situations, I think gpotato gets a pass on the amount of time it took them to "fix" their problem.

Most MMO companies don't put your private information up for auction.

@Wjowski

And Turbine didn't as well. Read the statement, though I was sure it was that way before.

Like I said on mmorpg.com, the usual happened - people overreacted. That url's weren't passed to any other companies, which looked obvious to me from the start.
But Internet is Internet - overreaction, made up truths, etc. People are sometimes naive when they think they are smart, ironically.