Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning

[Iv000]

I've been watching Reckoning for some time.

I'm quite interested in it. And with Ken Rolston being on the team, I'm sure it will be a good RPG.

Though if it will use Origin, I won't even look at it.

[Sebiale]

I've been watching Reckoning for some time.

I'm quite interested in it. And with Ken Rolston being on the team, I'm sure it will be a good RPG.

Though if it will use Origin, I won't even look at it.

Even if you could still get it via other sellers or physically?

[brokenergy]

I've been watching Reckoning for some time.

I'm quite interested in it. And with Ken Rolston being on the team, I'm sure it will be a good RPG.

Though if it will use Origin, I won't even look at it.

Even if you could still get it via other sellers or physically?

 

You should have also said that all EA forum accounts are now called Origins accounts, so in a way you already have Origins in your system. If you don't want EA or anyone else to see your details, then don't write them. Don't buy DLCs, don't give sensitive info and don't be online 24/7.

[JimboUK]

I've been watching Reckoning for some time.

I'm quite interested in it. And with Ken Rolston being on the team, I'm sure it will be a good RPG.

Though if it will use Origin, I won't even look at it.

Even if you could still get it via other sellers or physically?

 

It's not where you get it, it's the worry about being forced to install Origin just as they did with BF3.

[RomanKalik]

I'm not too concerned about the Origin client, honestly. They've been revising the ToS (which, legally, are as meaningless as they get if Origin does actually breach any privacy-related legislation) as fast as people notice any and every opening reserved in it for whatever the client might do in the future.

 

Basically, the starting point for EA here would be that they'd want to cover all possible future functionality, regardless of what the client does now, or even what it's going to do in any roadmap they might have, and this is because their lawyers are telling them to do that avoid legal trouble in the future. To do this, their legal team would say, they must get you, the end user, to do something that has no meaning whatsoever (hitting I Agree is not a signature on a binding agreement in any shape or form) but looks nice on paper. This merely continues a long-standing tradition in the gaming industry, wherein company profits are moved along the chain into the pockets of people running legal firms, thus keeping the economy going and creating much-needed jobs for everyone.

 

It's a lawyer-based economic structure, and the only one profiting in any way from it is the lawyer. If and when they form their own small cartel and found lobbyist groups to push forward laws that actually give any of this stuff meaning, I'll be concerned. Here and now, it just allows the lawyers on the side of the big publishers and the lawyers on the side of the class actions against them to profit handsomely, and has the added bonus of making some headlines.

 

 

Anyhow, back to the game itself... I'm still not entirely sure I'm excited about it. Some of the vids about have somewhat reassured me, but I still have to remember that R. A. Salvatore has (or had) a lead role in shaping the entire narrative of the game world, be it the 10,000 years or so of history, or the localized period in Reckoning. Now, I like Salvatore's books, and I'm especially a fan of his never-ending series of Drizzt books, but there's something you learn eventually if you read his books long enough. First, they're pulp fiction - if you're looking for complex stories, you need to be looking elsewhere. There are a few basic themes stringing it along, and the rest is fairly simplistic, though that can be fun to read as well... but then we come to the second issue. Salvatore's incredibly repetitive. He's a bit of a one-trick pony, and he'd write the same story over and over again if but given the chance to do so. He lacks originality.

 

How that works out in games? Forgotten Realms - Demon Stone, that's how. Bland, ever-predictable, and characters that were cardboard flat. I still wince whenever I recall that game plot and characters.

 

And here Salvatore was something rather close to creative lead - a consultant in charge of the entire world's backstory. With a game that, in itself, serves a stepping stone to the MMO that's meant to follow afterwards, that's not good.

 

Still, the videos have been somewhat reassuring...

[JimboUK]

Ignore EAs ever changing T&Cs and see what it actually does.... http://img526.imageshack.us/img526/8365/enxmldba.jpg it's spyware whatever way you look at it.

[RomanKalik]

I have, as a matter of fact, seen what it actually does. The most "nefarious" activity to date, in all of its functionality, had been its scanning feature - the part where it scans your PC for existing installations of games enabled on Origin, specifically by checking the registry and the ProgramData path.

 

The same is done by Impulse (now GameStop Digital or somesuch) since forever, at least for any game that utilized Stardock's Goo DRM (which didn't really live long), GameSpy Comrade, and to some extent, Steam - though a great deal of effort is already saved for it since it rigidly manages both the games associated with your account and their install location on the PC itself, saving a great deal of (hah) wear on tear on ye olde CPU. Of course, it could be that Origin collects information to send back home... only I've yet to see any evidence that it actually does that. It appears to collect even less information than the stuff collects on you by definition (as in, your computer hardware and operating system information, and every Steam game you play, ever, down to specific play times and in-game data on what you did - difference is, they just market that as a service, and most people like achievements, apparently).

 

If you have evidence to offer on what nefarious deeds Origin goes about, by all means, share it. It's not exactly on-topic with the original intent of this thread, but I guess it's close enough and does warrant some debate. Because as things stand, Origin doesn't seem to collect or monitor in any manner that I didn't knowingly consent to, nor does it embed itself secretly in my operating system - thus, I wouldn't go as far as to call it spyware.

[JimboUK]

No other apps do what Origin does, in that image it's reading backed up SMS messages, there is no reason whatsoever for it to do that. The changes to the T&Cs are worthless to, it's changed from "We'll help ourselves to your personal data and sell it" to "We'll help ourselves to your personal data and use it ourselves", it's not a great improvement. I use my PC for banking, shopping, communicating with friends and family as well as business, knowingly installing something that trawls through my personal files would be beyond irresponsible. Even if I wasn't bothered about my own data I should be concerned about contact details for other people as well as family photos being scanned, it's not just my privacy that's being invaded.

 

As for secrecy they've not been very upfront about what Origin is doing, permission to take your data is lost in the wall of text that is the EULA, a lot of other spyware vendors also hide those permissions in a wall of text, very few actually install anything without permission.

 

"…cookies, IP addresses (including for purposes of determining your approximate geographic location), mobile or other hardware device ID, browser types, browser language, information passed from your browser (if any), referring and exit pages, and URLs, platform type, the number of clicks, information about your media, software and/or applications installed on your machine and/or device, domain names and types, landing pages, pages viewed and the order of those pages, the date and amount of time spent on particular pages, other Internet and website usage information, game state and the date and time of activity on our websites or games, information about how your game is used, including game metrics and statistics, feature usage and purchase history, as well as MAC Address, mobile unique device ID (if applicable) and other similar information.”

 

No thanks.

[Marthos]

 

"…cookies, IP addresses (including for purposes of determining your approximate geographic location), mobile or other hardware device ID, browser types, browser language, information passed from your browser (if any), referring and exit pages, and URLs, platform type, the number of clicks, information about your media, software and/or applications installed on your machine and/or device, domain names and types, landing pages, pages viewed and the order of those pages, the date and amount of time spent on particular pages, other Internet and website usage information, game state and the date and time of activity on our websites or games, information about how your game is used, including game metrics and statistics, feature usage and purchase history, as well as MAC Address, mobile unique device ID (if applicable) and other similar information.”

 

No thanks.

 

 

 

 

Ditto, not going on any computer of mine either.

 

 

Total invasion of privacy and no excuses will cover it, if a government agency was found to be tapping people's computers like this there would be huge public outcry.

 

 

And as for it reading backed up SMS messages, well hey, Rupert Murdoch is still feeling the backlash on that isn't he ?

[RomanKalik]

No other apps do what Origin does, in that image it's reading backed up SMS messages, there is no reason whatsoever for it to do that.

 

Um, what image? Sorry, but I might be missing something here. Did you add an attachment or a link somewhere? If so, I'd be happy to see it, though I can't find it at the moment - please clarify.

 

Also, note that there's a huge difference between reading file data than doing, say, a recursive search in a set of starting directories to locate specific application info - it's grossly inefficient, mind, but it's also fairly common in code like this. Process Explorer will still show the files as accessed regardless, mind, regardless of what's actually *done* with them - it doesn't, say, show if they're actually read or not. Or if the information collected from it is stored in some log file and/or transmitted to some remote set of servers. I've seen no oddly bloating files under "C:\ProgramData\Origin", and I didn't see any suspicious location the program wrote into over time (Process Explorer is not unfamiliar to me, either), nor have I seen it upload anything suspiciously large over time, unless it hides it in very small messages (Wireshark is not unfamiliar to me, either, and nor is raw network data)... I did check up on this, albeit over an hour or so and little more, when I first read about EA's eyebrow-raising ToS for Origin.

 

As for secrecy they've not been very upfront about what Origin is doing, permission to take your data is lost in the wall of text that is the EULA, a lot of other spyware vendors also hide those permissions in a wall of text, very few actually install anything without permission.

 

http://eacom.s3.amazonaws.com/EULA_Origin_8.24.11.pdf

 

I think it's fairly clear and up front now. What you quoted isn't the Origin EULA, man. It's the EA Privacy Policy from their website, which they might have included in its entirety in the EULA at some point as a point of reference: http://www.ea.com/1/privacy-policy

 

Except it isn't tailored for Origin. It covers everything that every single EA service did, does, and might do. Including web servers (IP, number of clicks, cookies and the like), mobile applications, a few dozen games, and game multiplayer services. Basically, you're mixing apples and oranges here. Anything from achievement tracking to a bug report to a crash log is collected data for something, man. So, again, EA are rather up-front and clear about this stuff... at least now.