World of Warcraft has updated the legal agreement on its controversial Community Discords Program. The second draft removed a few of the more troubling clauses from the agreement, but some World of Warcraft fans think the changes aren’t enough.
In May, World of Warcraft introduced the Community Discords Program–a partnership where fan groups could sign their servers up to receive official support and perks from Blizzard. However, the legal agreement to join had some shady provisions that caught heavy criticism from WoW fans.
In response to the feedback, Blizzard has revised the legal agreement for the Community Discords Program. The bulk of the agreement is unchanged outside three major provisions. Firstly, the agreement clarified the program was also for fans in the US, not just for EU players. Secondly, World of Warcraft clarified partner Discords only need to install the Clockwork Rocket sentiment-tracking bot on their servers, rather than any program Blizzard requests, and assured the bot only had access to public information. Lastly, it removed the limitation on saying negative things about Blizzard, though partners still cannot say “unlawful, untruthful, or intentionally misleading statements” about the company or its products.
Many of these provisions are ones that community Discords built around major World of Warcraft content creators would already have to accept in order to work directly with Blizzard, so these groups may be more inclined to do so. On the other hand, player communities, such as the WoW class-oriented Discords like Acherus who levied criticism on the first draft, would have to sacrifice more of their autonomy, especially considering some of the servers have over 100,000 members.
Even so, the updated terms of service for World of Warcraft’s Community Discords program are an improvement over the first version. Enforcing its partners not saying anything bad about the company would have been a nightmare for Blizzard, but the threat would have made giving valid criticism difficult for players, and the thought of having private information scraped was too much for many to swallow, so removing these provisions in the second draft was important.
That said, many players are still not convinced the agreement is worth it. Discord servers still must sacrifice a great deal to join, while Blizzard’s offer of interviews, beta codes, and community event opportunities is nebulous at best. Either way, World of Warcraft Discord communities should be sure to read the legal agreement carefully before making a decision–and may want to consider consulting a lawyer just to be safe.
World of Warcraft is available now for PC.