It kind of blows my mind that forced arbitration is legal at all.
I think in the case of forced agreements (both Roku not having a way to select disagree and disabling all hardware functionality until you agree, and blizzard not allowing login to existing games including non-live service ones) no reasonable court should be viewing this as freely accepting the new conditions.
If you buy a new game with those conditions, sure you should be able to get a full refund though, and you could argue it for ongoing live service games where you pay monthly that it’s acceptable to change the conditions with some notice ahead of time. If you don’t accept you can no longer use the ongoing paid for features, I expect a court would allow that. But there’s no real justification for disabling hardware you already own or disabling single player games you already paid for in full.
It’ll be interesting to see any test cases that come from these examples.
I see 1 class action where the consumers get screwed and the company gets a slap on the wrist
Right?
Amazes me how many people cheer on these class action suits, and when I remark that class action screws the consumer and benefits the company, lemmites downvote to oblivion.
I got my first class action reimbursement at age 19…for perhaps $5.
Today I see one about twice a year, again for about $5 each. I don’t even bother replying to get my check - it’s simply not worth the effort.
The class-action system is a scam to benefit the wrong-doers, not to give strength to a class. What company would prefer 2 million court cases vs a single case? They want to prevent that first individual case from happening, at all, let alone from winning. If one case wins, the ambulance chasing lawyers would crawl out of the wood work and line up for their payout. The legal fees alone would be 10x+ any class-action settlement.
Correct.
The problem here is “reasonable court.” One party in the US has spent decades stacking the courts with unreasonable judges who will agree to anything a corporation hands them.
My brother in christ, both parties have been doing this for ages. You aren’t looking at the right lines. This one is about wealth, not about party affiliation.
If you had the money to put safeguards in place to protect you and your stuff in the event something went wrong, you probably would. It would be a mistake not to.
A simple example is keeping some money set aside as a savings or emergency fund. For rich people, lobbying for more favorable laws, and helping more friendly judges rise up the ranks is a similar thing. Some have went on to make and plan apocalypse bunkers too.
When you have enough money that you don’t have to worry about spending a certain amount, you just go and do it. Like people not worrying about spending on Starbucks every morning because it’s equivalent to 30 minutes of their time or less.
I think you are correct. A contract requires “consideration.” You got nothing for agreeing to the new contract, so I don’t think it is legal.
Somone said that it isn’t and isn’t enforceable to but no-one has the time money or will to fuck around with that.
Depends on the country. This wiki article goes over a bunch of countries. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitration_clause
The governments all around the world are probably in favor of it, because their big “donors” want it and it lowers costs for the judicial system for them. It’s a win-win from their perspective.
The real reason for arbitration is that it usually costs hundreds to initiate and the rules can be murky. In comparison most places in America you can file a small claims suit for $20 and are given help by the court/government.
It also creates no precedent. You lose, you pay out one angry customer, but the next one who tries, you get a fresh attempt to convince the arbitrators you were right.
In a real court, the first loss woukd be leveraged against you by everyone else in similar straits, even if it wasn’t a class action.
NAL and stare decisis is definitely not as strict in arbitration but arbitration generally has to follow state court rules or it will get invalidated including use of precedent. Most court decisions never get published anyway so its essentially the same loss.
I hadn’t considered small claims (though I’ve filed, and won, several small claims cases myself).
It would be great to teach people how to use the small-claims system - Imagine these companies having to deal with these courts in every state.
They’d probably default (not show up), and have judgements against them, then the complainant would be stuck trying to enforce the claim (it’s not automatic). In the end, Corp would see this as a win… Until it became a news story that “Corp X has hundreds of unresolved judgements”
I am sure everybody’s situation is different but luckily for me as a New York Resident, between long arm statues and the interconnectedness of banks/Wall st everybody has to pay or forfeit their bank access 🤣
Corporations are people and they have so much more money and time to fund their interests than individuals do.
It’s just a term of a contract. It’s only “forced” insofar as both parties agree to require it in order to settle disputes.
Which shouldn’t be allowed in relation to consumer goods and services.
Meh, arbitration is cheaper and faster than actual litigation. I see clear advantages for both parties.
But also obvious disadvantages to the customer in cases like this. Why should the customer not have a right to refuse?
“Maybe if Activision gets bought by Microsoft, Blizzard won’t be as scummy.”
Hahaha, nope.
Between the company rape culture and enabling internet & gambling addiction, Blizzard is dead to me.
Support your local private servers.
Have you found any good private server sublemmies? Whatever we’re calling them?
Communities.
If you build it, they will come.
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Idk if there are any sublemmys for it but I’ll take this time to recommend the private server I’ve been enjoying for the last year. Wow-hc is a small tight knit community, we just cleared molton core a couple weeks ago and are slowly progressing through the content. It’s very blizzlike and the dev is active and fixes problems very fast. I know hardcore wow isn’t for everyone but deaths can be appealed in the event of disconnects and bugs which is what drew me to it, where other private servers if the server crashes you are just out of luck.
First Roku did a quick force TOS change before a beach disclosure, now Blizzard is mysteriously forcing a change to their TOS. I have no idea what’s coming next. Seems like it’s going to become part of the breach playbook to minimize financial loss. Maybe there will be a law against it in… oh…15 years?
So i’m not a lawyer but isn’t there a law for unconsciability, When a contract is so one-sided, it’s obvious that me the signer has absolutely no rights.The entire contract is voided.
EULAs and TOSes are as legally binding as a secondhand piece of toiletpaper with a contract written in shit. Almost every single one will be thrown out in court. The problem is getting to that point in the first place, and incurring the (time, effort & money) costs while enduring. Most common people can’t afford that, which the companies know, so they keep making unenforceable EULAs.
That is true in US. In EU litigations cost are way lower and a single person could sue, win and not be financially broken.
Problem is only that in any case what you pay for a lawyer is more than you win, so it make no sense to sue in any case.
Almost like the Legal system is intentionally designed such that the wealthy are the only ones with any actual access.
I guess in return the signer gets the service?
The signer gets the service because they paid for it. Mostly these are changed after people already bought the stuff.
Let me laugh if Blizzard’s TOS change is because of a security breach they haven’t disclosed yet.
Roku bought a beach?
In Arizona.
I should buy some oceanfront property there.
Is the beach the place where the breach happened?
my vizio has been stuck on a tos update acceptance screen since about the time of the recent roku shit. i haven’t had the time to deal with it, so it’s just been turned off.
Roku wasn’t breached. They reported that a bunch of people who had reused passwords from other breached sites were compromised.
So you have all users sign a new TOS to force a password change? I’m not seeing the connection.
The TOS had nothing to do with having announced that some peoples’ accounts had been compromised due to password reuse from other hacked sites. People just started conspiracy theoryin’
If I don’t own the product after purchase, the button shouldn’t say “buy/purchase” it should say “rent”.
That’s the hilarious(ly depressing) thing about buying a digital movie, for example, to me.
If you rent it, you get it for a certain amount of time.
If you ‘buy’ it, you also rent it, just for an undisclosed amount of time that they may or may not retroactively take away from you at any point with no warning or compensation.
Your use of the Platform is licensed, not sold, to you, and you hereby acknowledge that no title or ownership with respect to the Platform or the Games is being transferred or assigned and this Agreement should not be construed as a sale of any rights.
From the Blizz terms.
WoW has always revolved around having a server handle everything and your client is just the textures/models viewer where you tell the server what to do, I have been fine with this. But I do agree, it should say something else on the button. Other games that are not MMO shouldn’t be a “license” to play. If you buy it, you can play it whenever and wherever. Features that are not multiplayer should work regardless. Some things just shouldn’t be tied to a server. I really despise modern gaming because of this.
Anecdotal experience: Gran Turismo Sport recently lost its servers. When they went down, the Mileage Exchange shop went with it. This means all the cosmetics for cars. and a few unique cars, are now unobtainable for future players. PD could have patched the shop to be a complete list of everything and you buy it with the plethora of points you will collect in the future as you race. But no, they didn’t.
Fuck Blizzard. Haven’t used them since the censorship bullshit they pulled over Hong Kong.
At that point I tried to delete my account, but they made it impossible already. So they are “lucky” to “keep me” as a “customer”
I was able to close my account effectively, circa 2019 after big-dick Blitzchung got disrespected.
This is not unique to Blizzard, and has nothing to do with their latest EULA changes. Binding arbitration has been part of their EULA for years, long before the latest one arrived. (The earliest copy I’ve found is from 2018, and I don’t think it was new even then.)
For reference, here’s a diff showing the latest changes:
https://rentry.co/yuu78kqdBoth that and the unilateral changing of terms post-sale are horrible practices that we should all pressure our legislators to make illegal, and perhaps reject by voting with our wallets, but singling out one company for it takes attention away from the larger issue: It has been widespread in the software industry for a long time.
If EULAs are going to be legally binding, there should really be some standard mechanism, an API, on systems to display one such that the system can record a copy and you can see differences and such. Otherwise, you’re entering into a contract with some random party and only they have a copy or and see what changed across versions.
If such a display API is available on a given platform and isn’t used, could simply make the EULA automatically non-binding.
I’m willing to believe that there are legitimately cases where one does need license agreements to fix issues that extend beyond standard consumer law, but the current situation is simply a dumpster fire. Also, some EULAs have been held unenforceable, so even from the standpoint of the software company, it’s a mess as to whether their license is actually going to stand up; there are no clear lines to which a lawyer can conform to make their license hold up.
Some other possible tweaks:
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Require that prior to sale, existence of a EULA be prominently disclosed and be readable.
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I personally would much rather have industry adopting standard licenses than having every company creating ad-hoc licenses. Like, in the open-source world, the GPL and MIT licenses deal with a number of problems that open source software runs into, and I can learn once what each entails and quit looking at it. I’d rather have there be agreements for commercial software that work the same way. If industry needs flexibility, I think that it’s reasonable to say that they don’t all need to custom-craft solutions. I’d rather like legislation that encourages industry use of a limited number of widely-used agreements rather than hand-crafting them. Maybe add some kind of tax on non-standard EULAs, dunno.
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Disallow change-without-notice as a EULA condition; there should be no legitimate reason for this. If you got agreement once, you can get it again. Require that any change notice also provide a way to see the “delta” between the old license and the new license, just the changes.
One thing to keep in mind, though. They have more money than we do and will use this extra step to make it that much harder for them to face any consequences of their negative actions
I do like the idea of industry standard license.
My thoughts are:
- They need to limit EULAs to something like 600 words.
- Make them binding and non-changing to the product purchased, only newly purchased products can get the updated EULA.
- They should make a Ethics Policy (things like no cheating, be kind, no swearing, etc.) separate from the EULA. This Ethics policy can be updated whenever.
Make them binding and non-changing to the product purchased, only newly purchased products can get the updated EULA.
So I think I see what you’re getting at, because I was thinking about it in another comment and considered that, but I think that that’s probably overly-strict. There are some cases where legislation requires that a service provider act differently, and their EULA may be incompatible with that. Or where they’ve made a legal error in their initial EULA – you gotta have some route to fix that. Though I suspect that it’s possible to carve a smaller hole for that than is currently the case.
I have another comment where I make one suggestion to tighten up that hole a bit:
https://lemmy.today/comment/6999434
Yeah, I think that a EULA change should reasonably permit for some kind of refund. Maybe have some mechanism for deprecating the value of the service based on use – like, if you expect a typical online game to be online for 10 years and a user has used it for 5 and the service wants to change the EULA, mandate the option for a 50% refund in lieu of continued service under the new EULA or something.
That’d make games more expensive, but it’s a risk that companies could factor in when deciding on EULAs and the initial price.
That avoids the possibility of a bait-and-switch where you agree to one (acceptable) EULA, but then the vendor places you in a position of either agreeing to a new EULA or losing your money.
We already do things like that to evaluate how much an old vehicle is worth or how much life insurance is worth or something like that.
That being said, it’d also make games with an online service component more of a formal commitment than is the case today, in consumer law. As things stand, that’s mostly done on the on the honor system or via publishers being concerned about loss of reputation, and…honestly, I’d say that in general, that works pretty well. Companies don’t usually just immediately shut down service. But in order to do that, you’d have to have some kind of minimum concept of service that a consumer is actually expecting to get when they buy a game so that you can value how much of that service they actually received.
EDIT: Honestly, think that there’s a fair argument that games like that should make money via “microsubscriptions”. Like, the problem is more that people pay for an up-front game and get free bundled service rather than pay for service, so we have to come up with some kind of totally artificial value of how much the service is worth. You can’t have every game have a subscription as things stand…I mean, game publishers are not gonna take subscription fees of 50 cents each month for a game, because the transaction costs will kill them, though that might well otherwise be perfectly profitable and a viable way to make money. Hmm. Maybe someone like Steam could aggregate subscription fees from all users on Steam, then dole out the subscription to the game services that a given user subscribes to.
Just start sending your own terms back to them. They accepted the terms and provided the thing? Great!
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Hopefully the lesson people are slowly learning is to walk away from these systems.
It’s not that easy. My Blizzard account is over 10 years old - never thought they’d go down hill so much. What’s the solution, to never create accounts online anywhere? Even if a service looks good and you support it, a corporation like Activision can come along and have their asshole CEO infect everything.
Walking away from my account now means throwing away a lot of money spent on it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost
a sunk cost is a sum paid in the past that is no longer relevant to decisions about the future.
So due to sunk cost the better choice is to continue supporting bad behavior?
For me, not continue to support but use what I’ve paid for and not put any more money into it
I’m not supporting them, I haven’t bought anything from Blizzard since the last Protoss SC2 game ages ago. But I don’t want to lose access to my games.
I played Vanilla WoW a week after launch and was with it all the way up through
CataclysmMists. After hearing about the multiple shocking incidences of sexual harassment and gender discrimination at Blizzard and upper management’s unwillingness to stop it, it was quite easy to delete my Battle.net account and walk away. (Yeah I hadn’t played in a while, but I’d intended to come back eventually.)There are plenty of other games out there. You vote with your dollars, and your vote shows your character.
What’s the solution, to never create accounts online anywhere?
Yes. I buy all my games either as physical releases on consoles or DRM-free on PC. If a game requires an account to play, I won’t play it.
Fuck people who want to play matchmade competitive games I guess
Competitive games were once upon a time p2p 🥲 now we have single player games that demand networking.
I walked away from my account with the Hong Kong stuff after spending an uncomfortable amount on Overwatch. Every decision they’ve made since then has made writing it off easier. I still have my Starcraft and Brood War discs, I enjoyed my time with WoW, but I don’t see a reality where I turn back to Blizzard without huge internal changes.
It’s no solution but the takeaway is this is always a possibility and maybe even inevitable.
I was playing WoW since 2005, just have to walk away. I left the game, and all Blizzard products, as they have just gone to absolute garbage.
There are better games out there.
This is what a vocal minority have been saying for years, but no one cares.
Don’t use McDonalds or TB app anymore. Praying Dunkin don’t pull this bs. Every few times I go to McDs and they ask I wanna respond, “no cause forced arbitration is dumb for just a hamburger”
And the cashier would have no fucking clue 😂
The funny thing is by forcing you to agree to the new terms, the contract can be challenged since one side was coerced to sign it (and didn’t get a chance to sign in voluntarily!).
US courts tend to favor corporations over end users, so there’s still a strong chance a judge will throw the case out anyway, but because this is such an act of bad faith in US contract law, a judge might also rule in the end-user’s favor just to make an example out of Blizzard for being such a dick.
PS: Steam did this a long time ago. I’ve never had any disagreements with Steam but some folks have. I don’t know if anyone’s had the account bricked, which Blizzard, EA and Ubisoft have done.
I understand why Louis likes privacy.com so much. But he really needs to stop telling people to use them as a means of stopping payment with scummy vendors and companies so frivolously without having a disclaimer that it can open that person up to getting their credit dinged for non-payment.
Maybe he doesn’t care about such things, but his viewers might.
To get around the Blizzard dark pattern the “right way”, agree to the EULA, login, cancel subscriptions, remove payment details, close account (if possible), stop using Battle.net, done. Now the EULA is irrelevant. This also has the knock on effect of being the path that Blizzard/Activision/MS will actually notice since it will cost them money at scale in a way they can’t explain away as childish internet trolling.
Edit: a word (irreverent > irrelevant)
Now the EULA is irreverent.
True, but I think you meant “irrelevant”.
Indeed I did sir/madam
I can’t think of any reason why it would be inadvisable to cut off billing to an MMO subscription that was connected to a privacy.com card. Is there any basis for your concern? Do you know of someone who had “prevented Blizzard from billing them for WoW” on their credit report?
I can’t say I’ve ever had an MMO subscription - or any prepaid account, for that matter - show up on my credit report. Or that I know anyone who has. Even prepaid credit cards don’t show up on your credit report.
If a game, site, or app subscription fails to bill, the recourse the provider has is to cease providing the service. Standard industry practice is to suspend service and send out a notice, attempt re-billing a couple times, and to them consider the subscription canceled.
A debt can show up on your credit report, even if it’s not associated with a loan or line of credit… But with a prepaid account, like an MMO subscription, you’re never extended credit and you never incur a debt. The exception would be if you signed a contract for your prepaid account stating that you’d maintain it for a certain amount of time (common with phone plans, internet plans, leases, some shady gym memberships, etc.) or you caused damages to the provider. Without such an agreement, there are no damages from just causing them to be unable to continue billing your credit card. If you were paying by check or disputed an already posted payment, that would be different - but neither of those are relevant here.
I support this. Sadly I’m not subscribed but wish I was just so I could cancel 🥲
This seems to be the new norm, first Roku, now Blizzard.
Worthless company. Hope they go bankrupt.
They’re not worthless, I would love to take ownership and sell it for a pretty penny
I have less reasons to feel bad about pirating everything day by day
How can they “force” anything if you dont sign? By not agreeing to new terms… you dont agree to the terms. Wouldnt having it any other way just be insanity? Like i could write “contract” here that by viewing it you agree to it and if you dont agree, i could still claim that some part of it applies because it reads so in the contract. Or I have some other contract that is agreeable and someone signs it, then I change the terms and other party can’t reject them all because of something in the first contract.
Internet companies usually have clauses that they can terminate the agreement at any time for any reason, including “because they feel like it”. They usually don’t have to tell you why, either.
Same deal with all the “licensing” things and “digital goods ownership”. In two words: you don’t.
But it’s been that way for ages.
Especially if it’s something free or subscription based. It’s just a “our rules have changed, if you don’t like it stop using it/paying for it”
It’s get very dodgy when it’s a physical thing you’ve bought like that Roku agreement a few weeks back, but I doubt they’ll let that stop them.
They can just put in the initial contract a clause that basically they can change the contract as they see fit, when they see fit, and if you don’t like it, too bad.
That pretty much wipes out a lot of recourse for most people when it comes to changes in costs and services.
People don’t read the contracts, so companies just exploit that habit.
As my lawyer used to tell me, “there is the contract and there is the law.” Meaning anyone can say anything in a contract. If you have the legal ability you can find out what the law says about it.
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This doesn’t affect me, because I stopped buying Blizzard’s shit games after the BnetD lawsuit.
For me it was during the development of Diablo 3 when Blizzard acted like a bunch of children over community comments/concerns about the art style/direction of the game. I don’t feel like I’ve missed out on much, honestly.
k, I’ll continue to not ever buy their games
