Chocy

Oh and there is another thing to it... Quote from the forum: "The users were never notified by the ToS that this watermarking was going on so, for four years now, we have all been publicly sharing our account and realm information for hackers to decode and exploit."

O.o

that's pretty interesting actually... Although not having in ToS is pretty damn dodgy...

Having read through the information, you should be aware that this shares the IP address of the server (not yours), your account ID - this is important. The ID is an internal string stored in Blizzard's servers, NOT your login user name credential, and the character name. The character name is irrelevant, as that can often be determined by the screenshot itself. Neither of the other values reveals anything personal about the user.

That said, there should still have been an announcement of some sort and a TOS notification, but the system seems to have been put in place to catch botters, exploits, and hacks. It shouldn't affect the average player in any way.

That's exactly the problem, I think. They wanted to keep it a secret, it even seems like they disable the watermark for best quality JPGs and loss less formats, so no one would stumble upon it. It's not like they put it in the meta data...

maybe i'm just stupid buuuut.. why should blizz do such watermarkythings?

to track screenshots and maybe identify terms violations even when you edit out your character name... like when people sell their accounts on ebay.

okay now i get it.. so as a non hacking non glitching player there is no harm :D ty