The overwhelmingly negative feedback from players has led to Turbine pulling the plug on the newly released Offer Wall feature. Many of the complaints revolved around the lack of security of the Offer Wall, as it had been reported to be transmitting players' login names and e-mail addresses simply for viewing the offers. Turbine admits that the Offer Wall was "a poor user experience that was not up to our standards, and for this we apologize."
On the earlier mentioned subject of users' e-mail addresses being transmitted to sponsors, Turbine had this to say:
Finally, there was a lot of speculation about how information such as your username or e-mail address was being used by our commerce partners. Ultimately we chose to pass the e-mail address to our commerce partners in the URL to facilitate e-mailing receipts to players. It went no further than that. Neither PlaySpan nor Super Rewards passed the information on. It was stored in the user database only and not transmitted to any of the companies who advertised via Super Rewards. Players who visited the page did not expose any new information to PlaySpan (our in-game store provider) that they did not already have. Even though this implementation did not constitute a technical breach of our privacy policy, we certainly understand the concerns that have been communicated to us and how seriously players take their privacy. As a result, the Super Rewards team has already removed the e-mail addresses from their user database. If we decide to return to the Offer category in the future we will certainly work with our partners to implement a better system than the one we tried this week.
View the original announcement here.
[Thanks Khalathwyr for the tip!]
