14 DAY TRIAL // World of Warcraft players have noticed that Blizzard is secretly watermarking the in-game screenshots they take. The watermarks allow the company to learn who made the screenshot based on the account ID, the date and time when it was made, and the IP address of the game server.
Game developers often resort to all sorts of tricks to monitor players and identify issues and, usually, when these methods come to light, players are displeased. The rule also applies in this case. The OwnedCore members who have learned of the watermarking process are certainly not happy.
The issue was made public by a user called Sendatsu. He revealed that players must go below Dalaran, in the Crystalsong Forest, set the screenshot quality to 9, and take a screenshot of a white area.
By sharpening the screenshot in an image editor, a custom bar-code that encodes the valuable information is revealed.
“The pattern, which consists of approximately 88 bytes of data, repeats itself many times depending on the resolution of your screen,” Sendatsu explained.
“The secret watermark which is being intentionally embedded inside WoW generated screenshots below top quality, DOES NOT CONTAIN the account password, the IP address of the user or any personal information like name/surname etc. It does contain the account ID, a timestamp and the IP address of the current realm,” he said.
While Blizzard’s “Terms of Service” clearly states that the company could harvest certain details, it never says anything about embedding them into secretly planted watermarks.
Many fear that the information could be misused by cybercriminals to launch targeted attacks against certain players. Others say that it could be utilized by Blizzard to track down private WoW servers.
Based on the watermarks analyzed thus far, it’s believed that Blizzard introduced the mechanism sometime between 2008 and 2010, the service being provided by Digimarc.
Blizzard has yet to comment on these accusations, but until it does, gamers who want to make sure that their screenshots are not watermarked can set the quality of the picture to 10. This is the maximum quality and screenshots made this way do not include the watermark.