Blizzard's Beta Timewalking page: what it says before you log in

A page titled World of Warcraft: Forever Beta Timewalking sits at timewalking.blizzard.com, on Blizzard’s own domain. Before you sign in, it tells you it has found some stats for you and asks you to log in to see them.

What the public page says

Its short explanation describes the service as a way to view your account, gameplay and transaction statistics. To generate them, you consent to Blizzard using your account, gameplay and transaction data for the purpose of generating and displaying statistical information.

Blizzard says it will retain and use that information for this purpose until the end of the service. The page gives no date for that end. You can decline, but the page says that if you do, you won’t be able to generate your statistics through this feature.

So, by the page’s own description, this is a personalized set of statistics about your account, kept behind a login, under a title that ties it to the Forever beta.

What we haven’t seen

We have not logged in or given consent, so we can’t describe what a report contains: its categories, figures, comparisons, or how anything is calculated.

The landing page carries no date, so we can’t say when the service went live. The forum thread below is dated 23 October. It establishes that a player asked about one of the report’s categories that day, and nothing more about the service’s start.

The “Nemesis” question

That 23 October thread on the US forums opens with a player asking what a category called “Players Who Count You as Nemesis” means. That is the whole of the original question.

None of the answers comes from Blizzard staff:

• The first reply, from another player, states an answer in one line, tied to killing the same players repeatedly. It gives no source.
• The next reply, from a third player, offers two speculative ideas in one post: that the category might relate to later PvP systems, or, as a joke, that it might count people who have you on their ignore list.
• The original poster then added their own figure for the category. That is their report of their own account; we have not seen it and are not repeating it.

None of these is an official definition, and we are not offering one without seeing a report and an explanation from Blizzard.

Before you log in

Some editorial advice if you want to try it. Check that the address really is timewalking.blizzard.com before you enter your login details. Read the consent text before agreeing; it covers transaction data as well as gameplay. And if you share your figures, remember that the page presents them as statistics about your own account, which is a different thing from a count of the beta as a whole.