It kind of blows my mind that forced arbitration is legal at all.
Corporations are people and they have so much more money and time to fund their interests than individuals do.
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.
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 🤣
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.
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.
look at all the lefties down voting you. when are people going to learn?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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Competitive games were once upon a time p2p 🥲 now we have single player games that demand networking.
they are all ill moderated and implemented anyway. competitive gaming is a cancer on the gaming community.
idk, I’ve had some great experiences with competitive gaming, I don’t think generalizing it all as a cancer is reasonable.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 😂
This is what a vocal minority have been saying for years, but no one cares.
Well you don’t own the games and they are just games
Don’t buy games from such vultures
I have less reasons to feel bad about pirating everything day by day
Common Blizzard L
Let your House of Representative member know that you do not want forced arbitration.
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This seems to be the new norm, first Roku, now Blizzard.
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.
Praise Microsoft
I haven’t watched Louis’ video, but I do have a Blizzard account, and up until a couple of days ago I had an active WoW subscription (ended because I wanted to play other games, not to make a point).
I didn’t get presented with any new terms recently, presumably I will in the future should I decide to sign up again, or even dip in on a free trial account.
I did look up the terms though. I’m not in the US so it’s not clear if I’d be bound by it anyway but not only do they have an opt-out clause (11.A.vi) they’re actually less egregious than some EULAs, allowing opt-out via email, rather than requiring a mailed in letter (Roku) and being prominently highlighted at the top.
Lot of folks here dreaming about them going bankrupt, I have to say, I think that’s wishful thinking. The current WoW expansion has been very successful with the highest signups and retention in a long time as they’ve apparently figured out what players actually want. Even without their other IP’s they’re doing ok.
OMG, Blizzard?! How could they?!? -.-
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.
