World of Tanks to Come in a Box

Or so I gather, since they sent me a press update with the updated box art now that they have received their ESRB rating.

Tanks in a Box

The alternate title for this post: Tanks for Teens.

Having played the game, the teen rating seems a bit much.  The description for the Teen rating says:

Contains content that might be considered unsuitable for children under 13 years of age. Titles in this category may contain more intense violence, suggestive themes, crude humor, blood, simulated gambling, and/or use of strong language (which is uncensored)

I wonder what prompted the ESRB to choose that rating as part of their process?  That is the same rating as WoW, EverQuest II, Lord of the Rings Online, and most other MMOs I looked up where your avatar personally hacks humanoids to death.  In World of Tanks, it is just vehicles getting knocked out.

Or maybe online games just get Teen by default due to the chat channel.

The ESRB – Against Real ID, Befuddled by Reply All

As part of last week’s Real ID crisis, nearly a thousand people apparently wrote to the ESRB asking for help in the fight against the latest step in Blizzard’s Real ID campaign.

We know this because, as WoW.com has reported, the ESRB replied to all of those who wrote in with a supportive message… and just did a mass “reply all” to the whole list, not bothering to use the blind carbon copy (BCC) feature to hide the addresses and, in some cases, the full real names of the recipients.

Well, the ESRB certainly gets full points for irony in this situation.

I am sure that somebody in their office will be hearing about this for some time to come.  They have since apologized.

Of course, if you work with any sort of corporate email system, people mis-using the said system is probably a common sight.  The reply all button is a dangerous, career limiting weapon in the hands of the uninformed.

And coming from a company with over 70,000 people world wide… somebody once sent out an innocuous message and accidentally CC’d it to the “all managers, world wide” address list.  This was responded to via reply all by literally dozens of terse, unprofessional, and sometimes very angry, messages, all of which went to everybody on the email list, right up to the CEO of the company.

So the ESRB is in good (or bad) company at least.

Finally, as a complete tangent, how many people entering the work force today know that CC stands for carbon copy and is a reference to using carbon paper to make a duplicate or a typed document?  How many have even heard of carbon paper and know what it is?