[falcolas]

> they're not monetizing their players directly with it

How do you know? Did they pinkie swear on it? Did they add any kind of T&C around their use of Telemetry specifically?

Telemetry that can be used to identify frequently used game functionality could equally be used to identify game functionality that can be monetized. Identifying how a user dies is a fantastic way to identify items which can be sold to prevent those common deaths.

[Zandikar]

Precisely. Another commenter said they were shocked to see this community have a negative reaction to telemetry in this instance (and/or generally), and this is why: For-Profit corporations have routinely and repeatedly demonstrated that they should never be given the benefit of the doubt in this area. The developers and engineers in charge of game balance or mechanics may be people we can intellectually relate to and understand the positive value of telemetry, but we more than most should also be aware of how those same people have management to answer to who see something to be abused to improve monetization.

It can be a good thing, yes. Why on earth would anyone assume it would be used and only used in positive, privacy respecting ways in this day and age?

[filoleg]

>Identifying how a user dies is a fantastic way to identify items which can be sold to prevent those common deaths.

Just as commonly, it is done to identify bugs and issues, tweak the game balance to get it to a better state, or to see which things players like to do (as opposed to what they say on forums and in focus groups) in order to provide more of similar features.

It is no different from engagement logging in a lot of applications. It is far from always being done for the purpose of monetization. If my business application has a lot of users stuck on a particular screen for prolonged periods of time due to the UX being confusing, I would want to know about it and address it. A lot of times it is hard to gauge how bad it is, because users might just tolerate it if it is ok, or maybe it is something users attribute to their own fault (i.e., they might feel it is just them being confused about it, not that the UX is confusing for everyone). Engagement logging would help me identify that problem and pinpoint it very fast.

>How do you know [they are not using it for monetizing]?

How do you know they are? I am more surprised they didn't have that type of telemetry already for a while, because that's one of the most common ways to identify pain-points in the gameplay balancing, which features might need more attention/rework, identifying potentially very tricky to catch bugs, and come up with ideas for new feature ideas that users might like based on actual data (as opposed to hearsay and public feedback, which can get significantly skewed by selection bias and other factors).