by JR Cook - 9 years ago     show comments

Today’s PTR build implemented the integration with Twitter that we’ve been hearing about, and while the system clearly has some rough edges to buff out, it’s already in a pretty good spot.

First off, keep in mind that the Twitter integration is very much opt-in: the hooks for opening the UI don’t show up until you’ve linked up your Twitter account, and even after that, you need to trigger a tweetable event for those hooks to show up.

Right now, those tweetable events are one of the following:

• Loot a rare or epic item. This may include buying it.
• Take a screenshot.
• Earn an achievement.

Clicking on the icon that shows up next to the trigger in the chat window will open the new UI, which also behaves differently based on what you’re tweeting.

• Looting an item will populate a tweet with a link to the item’s page on the battle.net site.
• Screenshots will show a preview of the last screenshot taken, along with the ability to crop the shot to your liking.
• Achievements will attach an image of the achievement toast.

In every case, you can remove the attached images or change the text to remove whatever is prepopulated.

There are also some limitations, based on how the UI auto-generates the tweet.

• You can’t attach multiple screenshots or achievements to a single tweet.
• You can change the item linked in the tweet by shift-clicking it, but it’ll only allow you to link one item in the tweet, and it always changes the battle.net link accordingly. Also, linking a new item into the tweet will overwrite whatever text you typed in.
• In fact, switching between different default tweets by clicking on the three add options in the UI will wipe out whatever text you’ve written and populate it with the default string.

As of today’s build (19551) there’s also no way to get to the Tweet UI aside from clicking on the trigger in the chat pane. That may be by design, or it may simply be an option that hasn’t been implemented yet.

So there you have it! The UI as implemented is pretty straightforward, and does what it needs to do in terms of letting people quickly generate tweets for the things you’d normally expect people to want to tweet about. Moreover, there’s no option to automatically tweet anything: if it turns out someone is spamming tweets, it’s because that person is actively choosing to spam tweets, not because the game is doing it for him/her.

Finally, Blizzard does nothing to invite you to tweet something unless you’ve enabled the functionality in the Interface panel. Even then, that invitation is in the form of an icon that shows up in your chat pane, right next to a notification that would have shown up for all of those events anyway.

All in all, it’s a pretty slick integration with a lot of room to grow, but even if it stays where it’s at now (so long as there’s eventually a way to get to the Tweet UI w/o requiring a trigger in the chat pane) it’ll work for its intended purpose pretty handily.