From BBC News: “A row has erupted after Blizzard – the publishers of the popular online game World of Warcraft – announced that users on its site forums would have to post under their real names. The firm say the move is to put an end to heated online arguments and topics started purely to cause trouble. But users reacted angrily, citing concerns about safety and privacy.” The take away quote: “one Blizzard employee posted his real name on the forums, saying that there was no risk to users, and the experiment went drastically wrong. Within five minutes, users had got hold of his telephone number, home address, photographs of him and a ton of other information. The post and topic has since been removed from the Blizzard forum.”
I guess it hasn’t been attempted in the post usenet age so there are probably people with the delusion that this is a good idea.
They were probably inspired by this comic strip a few weeks back: http://thenoobcomic.com/index.php?pos=378 much like youtube was inspired by xkcd to implement that text-to-speech option in comments.
I just don’t see how it can possibly have any positive effect.
It will make most people desert those forums, leaving behind:
– people who’ll continue trolling under fake names
– people continuing to flame each other over divergent opinions (like it always happens on the internet when discussing a polarizing subject, anonymous or not. Game mechanics in a MMO? That’s like a perpetual vi vs emacs vs windows vs linux vs iphone vs xbox vs playstation flamewar.)
– people using facebook accounts and other real life information as the basis for ad hominems (like they tend to criticize other people’s character profiles currently to divert threads from the topic at hand)
– people finding out first hand the privacy problems resulting from having their real names out in the wild like this and linked to their wow playing habit.
The good thing is that the impending debacle will serve as a useful reference in the future to show people how bad an idea this is.
That said the outcry is consequent (even for wow standards) and there is probably lots of people against it even within blizzard (also I doubt their legal department is really impressed with this idea). So ultimately I don’t see it happening. Whoever championed this idea at blizzard will have to accept that people just don’t want this.
Edited 2010-07-07 22:30 UTC
How is World of Warcraft an Operating System news?
It^aEURTMs in the privacy category, and on pg.2. This sort of decision making can have knock on effects that affect users of all OSes. The debate about anonymity / quality is more greyscale than Blizzard make it out to be.
I [Tom Dison] think this [Tom Dison] is a really bad idea [Tom Dison]
Is your wife’s name Val by any chance? =)
Yup! And my credit card number is…
That’s strange it got cut off and replaced with a series of periods. I think you have to post it with an expiration date, card security code, billing address and social security number for it to show up correctly. Try that.
No, that is a security feature of osnews. You can type in your credit card number and it will appear as a series of dots. See, … is my number. You try it too!
http://bash.org/?244321
I would vote you up if Osnews would let me.
Ok, here goes!!!
0666 0666 0666 0666
Incidentally, I found out about this from a friend on Runescape, which is currently the butt of jokes from WoW fanboys (mostly fanboys; I’m not aware of fangirls with such attitudes).
Ha ha. Stick it, fanboys. Crow about how bad our graphics are, etc., etc., la la la, but we don’t yet have to deal with this crap.
From my experience, the female to male ratio is much higher in Runescape than WoW, and the female WoW players I knew (my then girlfriend included) cared more about having fun than ripping on other games. At least, that’s the way it was three years ago when I played both games.
Stupid question, I know, but don’t forums usually have something..something, can’t think of the name for it.
Oh, that’s right…a moderator. I guess this is too foreign and out there for Blizzard to initiate. I mean aside from the 99.9% other forums I visit, moderators are rare. Actually, come to think of it, Blizzard is the only site I know that does not have moderators. Or at least any that can be bothered to spend a whole 10 seconds deleting inappropriate posts.
This is very true. WoW forums, although usually very busy, should be easy to moderate as only people with active game accounts can post. How hard can it be to moderate it when CMs can just ban whole offending account (and the ban can be forum-only). Not many people will buy another copy of the game just to troll on forums.
This leads many people to believe that trolling is not the real reason for this change, but the recent deal between Activision-Blizzard and Facebook is. There are also rumours that South Korean law is responsible (users have to go by their real names on big forums) as Starcraft is something of a national sport there.
Edited 2010-07-09 11:38 UTC
OK, I’ve read the news but they don’t explain HOW are they going to get their user’s real names. As a player I’d just make up a first name and a surname.
I’m not a WoW player so I don’t know if thise who pay already provided their real names so please enlighten me. I can imagine they could use the name from the credit card but a) the player doesn’t have to be the payer b) what about other means of payment like PayPal?
You enter your first and last name when creating your blizzard account. It is used for billing. You also can’t change it afterwards without contacting them and then it’s only possible if your name actually changed (marriage etc.)
Of course you could have used a fake name in the first place and some people did. Myself I was under the impression that my personnal information would remain, you know, confidential so I did use my real name.
I’m going to be using a new blizzard account with a fake name from now on, regardless of whether they go through with this stupid idea.
Blizzard has been downgraded to the kind of scummy internet company with whom I don’t want to share any personnal information anymore, if only because of the fact that even if they end up scrapping this idea (which seems very likely) it still managed to get the greenlight all the way through to being publicly announced.
It’s pretty scary that they are ethically bankrupt enough to give go ahead to such an idea.
Edited 2010-07-08 07:41 UTC
Rofl fucking losers, drama already going on the SC2 general discussion forums. They will only accomplish one thing with this that more and more people will register on first/last names like fuk blizzard, asdfas dfas, john doe. Now by knowing this I gonna reg a new bnet acc for my new sc2 key and anyways if you dont like their games/rules you can always ignore them and go play counter strike.
I don’t mind my name appearing on the forum.
No big deal I even named some of my characters with my real name.
I don’t know what are people freaking about. Almost all of us use social networks like Facebook and so on. What’s the difference here?
Here’s an example of what can happen:
http://seewhatyoudidthere.com/2010/07/07/realid-changes-the-very-re…
Now imagine that instead of this guy doing it merely for educational purpose it is done by some weirdo with the intention of harassing you.
See also at the end of the following article what happened to blizzard community manager Bashiok when he posted his real name on the forum:
http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Real_ID
So, that guy had no idea how to keep his private life private. This ain’t no body fault, but his.
If you look for my name for example. You can find few persons with same name (it is spelled different in some language and so on). But you can’t find such details like that dude in the article you posted. Why?
Because some people prefer not to share all the personal info to the world and actually read the security warning on the social networks they are in.
Just thinking this thing through I see some bad sides of Real ID. There are too many youngsters playing those games and they tend to be annoying. Real ID in this situation can be source for some IRL spam.
Also there are some people playing cross gender and don’t like to reveal their true self.
One more thing I think of, is if you really want to connect with someone you can give him the way to connect to you.
So in my opinion Real ID should be optional. If someone have some concerns about this they should be able to turn it off.
The information you had filled in thinking it was for blizzards eyes only is now suddenly your chatname.
http://greedygoblin.blogspot.com/2010/07/would-you-stop-whining-abo…
No RealID for your inner child.
Look at facebook, there’s rarely any IRC-style fighting there. That is because they use real names, with pictures, on their account.
Let the IRC-jungle die, and evolved society reach internet aswell
If there should be need for anonymous forums, let that be a service, separate from general discussionforums.
Yes, lets look at facebook and it’s absolutely abysmal record for privacy. Fine example to be following imho.
If they wanted to clean up the community they should’ve hired mods like, you know, virtually every other site on the planet. Instead they took it upon themselves to use our billing information to populate this social networking garbage then have the temerity to demand we use it to post on the forums our subs help fund.
Exactly. Can someone please explain what is so freaking hard on Blizzard’s part to actually use a few moderators? WTF, this is not rocket science folks, there are literally thousands of internet forums that simply do not have this issue because of one simple fact; they have a moderator.
Sorry, but not all of us are into this idiotic Facebooking/Social network crap. You want to paste you entire life online, good for you (just please shoot yourself if you should ever feel the need to complain about privacy). Blizzard is attempting to solve the issue of getting a nail into wood by using a jack hammer. Are they really this dumb to not know how to use a plain hammer?