RealID: When Good Ideas Go Bad
ADDED This is what I get for being late to the party and carefully considering how I feel about an issue. As various comments have stated, the policy has been rescinded before it was ever put into place. Someone got smart.
I haven’t really been doing much gaming, lately, and what I have been doing has been mainly Star Trek: Online. Nevertheless, I have enough World of Warcraft players in my world that I became aware of the advent of RealID pretty much from day one. Most of them seemed pretty happy with it, since, among other things, it enables the ability to chat with people on other servers and other factions. This is a big shift in the social architecture of the game, which previously restricted in-game chat to people on the same server and on the same “side” (Alliance vs. Horde).
But a RealID is an e-mail address, which is Problem Number One. Now, everyone can see a player’s e-mail address. Oh, sure, one can probably cons up a free e-mail address that has nothing to do with them in any other context easily enough, and use that in-game only. A lot of people, however, won’t think about that. None of my friends have. And they probably should have.
But now, Blizzard is insisting on a new policy whereby they will only permit the use of real names in their forums. Since you have to give your real name to create an account (at least, if you’re using a credit card, which most people are, I believe), this is rather difficult to evade, and anyway, if it’s policy, then obvious evasions will probably result in banning.
The intention of this is presumably to suppress so-called “griefers” and others trolls and active criminals, by requiring them to stop hiding behind pseudonyms. However, as Scott Lynch points out, all it’s really going to do is give such people a more target rich environment. People who are intent on causing trouble–whether it be merely social maliciousness like trolling or active criminality–will be the most likely to find canny ways to evade the new rules, while ordinary, law abiding folks who just want to play the game and talk about it with other players without getting harassed or stolen from will have no idea how and no real desire to do so. Because they’re not the ones doing anything wrong!
Scott pretty well enumerates all the reasons why this turns out to be a worse and worse idea the more you think about it, so I won’t belabor it further — go chase the link above.
Meanwhile, I think I will not, after all, be getting back into the game anytime soon as I’d planned.
This has been recinded, apparently:
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Hello everyone,
I’d like to take some time to speak with all of you regarding our desire to make the Blizzard forums a better place for players to discuss our games. We’ve been constantly monitoring the feedback you’ve given us, as well as internally discussing your concerns about the use of real names on our forums. As a result of those discussions, we’ve decided at this time that real names will not be required for posting on official Blizzard forums.
It’s important to note that we still remain committed to improving our forums. Our efforts are driven 100% by the desire to find ways to make our community areas more welcoming for players and encourage more constructive conversations about our games. We will still move forward with new forum features such as conversation threading, the ability to rate posts up or down, improved search functionality, and more. However, when we launch the new StarCraft II forums that include these new features, you will be posting by your StarCraft II Battle.net character name + character code, not your real name. The upgraded World of Warcraft forums with these new features will launch close to the release of Cataclysm, and also will not require your real name.
I want to make sure it’s clear that our plans for the forums are completely separate from our plans for the optional in-game Real ID system now live with World of Warcraft and launching soon with StarCraft II. We believe that the powerful communications functionality enabled by Real ID, such as cross-game and cross-realm chat, make Battle.net a great place for players to stay connected to real-life friends and family while playing Blizzard games. And of course, you’ll still be able to keep your relationships at the anonymous, character level if you so choose when you communicate with other players in game. Over time, we will continue to evolve Real ID on Battle.net to add new and exciting functionality within our games for players who decide to use the feature.
In closing, I want to point out that our connection with our community has always been and will always be extremely important to us. We strongly believe that Every Voice Matters, ( http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/about/mission.html ) and we feel fortunate to have a community that cares so passionately about our games. We will always appreciate the feedback and support of our players, which has been a key to Blizzard’s success from the beginning.
Mike Morhaime
CEO & Cofounder
Blizzard Entertainment
If you buy your game time with game cards instead of credit cards, you don’t have to give Bliz your real name. Therefore, use a valid, on-time email address and a fake name. Anonymity achieved.
That said, there are lots of good reasons to use aliases/characters names in public areas in online games, both because of safety and because people want to leave real life at the door when they go into a virtual world.
Very last comment in Scott’s post is a link to this:
https://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?sid=1&topicId=25968987278
which appears to be Blizzard backing off of the “real names in forums”.