https://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?sid=1&topicId=25968987278

which appears to be Blizzard backing off of the “real names in forums”.

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.

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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

Dave..

We’ve been down that road with handwriting recognition. The earliest consumer-level handwriting recognition devices tried to recognise human handwriting and mostly failed. Handwriting recognition didn’t take off in consumer devices until Palm introduced Graffiti, in which the humans had to learn how “think a bit like the computer” and write in a prescribed manner.

However, where is handwriting recognition now? It’s been 9 Moore-doublings since Graffiti was introduced. Yet a 512-increase in processing power has not resulted in a corresponding increase in acceptance of handwriting recognition. I’d go as far as to say that handwriting recognition, Graffiti and all, has been rejected by the market.

I suspect there are parallels to the voice recognition issue as well.

Perhaps the verbal recognition dictation is a start for dealing with the wording piece. They have accent packages for that. There is a particular cardiologist, who I never thought would be able to dictate to a computer, and yet he is.