Blizzard Backs Down On Real Names For Forums 432
Ashe Tyrael writes "Earlier this week, Blizzard announced that they were going to be implementing changes in their official forums (for StarCraft II when it launched, and for WoW prior to Cataclysm) that would require users to post under their real names, as part of the Real
ID system. After perusing nearly 14,000 European and 50,000 US forum posts, the majority of which decried this move with various levels of vehemence, it looks like Blizzard has given in to the pressure. From the official statement: '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.' Not that this doesn't leave room for them to re-implement this at a later date, but that's a pretty definite 'no.' It was clear they were going to take criticism, but the size of the backlash was impressive. It seems likely Blizzard simply wasn't expecting that level of antipathy toward their new policy.
Whole real names in foodservice (Score:1, Informative)
Worked in the dorm commissary for awhile. At one point they decided to go from first names on name tags to first/last names. That lasted about 48 hours. You can't believe how much harassment will occur outside work if the patrons know your first/last name. There should really be a repository/educational class of REALLY BAD IDEAS for business majors.
Re:Pretty Obvious Reasoning (Score:2, Informative)
We saw exactly this in EverQuest 1 where server forums were independent as 989 Studios/Verant didn't have any. Once one server operator found the real life name of a guild leader that he didn't like, he started getting people to call the child protective services in the guy's hometown and allege felonious acts.
It took tends of thousands of dollars for the guy to defend himself against the DA's inquiry, and to keep his kids.
Also, don't forget: The EU would have kicked Blizzard's ass to the curb. I'm sure there is a data privacy law being broken somewhere in this mandatory RealID fiasco.
Re:Pretty Obvious Reasoning (Score:4, Informative)
Right now, you can roll up a new character easily enough and shrug off the reputation of your old character. Or create a character specifically for the purpose of being an asshole. You can log in as "Joe the Night Elf" and be a nice guy and go on all the raids... And then you can log in as "Ed the Dwarf" and be a complete asshole... And nobody knows it's the same person. Ed's bad reputation does not affect Joe at all.
All you have to do is make it clear that those two characters are owned by the same account. Then if everybody hates Ed because he's an asshole, they know that Joe is also that same asshole, and they can hate him too.
Love them or hate them, this is a great feature of Cryptic's games. Every account has a 1:1 mapping to a "handle" (aka "display name" aka "forum name"). When you create a character (for example, "Joe"), in-game, you appear as "Joe," but when you speak in chat, you appear as "Joe@YourHandle." When you right-click or otherwise inspect another character, you also see their handle. And if seeing handles in chat are an immersion-breaker for you, you can easily turn them off -- hovering your mouse over their name in chat will show their full name.
And one of the great things about this system is that when you friend or ignore someone, you do it based on their handle. So ignoring someone will ignore all their alts and likewise, friending someone will show them online no matter what alt they're on. (Though there has been whining about the latter being a breach of privacy...)
Although the primary reason I like this system is that it avoids the name land-rush. I can name my characters any name I want (within the rules :P), regardless if it's a dupe. I wish more MMO companies would adopt something similar. Who knows, maybe Real ID (hopefully sans real names) will get there in the future.
Re:Pretty Obvious Reasoning (Score:3, Informative)
To post on the Blizzard forums, you currently must log in using your battle.net account. So Blizzard already has all the information they need to bad a blatant troll from their forums.
No, the RealID issue was specifically about a) preventing sockpuppetry via alts, b) shaming trolls into behaving, and possibly c) recasting the forums as a social networking site.
Sockpuppetry, because a user of the blizzard forums is represented by one or another of the characters on an account. We readers of the forums do not have the information required to tie one user to another.
They could have done this as well by allowing users to define an account sobriquet distinct from any other account information. But they got lazy: "Hey, we've already got a name associated with the account, let's use that!" Todd Knarr [slashdot.org] mentioned this in a post below.
The choice to avoid an "account nickname" may have been influenced by the recent change of WoW accounts from "account name + password" to "real/credit card name + password + optional 'authenticator'). Having removed one non-identifying account name, they may not have been eager to attach another.
Re:Pretty Obvious Reasoning (Score:3, Informative)
As if September 2008, when Blizzard last reported WoW expenditures, it averaged about $4-5 million/month ($200 million spent over 46 months).