Maybe this is just Blizzard’s attempt to cut down on the number of people they have to pay to watch the forums.  If nobody posts, nobody will have to be hired to watch them.  Then they can shut down the forums and replace them with a Ghostcrawler blog.  Excuse me, a Greg Street blog.

But what if I am really friends with everyone on WoW’s forums… they only outed my real identity once

This seems quite a boneheaded manouever, but I guess with their stance on RMT and so on it makes sense from Blizz’s point of view. Hard to say I’m in favour of it, because it’s been proven time and time again that MMOGs are a technological drama magnet and I can see this scheme lasting all of 30 seconds before someone abuses it.

Disclaimer: Haven’t played an MMOG since UO

Oh, I forgot to add this; apparently the Blizz devs read The Noob.
http://www.thenoobcomic.com/index.php?pos=378

An even worse problem. What happens to all those posts before the system is implemented? Does it retroactively apply your RealID info to them?

We’re going to see a lot more about this over the next couple of hours. I can’t imagine Blizzard not backpedaling on this decision; it’s asinine.

Holy shit.
Are they crazy? Im sure its a nice way to to cut down on obnoxious posts, but they are going to get their ass sued when someone claims they got smacked around IRL for something they did online due to their board.
 

Wow– surprisingly bold experiment.
This is such a big move that either they don’t realize it’s a big move, or someone pretty senior got divinely inspired. I’m betting on the latter– I wonder who’s the big force behind this?
I’m happy to have this experiment carried out for the benefit of all of us, on Blizzard’s dime!

Athryn: According to a followup post, this will not be a retroactive change at least. I was contemplating reactivating my account solely for the purpose of deleting old posts.

OK, so the cynical suggestion made earlier that this is intended to kill the forums so they don’t have to pay people to moderate them may have some weight behind it.

There are no words for how flabbergasted I am by this move. It’s so divorced from what makes a game community thrive, and there are so very many problems with it.

Minors, for example, are supposed to be on an account bearing the name of a parent, but in practice this rarely happens. I doubt the kids playing WoW are telling mom and dad about this little change, and many parents will go completely unaware that their sons and daughters are posting on the internet with their real name. Those that do actually follow the guidelines will be unwittingly allowing their children limited anonymity by being able to use their parent’s name instead — and I doubt strongly that all the minors will have the good judgment not to tarnish their parents’ names. Can’t wait for that to show up on Google!

At the heart of it, it breaks down the escapism people often seek from these games. While I’m sure the response to that argument by those who made the decision was something along the lines of “Forums are an optional service for the game,” they’re still a significant part of what makes a game and a realm community work in the long run. I like the people with whom I play, but I don’t need the person asking for more people for his raid on Saturday to know my real name. I don’t need to know his, either. This is going to chase a lot of the people who use the forums for legitimate, community-building communication to unofficial forums — which is a win for Blizzard in the business and marketing sense, since the forums will become more manageable. It’s a serious loss for the game community, however.

This move might finally get me to stop stalling and start my own blog.

I don’t think even the most vitriolic of forum posters there has much to worry about.  Stick your first and last name into Google and marvel at how many people share your name.  It’s pretty weak accountability.  They would have to include your city and state as public knowledge so your potential stalkers know which phone books to look in.

geldonyetich:
I don’t think even the most vitriolic of forum posters there has much to worry about.  Stick your first and last name into Google and marvel at how many people share your name.  It’s pretty weak accountability.  They would have to include your city and state as public knowledge so your potential stalkers know which phone books to look in.

 
Speak for yourself – my name is rare enough that every single thing I can find on Google using that combination does, in fact, go straight back to me. Searching on real name plus “WoW” or “MMORPG” would probably help narrow it down for those with more common names if they’ve ever posted something about their hobby on a blog or Facebook.

geldonyetich’s point stands, however.  Real ID is only an effective stick for a segment of the population.  There is a reason why governments went with social security numbers and what not, names are very crappy ways to identify people.  Not only is there tons of false matches, but there are tons of variants for the same person.  First names can often be long or short forms.  People get married, divorced, and just plain change their names.
 
So, we have a class of internet trolls which will be unphased by this “real world” identifier – you can’t track down all the John Smiths, or better yet, if you happen to have a real name that is shared by a popular in game player, you get to have them take the fall for your rants.  Or they are posting from stolen credit cards anyways, so don’t particularly care about whatever poor saps name gets dragged through the mud.

err, the woo hoo was for all the baby lawyers I know. IT’ll really help looking for a job.

It’s a radical move, for sure.  However, it’s nothing that we should feel completely betrayed by.  After all, the official forums are just a side service, completely optional to use.  I rarely, if ever, use them.  I know I never will now.  Whatever their intentions, they have to understand that this move is going to greatly decrease the interest and use of their official forums; whether or not that was their goal is open for interpretation.
However, having played many games like these for many years, I can tell you that I expect a certain level of space between my real life and my interactions in the game.  I can get by playing their game without the forums.  If they ever try to force this on the in-game friends list, though, I’ll stop using the friends list altogether and just keep a pad and paper nearby to write player names down.

The other thought that occurs to me is that this is part and parcel of WoW becoming less and less of a fantasy virtual world. Out go exploration, open world pvp battles and immersing yourself in a virtual alter-ego; in come instant dungeon group finders that teleport you to the action, small team arena e-sports and social networking integration. All of these changes add convenience at the expense of immersion.

Stalking just got easier!

Hmmm, What happens when this works at cleaning up the forums (not nessisarly saying it will). Then they descide Barrens chat could use a simular clean up? After all, chating in open chat is optional, it isn’t required to play the game.

Okay, so, after some thought.. How can Blizzard possibly think this is a good idea? I mean, look, I get the theory: Hey, people are assholes because of anonymity! No anonymity, no assholes! But that seems like a fucking bizarre trade-off to make given that it’ll basically kill the forums. But hey, maybe that’s really what they’re going for. The question is, how big or WoW’s forums in the big scope of things? I’m wondering if the effective loss of the forums will make a dent in their subscriber numbers.

Probably not.

Do you really think this will kill the forums? A lot of people use their real names on the internet. Others will grudgingly go ahead and use real names on the Blizzard forums because they want to post there. As busy as though forums are, I don’t see this killing them. Even if they dropped down to 25% of current traffic, they’d still be extremely busy.
The sheer amount of traffic the forums get now kill them for me. I read them now and then, but never post because every post gets buried under hundreds of new posts every minute.
It’s interesting that no one is bothered by Blizzard and other companies exercising censorship on their message boards, because hey, they’re private services so the ideal of free speech doesn’t apply. They can do what they want to protect their interests. Now they apparently want to clean up the boards and hope to do so by removing anonymity and the sky is falling.

This latest news is a great example of why I feel completely justified in providing Blizzard “fake” account information when I created my accoutns. Maybe six or seven years ago now I started a fake “Sid” persona that I use exclusively for gaming things. I’m not trying to “hide” my real identity so much as control what shows up on Google searches for my real name.

I had the mis-pleasure of being accidentally outted once on a gaming forum I used to visit about 10 years ago. Basically, I was just credited by someone else for something I had written. I’m sure they thought they were doing me favors but even today it still shows up on the second page of Google.

Flashforward to today. I have two identities setup on the internet (facebook accounts, emails, etc). One is for Sid. The other for the real me. If you have a unique name like I do, I strongly suggest doing the same thing.

Why’d you post on a level 1 alt?  Too scared to show us who you really are?
 
THATS WHAT I THOUGHT

This is wrong for so many reasons. I know people that religiously avoid using their real name anywhere on the internet due to issues with real life stalkers. They play games like WoW and post on the forums for a break from real life. Beyond that, whatever happened to privacy? I understand the need to deal with trolls on the forums, but there has to be a better way.

geldonyetich: I don’t think even the most vitriolic of forum posters there has much to worry about.  Stick your first and last name into Google and marvel at how many people share your name.  It’s pretty weak accountability.  They would have to include your city and state as public knowledge so your potential stalkers know which phone books to look in.

I just googled my name and the first 3 links are My dad, me and my great uncle who died in WW2. Im over half the links on the first 2 pages and my dad is many of the others.

It wouldnt take much of a brain to find me and my address just using google. And Im someone who makes a modest effort to keep my name off the internet.

I do agree its unlikely that someone will come to your house and beat you up. However I think its quiet likely that they could fuck with your name. By creating fake face book account, digging for bank info etc.

So I edited your post and removed the errant commentary.

geldonyetich: I don’t think.