You Got Your Facebook In Your Message Board About My Orc Game

Remember those halcyon, carefree days past, when Blizzard introduced the RealID system for friends lists, saying it was completely optional and that you should only use RealID with your closest friends?

According to Blizzard today, once Cataclysm ships, everyone that uses the official forums are your closest friends.

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  • Ashendarei

    VERY retarded idea.   I posted on the thread (over 8000 replies in ~12 hours now, as well as another 1500 on the EU forums) after cancelling my account.

    I can’t support blizzard in that, and since the game was already getting old for me this was the final nail in the coffin.

  • Freakazoid

    What? What’s the problem? It’s not like the armory doesn’t already force everyone to see what you’re wearing. It’s not like friends of friends can’t be trusted to know who you really are. This is just more trumpeting up of non-issues, now watch us add an in-game item that makes fun of these people and pay us another $25 for a dragon mount with your account name and last four credit card numbers labeled on the side.

  • john smith

    The problem is blizzard is intentionally exposing personal information for profit while hiding behind the fallacy of “WELL IT STOPS THE TROLLS AND WE ARE ALL FRIENDS AND THE INTERNET IS MADE UP OF SUNSHINE AND RAINBOWS AND WHAT DO YOU HAVE TO HIDE, JOHN SMITH OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, LEVEL 80 FEMALE RANGER?”
    Nothing, now. Thanks blizzard.

  • Ashendarei

    John Smith (RE: Freakazoid’s comment above)  Total Sarcasm there :D

  • The Alien

    How exactly are they exposing personal information for profit?

  • Aufero

    I read through that entire Blizzard post waiting for the tinfoil hat punchline.  Apparently they’re serious.
    Are they out of their effing minds?

  • hitnrun

    I wonder what Blizzard’s liability will be in the tragedies. We all know what’s going to happen. It will be an act of God if nobody is actually murdered during WoW’s lifetime.
    Obviously they’re going to load up on the EULA and disclaimers, but we’re entering fresh new territory and the courts usually only respect EULAs when there’s no other countervailing law or precept in place.
    They certainly proved you wrong though in one regard, Lum. Er, Scott. Jennings. You said last week: “And no one thought any of this through.” Clearly they knew well enough that they were about to engage in a social experiment that will result in people being hurt, not infrequently in real life.

  • blachawk

    My apologies if this has already been covered; however, Blizz could lose quite a few subscriptions from worried parents.  Those high school kids don’t have their own credit cards.  All it will take is one big case where the media reports about some kid who got assaulted or threatened IRL after posting on the official forums.  I don’t foresee CNN stressing the fact that the forums are completely optional and that everyone is warned before posting under their real name.  Many parents don’t know anything about this crazy series of tubes, and know even less about the difference between talking to people in the World of Warcraft game and talking to people on the World of Warcraft forum.  In fact many other parents I know are more comfortable with their kids posting all kinds of personal information in facebook than they are when it comes to their kids playing WoW under a made up name.
    Would the loss be the end of WoW?  Of course not.  Significant enough loss to make it in a financial report?  Probably not.  Enough revenue to pay for a full time general forum moderator?  Probably.

  • http://www.facebook.com/sanya.weathers Sanya Weathers

    Matt: I don’t have a, what you called it, expansive view of the legal system. Right this minute, I have a client who doesn’t allow me to use my real name for liability reasons. I have another that allows me to do after having put in writing that I was comfortable dealing with any potential fallout from using my real name.
     
    These rules came from the legal teams associated with massively multiplayer products. The concern is that I could be harmed or at the very least harassed because of posting on the product’s message board and website with my real, easily searchable name. Furthermore, another product I work on does not allow users to create visible handles that appear on Google as anyone’s real name. Anyone who makes a “real name” handle has it changed on the spot.
     
    Blizzard’s lawyers clearly concluded that my counterparts and my fellow players were not at risk – or if nothing else that the company was not liable for any damage that would ensure from the exposure of their real identities. The two positions seem to me to be 180 degrees apart. And we won’t know which side the law is really on until Blizzard gets sued for wrongful death.

  • hitnrun

    That’s my opinion too, Sanya. At first glance it looks like they’re on safe ground, but this is a wildly unpredictable, experimental situation. No company has ever been so stupid as to entrust an entire MMO playerbase with access to every other noteworthy player’s real identity. It will depend on the circumstances (and frequency) of the first few incidents, the arguments surrounding those, and the interpretations of the court.

  • Alejandro Torres

    Forums are completely optional, wow people are crying so much.  If you have a facebook then you’re also a hypocrite.

  • ZS

    I’ve posted it elsewhere, but Blizzard says they’re doing this to increase accountability of the users posting on their forums.

    Why does Joe User need to know my real name? For what purpose would he ever need that?

    The only people I have to be held accountable to are Blizzard and the proper authorities. This smacks of Blizzard effectively washing their hands of trying to police the boards, themselves. They’re effectively saying “we can’t do it, so here, we’ll give you the person’s name, and you can go harrass them…”

    If Blizzard really wanted to cut down on trolling (and I seriously doubt this is going to affect that much, at all), they could have simply created a “nickname”, tied it to the battle.net account, and then to all of the toons you have. Or, they could simply make you choose one single toon to post from.

    Real names aren’t the way to solve this problem.

  • Angelworks

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmYZ2WCSjP0 – guy gets pissed in a game and kills his foe in real life.

  • Jormundgard

    I, for one, think people say “I, for one” a lot.
    I also think this is yet another Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street Production, that got green-lighted by higher-ups because they can then save money by firing half of the community management staff.

  • Arthur “Two Sheds” Jackson

    As it happens, there does not appear to be a convenient way to change the name associated with an account, though I wouldn’t be surprised if a quick call to customer service saying something along the lines of, “I just got married, so now my name is ‘Raymond Luxury Yacht’, please change my account information accordingly” did the trick.  It all seems a bit too silly though, as people don’t take responsibility for their own actions in person, so using their “real name” name over the Internet won’t do much.  Though it is a great day for stalkers everywhere…

  • Eli Trachtenberg

    In all fairness, can Blizzard really be sued if someone gets smacked around for picking a fight on their forums? I’m going to assume that just by accepting the new ToS and EULA you give Blizzard permission to associate YOUR name with posts YOU make, and therefore are responsible for whatever comes your way?
    That being said, I think this is still a poorly thought-out move that will only drive away the people who actually have things to contribute to WoW developers.

  • Matt Lubbock

    Time till we see people with account names like:

    Big Funbags
    Lotsa Love

    etc

    5… 4…. 3…. 2…. 1…..

  • Merlyn Davis

    I actually use an alias in most online communications due to issues with people IRL tracking me down.

    It doesn’t help I did network security, so there are some posts and essays out there under my real name I want employers reading…and don’t need my gaming habits exposed.

    (not that I play WoW anymore…)

    Having dealt with internet stalkers before melding into real life, and knowing that my real name brings up me and an art professor in CA (Who wasn’t happy about getting nastygrams meant for me when I helped the FBI locate and detain a hacker), I’d be even more unlikely to join anything where my real name was public, and it wasn’t directly related to my job.

  • http://hellmode.com Ian “Sol Invictus” Cheong

    The outburst of anger at Blizzard’s latest move from a good chunk of the game’s fans is heartwarming to see. I’m glad to know that there’s a lot of people who still feel strongly about protecting their privacy even if we do live in a world where privacy exists mostly as an illusion.

  • http://unsubject.wordpress.com UnSubject

    I keep my RL identity and my online identity as separate as possible because ultimately I do act differently in personal and professional capacities. So does everyone. Zuckerman doesn’t get it because his personal and professional life are completely intertwined online.

    It’s a poor move by Blizzard because yes, they could have certainly built a social network, they just didn’t need to use people’s account info to do so. One issue not mentioned is the chance for mistaken identity or cyber-griefing: if you share a name with someone who (for example) is a pedophile, it won’t take much for someone to link the two and for the harassment to commence.

    The next step is that RealID makes it to other Activision titles – Kotick has been out and about promoting his preference for all-online games, of which it is a short step to making some sort of single Activision Blizzard account (like RealID) requirement.

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  • Ingmar

    “I also think this is yet another Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street Production”
     
    Uh, no. This is not a designer sort of thing. This is a marketing/executive sort of thing.

  • Ingmar

    Double post yay?
     
    Some speculation that this is actually being driven by South Korean law:
     
    http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/zeroday/2010/07/07/is-korean-law-driving-policy-at-blizzard/

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