Posted by Kadaan at 2:33pm Jul 8 '10Blizzard recently announced their "Real ID" plans on their community forums. Basically, when they change over to new forums all new posts will be posted with your full First+Last name instead of your character name. The two reasons they gave for the change are to improve the quality of posts by removing anonymity and hopefully reducing flames/trolling, and to push more into the social gaming world and letting you connect with friends cross-games and in the forums.
Official announcement: Battle.net Update: Upcoming Changes to the Forums (and related discussion thread, currently over 2,000 pages and 40k posts growing about 4 posts per minute.)
People are throwing around all the expected complains, and made an "example" of one of the moderators by posting a lot of his personal information they found with just his name. Someone else started a blog posting info about a few employees: What's in a name?
I think most of the complaints about it aren't really touching on my real complaint about it. I don't care if my real name is on the internet. It is, and I know you can find out a lot about me with it. What I do have a complaint about, is the mandatory linking of your real life identity to your online gaming identity.
I also fail to see the benefits of this change. Both of their reasons could have been accomplished just as easily with having you choose a unique identifier that you can't change. Trolling/flaming is a problem because you can create multiple level 1 characters with any name and post with them. I also don't really _want_ social gaming. I don't mind people in my social network talking about games, or talking to them about the same games, but my Steam friends list and Facebook friends lists are 90% different people for a reason. I've been playing with 'Kurnn and Witchie' for years, but that's what I know them as, not 'Joe and Mary.'
Official announcement: Battle.net Update: Upcoming Changes to the Forums (and related discussion thread, currently over 2,000 pages and 40k posts growing about 4 posts per minute.)
People are throwing around all the expected complains, and made an "example" of one of the moderators by posting a lot of his personal information they found with just his name. Someone else started a blog posting info about a few employees: What's in a name?
I think most of the complaints about it aren't really touching on my real complaint about it. I don't care if my real name is on the internet. It is, and I know you can find out a lot about me with it. What I do have a complaint about, is the mandatory linking of your real life identity to your online gaming identity.
I also fail to see the benefits of this change. Both of their reasons could have been accomplished just as easily with having you choose a unique identifier that you can't change. Trolling/flaming is a problem because you can create multiple level 1 characters with any name and post with them. I also don't really _want_ social gaming. I don't mind people in my social network talking about games, or talking to them about the same games, but my Steam friends list and Facebook friends lists are 90% different people for a reason. I've been playing with 'Kurnn and Witchie' for years, but that's what I know them as, not 'Joe and Mary.'
Privacy in Gaming - Kadaan