Blizzard Requiring Real Life Names for Forums!!!

Blizzard just announced this morning that they are merging their recently released (and hated) Real ID system with their Official Forums. All future postings for World of Wacraft and Starcraft II will no longer be anonymous, the posting will include your real life name.

Blizzard hopes this will reduce the amount of trolling and improve the atmosphere on their cesspool of a community. Quoting: "the forums have also earned a reputation as a place where flame wars, trolling, and other unpleasantness run wild. Removing the veil of anonymity typical to online dialogue will contribute to a more positive forum environment, promote constructive conversations, and connect the Blizzard community in ways they haven’t been connected before"

 

This is blasphemy! This is madness!
Madness...?
This is... Well you get the point...

 

I agree this would help to a certain extent. In real-life I see a lot of adults who don't bother with acting in a civil manner, no matter what happens to them.

Perhaps a more drastic measure would be: Blizzard stores all the posts and threads involving the user. When he / she is looking for a job, Blizzard forwards those information to the potential employer. That would be a very big stick.

Or perhaps a simpler solution is to have the moderators assign a + or - reputation to each user. When the reputation goes below a certain threshold, the user is banned.

 

Well this system has it's own pros and cons and it depends on how the users themselves take it ._. I personally don't exactly mind about it but most people will definitely hate it since it removes a sense of security that being anonymous gives. Hell if you're not careful the trolls will bring it to real life and order hundreds of pizzas to your address D:

 

And a huge violation of privacy, probably leading to very hefty law suits against Blizzard.

Other than that, yet another reason not to post on those forums. It's not like there's more than ~1% of useful posts there. Your name can pop out for your potential employer googling you! I guess they decide that instead of actually paying real forum admins. This forum works very well despite most people not using their real names.

 

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I know, overused, but comon, you gotta like this one

 

/Agree

But i guess Notebookreview doesent attract newbish (Possibly rude) WoW players either.

 

True Or Blizzard can state, in very, very small text in the disclaimer, "If you don't behave, we gonna store your posts and tell on you!"

 

The WoW and the Battle.Net forums are a abomination on the internet. It's a horrible version 4Chan, with poor memes and trolls.


This is a drastic a unforseen move. It will be interesting to see how this unfolds. WoW defintely has one of the worst communities, and have had it for a long time. Warcraft 3 and Starcraft and Diablo 2 have also all been very bad. Full of racists, and hate mongering fools. That these people go away, is only a good thing.. if this will make them go away.

Some people suggest that some people won't care, and will still do it, even with their name displayed. Others might buy the game on a seperate account and put in a fake name, and pay with game time.


but the forums will probably be easier to control if the majority of the hate goes away. then the mods can easier ban people. They should have strict guidelines so people get banned fast and furiously. The Blizzard forums are in so bad need of order.

 

If you want to know how it will turn out, here is the first example:

Blizz Admin offers up his real life name

Within the past few hours this guy has pulled all his accounts offline and we'll see how long everything else survives.

 

I heard that there were two people with that admin's name in the area and the wrong guy got found out.

 

This proves there will be "innocent" victims. I'm sure this other victim aint too happy with Blizzard's new policy.

 

Now the information gathered there about that guy in the short amount of time is scary.

 

So I've heard, that's crazy, good thing I don't play WoW.

Can you believe I once spent $50 on WoW and WoW:BC only to play it for a couple of hours and throwing it away because I thought it sucked so much? Talk about a waste of money.

 

that is a bit absurd. Blizzard should respect people's PII, though, i guess if people are going to make fools of themselves they so be it.

 

Not true about the privacy thing. No one is forcing these people to post. And the new terms and conditions apply when they sign up for the new forums.

 

Wow ... what a terrible decision. I will for sure NOT be posting on those boards any time soon.

All I can think about is how easy it will now be for people to do the following if they get pissed off:

YouTube - Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back - Kick Some

 

Oh no sorry, I meant about what the other guy said if they send that data to your employer. He can be like "Oh I couldn't help noticing that while being employed in your last company, you leveled no less than 4 characters to level 80 and are successfully raiding ICC25 on 2 of those." ^^


Good side is it will (hopefully) shoo away all the idiots from their forums. In that case they may have better forums, but I certainly don't want to post and have my name being shown on WoW forums to whomever googles it. Even if the forum is closed, there are just so many subscribers it's not that hard to log in and search for a specific person. Like you said, it is voluntarily, but still I was kind of hoping they'll fix the forums.

 

you may already be screwed if the automatically add your name to all the posts uve already made.

 

Even funnier is that people buy and sell those accounts.

Apparently playing a character for 1-2 weeks to reach maxed-out is too long for some people.

Now you can post with other people's names who sold you that account!

Note that many accounts are hacked as well as the community is especially vulnerable to such attacks.

 

I think most of the crap people are complaining about is due to Activision. I hate how all of these decisions are made by people who have never played a game in their life. I don't think Blizzard themselves would antagonize their precious customers like that. If only Blizzard could just break it off with Activision...

 

Touche Blizzard touche...

 

couldnt you just put in a fake name?

 

Absolute lawsuit waiting to happen. Wonder if existing users will have their usernames converted automatically. This could lead to disaster. Sometimes I wonder if people ever do a reality check or sit at a bar table and say "yeah, yeah, that's the ticket! that's what we do!"

 

Yeah there is no way they can convert old posts that would be a violation of privacy. However for a new account or new postings having to agree to new TOS would make it legitimate.

Plus if there goal is to prevent bad posting, turning old posts over wont really help in that goal anyways.

Now I wonder what happens if you have more than one account and things like that, will you have duplicate users/names?

There are way way too many people with the same name out there, so they must be adding your real name in conjunction with your user name otherwise I do not see how it will work.

I have access to the Hilton Honors database due to my job and when I try to find somebodies account by name because they forgot there membership number even odd names I find 10+ matches for first and last name in a single state, and these are only people who signed up for Hilton Honors program!

 

I don't play WoW, so I don't know much. But is it just a name that's required?

I don't see how just a name could be a big privacy issue. I've even used the name "Tank Jones" on some occasions (obviously not my real name), so why not just use a fake name?

 

The issue is its the name associated with your battle.net account. And sure you could plug a fake name in alright. But good luck being able to call up blizzard and getting support. They've been known to require faxes of an ID in situations of compromised accounts.

Honestly Im personally okay with it. No one forces people to post on these forums. And the hate and dbaggery that goes on on their current community site is absurd.

While the internet is great so many kids are learning nowadays its okay to be a dbag as long as no one know's who you are. Having some sort of accountability is a good step in the right direction. I mean im only 26 and I can already see the negative effect its having on the kids just going thru high school now.

People can either learn to be civil with each other and not harass someone digitally or learn that your actions do have consequences.

 

Ah, I see.

But then again, it's just a name? Why get so worked up about a name?

I mean, it doesn't show your name, where you live, ip address, social security number, bank account numbers does it? Lol

 

As shown in the Link before though it doesn't give them such details, people can still obtain them using other methods and having just the first and last name is enough to make that process a whole lot easier ._.

 

All that information from a name?

.....

 

Probably depends on the country you're at ._. Maybe it won't be as easy to just google for an address if you live in smaller countries like mine since there's none of those address searching thing like they used for the US >w>

 

-shrug-

If I had things my way, everyone posting on every forum on the Internet would have to use their real names. That'd slice the number of trolls down preeeetty quickly. And it'd probably make scamming people a little more difficult, too.

But I also think that one possible solution to DRM troubles is for video game companies to hire assassins to execute random pirates, so maybe I am a little unstable

 

No one else mentioned this, but I think it could be hilarious to see who used to post things like "Don't make me come over there and kick your , I'm 6"6 and 230lbs, I will pwn you little man!" and then you look him up and find that it's some scrawny teenager

 

I'm wondering why all those who think this is a "great idea" don't practice this in their current online behaviors. How many of you fill out your entire profile, including all your information, and then make your profiles entirely public. Why do people not include their real names and contact information in all of their forum postings?

Before you decide if this is a "good" idea, why don't you try it out for a few weeks and see if you like it.

 

The beauty of the internet is that you can have a dual existence, a new idenity. I don't think this si good. They will suffer from this decision

 

I think it depends on the forum. Here at NBR, people are quite civil so I don't think there's a need for that. I've never been on WoW forums but if it's as bad as people say, then perhaps drastic measures may be necessary. I suppose, in a way, being able to stay anonymous is the reward for good behavior, which I'm all for

That said, I don't know how Blizzard will verify that the 'real name' corresponds to the poster. One way I can think of is via credit card info, but I don't know how many teens have their own. If they use their parents', and their parents don't know about it,

 

Oh you ain't seen nothin' yet sonny.

What's in a name?

All THAT from a name.

Yea. I think the point has been made.

 

Holy.... guacamole!

There's a video of a Blizzard's PR fiancee playing with a cute dog!

Win!

 

I can't wait to see the group of WoW fanatics dressed up as their favorite characters landing on the lawns of the Activision employees and scaring the hell out of their families. I hope we get some good YouTube of that and maybe just maybe they might change the system. Surprised nobody has done this yet, so here it is:

 

Wow.

Good thing I don't have much on the internet to tie me to my name (like purchases on the internet, credit cards, etc etc), but I can see this being very bad for people like that.

 

Going back to the original point, why do people post on the official forums?

The only reason I can see is for technical support since the developers and troubleshooters sometimes read the threads available. On those forums "flaming", "trolling" and the like aren't too much of an issue since it's a simple Q&A regarding how to fix a problem and get the game to work.

General discussion on game features, storyline and the like can always be done elsewhere, forum users who plump for the above can simply pack up and go someplace else to indulge their online fantasies.

 

I don't know how they have there forums set up, but doesn't it require signing up on the forums with a username/password and a valid email address?

And if it did and there is still spamming/trolls, why not just ban them? Is there so many flamers out there that the mods just can't keep up? But instead come up with something like this? ....

 

The main reason to post on the forum is because it offers a direct chance to communicate with blizzard development. They frequently read and respond to posts throughout the forum and it's one of the few ways to allow them to read what you have to say and sometimes publicly respond.

Another reason to post on there is so you can effectively communicate with members of your battlegroup and server. When I go to the "Dark Iron" forums, for example, I know I'm going to have primarily readers from my server or battlegroup. It will be hard to replicate that on another site.

That said, definitely there will be a replacement. I can see a major portion of the community moving over to a popular wow fan site forum....such as mmo-champion. We may miss out on the two things I outlined earlier, but the other forums should end up being used frequently (class forums, etc).


Anyway this article may shed some light on the situation?

Purely speculation of course, but it seems very plausible. The Koreans are a huge part of the Starcraft community and the SC2 forum will be the first forum to receive a revamp.

 

eh don't like it? don't use the official forums... there are other sites available for wow talk.. elitist jerks is pretty popular.

 

Posting on the Blizzard forums requires an active WoW subscription. The main reason people post on Blizzard forums is this: getting Blizzard's attention. Blizzard set up the forums, and have active "Community Managers" which respond to the players, relaying the intentions and perceptions of the development/management team. 95% of the posts on the forums are to elicit a response from these community managers.

Blizzards entire reason for having the forums in the first place was putting them in control of the information that got spread about their game. They wanted the power to censor and promote as they pleased.

I was a part of gaming community forums before developers/publishers started setting up their own (EQ Rangers Glade, Druids Grove). The forums were filled with useful posts and helpful people, just like what we see here at NBR. I am a firm believer that developers' official forums are a terrible idea. Now Blizzard wants to kill the beast that it has created and couldn't control.

 

Back in the day, Tom 'Kalgan' Chilton, used to help contribute and moderate a UO fansite called Battlevortex.com under the name Evocare. It was partly because of his help on that site that he got his start on the UO dev team.

 

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, ( Blizzard Entertainment: Mission Statement ) 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



Awesome! And this is why people use the blizzard forums. It's because they actually read our feedback there and act accordingly.

 

I cant believe blizzard actually listened to the outcries. Maybe they do actually care about their customers? Nahhh they just don't want to get sued

 

Oh good, they snapped out of it. Still, what were they thinking?! lol

 

Well considering they patch their games a lot in response to their customers, I think this was going to happen anyway.