Real ID
I’m glad I don’t play Warcraft any more.
I’ve seen Blizzard do some questionable things over the years but this just takes the biscuit.
The first and most significant change is that in the near future, anyone posting or replying to a post on official Blizzard forums will be doing so using their Real ID — that is, their real-life first and last name
Yeah, has to be about the worst thing they could have done. As I write this, the forum thread has hit 953 pages. And it was at 942 when I started typing this post. Looks like I’m not the only one to think so.
Looking at it from Blizz’s point of view, it seems they have done this in an attempt to combat the trolls and spammers infesting the official forums. If people are forced to post under their real first/last name I guess the thinking is, they are less likely to post some racial insult or something. OK, I see the thinking, however…
Firstly, and I know this from experience, with 11 million subscribers, the portion of the playerbase that I’d describe as being “tossers” is very high. If I were still playing the game lets say, and I crush one of these “tossers” online a few times as he tries to gank me while on a mining run, or I post something reasonable on the forums but one of these nutjobs takes offense to it… under the old system the worst they could do is get my in-game name and harass me there. Under this new system players are not many steps away from having a little too much info.
Lets take a second and look to some other games for an example of the “internet tosser” in gaming. These are all examples from this year alone.
In January GamePolitics reported on a 16 year old teenager cutting his 46 year old father over a disagreement over tactics used during a game of FIFA on the PS3. When the father responded by turning off the TV/Console, the teenager went to the kitchen for a clean knife and stabbed his father in the neck.
An article posted in March details how a 17 year old Counter Strike player was stabbed in the head with a 12 inch knife in an internet cafe after being found to use ‘wall-hack’ cheats.
In June GamePolitics also reported on another Counter Strike related attack. Several months after being knifed in-game the 20 year old gamer tracked down his online enemy, who it turned out only lived a few miles away, then stabbed him in the chest to pay him back.
These are not isolated incidents either, I can sit and pull link after link up all day long on this subject.
Now, some may take these links as proof that video games cause violence, but because I’m not naive I see it for what it really means. Nutters are everywhere and need very little reason to set them off. If those guys played darts there is every chance that a loss or a disagreement over darts would set them off and cause the exact same reaction. Nutbags are everywhere.
As children we are taught not to talk to strangers, not to give personal info out to random people. We were taught caution, and for good reason. Then along comes a bunch of idiots like Facebook, Blizzard, etc, who think that those lessons of caution should be thrown to the wind and anyone who doesn’t has something to hide. The idiocy of it is jaw dropping. Even more so in a game like Warcraft which has spawned more nerd-rage outbursts than 90% of games that have ever existed.. or will ever exist. Give these mouthbreathers a first/last name combo and some of them are going to take it too far, I guarantee it.
Ironic that an attempt to unify an online community will essentially rend it in two. I never posted on the official boards (I don’t have the patience to wade through the rantings of semi-literate teenagers quite frankly), and were I still playing I know I wouldn’t even dream of going near the official boards ever again.
