Darryl Woodford

This update brought to you from my travels, so I apologise for any typos in advance.

So Blizzard are now making it so instead of showing your character on those forums, it’ll instead show your real name with the option of attaching your char name too it (no option of not showing your real name).

Now I think it’s fairly safe to say that this is perhaps the dumbest idea that anyone has ever had ever.

To alleviate people’s concerns, Blizzard employee Bashiok decided to say his real name on the forums, his real name is Micah Whipple

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=25712374892&sid=1&pageNo=1 Post #16

So say hi to Micah Whipple

via WoW Riot | WotLK, Wrath of the Lich King, WoW, World of Warcraft, Arena Season 5.

I’m not going to publish his details here, but suffice to say just about every detail of his (and several other Micah Whipple’s) life was made public.

The background issue here though is one of privacy. From what I understand in addition to this implementation on the forums, they also have an in-game/in-world implementation of RealID, which allows you to see the real names of your game friends, and (importantly) friends of friends. Now we all know how well that went down with facebook users.

It seems the idea behind this, and one that Eve have also championed with EveGate, is a desire to create a social network around their player base. This is an attempt to compete with the social element of facebook games, and presumably to keep their players tied to paying a subscription to maintain their social network, rather than using something like Facebook which, for all its faults, is currently free. I happen to think it’s a futile attempt for much the same reasons as I have discussed here before, there’s too much social capital invested in Facebook even for somebody of the budget of Blizzard to compete. Even Google is a long shot I think..

Blizzard responded thus:

“I should point out that showing a real first and last name doesn’t provide any one the right to then seek out additional information on that name and post it here. That has been and will continue to be a violation of the forum code of conduct, and so bans and what have you are incoming. Fair warning. 

That’s just a blanket rule that applies to everyone.”

Which is all well and good, but doesn’t excuse them from the initial privacy violation. What is to stop somebody engaged in an in-game or forum dispute with another player looking up their personal information and then publishing it on their blog, on a guild forum (for harassment purposes) or on one of the many unofficial WoW sites. In all those examples, Blizzard are enabling the harassment, and at the very least are opening themselves up to bad press.

The initial idea of allowing players to connect with each other isn’t horrible (a friend offered the example of connecting with people he used to play with that are now on different servers etc), but why they are relying on real name, as opposed to some non-character tied username I don’t understand.