Blizzard to remove the veil of anonymity

While they're at it, they should also use this opportunity to revamp PvP in WoW.

The only female executive in the top tier at Activision Blizzard is their Chief of HR (Activision itself has several women VPs, but there's definitely a glass ceiling installed). And Blizzard? The core group has been with the company for a long time: president and co-founder Michael Morhaime, vice president and co-founder Frank Pearce, vice president Rob Pardo, and vice president of Creative Development Chris Metzen. They're good guys by all accounts, but only Pardo has any real MMORPG cred prior to WoW. Earlier this year, there was an executive shakeup at Activision Blizzard. Morhaime now reports to Thomas Tippl, formerly of Proctor and Gamble, who was promoted to COO from CFO by Bobby Kotick, the most despicable executive in the gaming industry today.

He's arguing from a pro-business point of view.

This was posted earlier today in the voluminous Real ID thread - now over 2,100 pages - and the CMs on the forum have let it alone. Make of that what you will.

Except if you pay by credit card, the name registered to your Battle.net account is the one on the card. So how exactly are you supposed to give Blizzard a fake name?

Prepaid Visa?

Game Time Card?

Does WoW have a PayPal option?

Nope. I made a throwaway account last night to verify this. You can give pretty much any name at all, and it doesn't matter what you set as your credit card name, or your name in your shipping address. Whatever name you give at battle.net account creation is your RealID.

Keep in mind though that they're monitoring RealID usage and will probably shut down accounts with fake names. And probably not give you your money back if you spent any.

Originally Posted by Dispari I don't know why Dink thinks she's not as sexy as Jay was. In 5 posts she's already upstaged his entire career.

What I make of that is that we'll see security storm Blizzard HQ any day now and remove the heads of the studio. Just like with Infinity Ward.

Blizzard is dead. It's all Activision now.

Ooh. Could it be that the REAL WoW killer is not another game?

This kind of thing could have a HORRENDOUS impact on subscription rates for them.

And it couldn't happen to a nicer bunch!

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

I think the issue is much more important than nerdrage.

Just picture if, say, Amazon did the same thing.

Oh, I'm not downplaying it. I just wanted to make a snappy quote. This is one of the worst things I can imagine involving recreational use of the internet. It's absolutely awful.

It's purely a money decision. They're banking on the revenue gained from their Facebook tie-in will be more than the revenue lost by people quitting/not buying the Blizzard games.

As an example, notice that the "classic" boards are unaffected by this - only the newer and presumably hotter games get the RealID treatment.

Let's never forget that a gaming company is a business first and foremost and a publicly traded one is mandated by law to attempt to get the most profit for their shareholders.

Obviously there are differing approaches that companies can take, for example by building goodwill and customer satisfaction in all phases or another simply being to put out great games and ignore the rest.

The fact that I play this game indicates where I choose to spend my money.

Hey, thanks.

I'm not only talking about this here, and some places are a lot less reasonable so I will freely admit I'm kind of on a hair trigger about this. Sorry for jumping on you.

I get it's a money move, but this just seems like they decided to copy something popular without even considering what damage it could do to their brands. Blizzard was know to be a competent and conservative developer. Not big on innovation, and kind of slow moving, but what they made usually set the standard for the genre. Warcraft, Starcraft, Battle.net 1.0, Diablo, WoW. These are all the archetypical examples of their genres, and the fans, the millions of fans loved it.

Now they're going to copy Facebook? That's stupid. People don't go on WoW to network, they have Facebook for that. They go on WoW to team up and kick some... what DO they kill in WoW, anyway? The all-in-one approach will fail. It has always failed. Simply because when you get a successful all-in-one product, some company is going to snipe you with a smaller, more focused product. Always. Look at Nintendo and the Wii for a perfect example of this.

Activision is going to strangle Blizzard to death. It's a pity, because I liked Blizzard. But Blizzard is no longer allowed to do what they do best. Slowly and steadily develop the next genre kings. If Blizzard is forced to rush, they'll make bugs, just like any other developer. If Blizzard releases a buggy game, their reputation is shot, because Blizzard games don't have bugs. MMOs excluded, of course.

I feel a little sad. I had a feeling this would happen, but I'm sad about Blizzard. It's clear to me that they're heading down the path Infinity Ward took now. I'll miss them.

That's a legal fallacy, actually. While shareholders can insist on certain actions by virtue of being shareholders, the executives of the company are not required to maximise profit to the detriment of all else. Very few shareholders would be in favour of a pure-profit company; it's just that so few shareholders hold enough value or have enough time to be aware of everything the companies they own do and the steps they can take to make them do otherwise.

Dodge v. Ford, the case generally stated as proof that companies must maximise profit, is rarely, if ever, cited as legal precedent in course hearings, and wasn't even made in the district court most involved in corporate law (Dodge v. Ford was decided in Michigan; most corporate law is litigated in Delaware.)

While it's true that a distressing number of companies do maximise profit as if they were legally obligated to do so, the law does not, in fact, obligate them so.

Slightly off, but not in a bad way.

People don't go to Facebook specifically to network, they go to Facebook to maintain existing social networks and re-establish old ones.

I don't know if any of my old high school or college friends play World of Warcraft, so I'm not going to use it for the same purpose as I would Facebook.

The forums actually are useful if you're not haunting the favored trolling spots. Even then, server forums are a good place to recruit for your guild (even when they're troll infested). Class forums are generally a good place to find advice and stickies about playing and speccing your class. The role forums have a lot of constructive conversation. Other parts of the forum are pretty constructive. The general forum has a lot of trolls, but also has an informal chatty atmosphere like the general forum here, and again people get stuff out of it.

"Dank hellhole" is far from accurate. Yes, trolls are a problem. No, trolls are not every poster on the forum. A lot of people are inaccurately labeled as trolls because of the characters they post with.

In a lot of ways, you can get out of the forum what you put into it.

So this is how privacy dies... with thunderous nerd rage.

I doubt it. World of Warcraft makes gigatons of money as it is. This sounds to me like someone wanting to prove to the world they can make *more* money, which is not actually a money decision: its an ego decision. It happens all the time. The attitude is that neither success nor failure is as bad as being seen as irrelevant.

If the Activision-based rumors are true, this is comparable to shoving a camera up the oviduct of the goose that lays the golden eggs just to sell the video rights on the internet.


And the statements about Blizzard rank and file being generally just as upset about the decision has the ring of truth to me. In every dev studio I'm at least generally aware of, including Paragon Studios, there is a keen awareness of the fact that every developer has their own personal threshold for public participation, and that personal threshold is basically always acknowledged and accepted. Its why not all Paragon Studios and NCSoft employees that work on CoX have red names, for example, and why some are almost completely invisible. Even Blizzard employees perfectly comfortable with being completely transparent about their real names and identities are going to know and sympathize with other employees that are not, and most of them are likely to be a part of the MMO player community in general and have similar sensibilities as the majority apparently do.

Yeah, it really does reduce a lot of stress.

I just wish he had been using his real name here when I first joined, because while I had learned to ignore him by his real name years ago, I didn't realize that Venture was the same guy for a couple of months. Sucked in!

No, he argues like that when he reads your posts too.

This is ironic:

* Game implements an in-game feature (the ability to change your character's sex with the science pack). Venture argues vociferously against it because it could encourage people to ERP kinky sex.

* Game implements invasion of real-world privacy with potential for harmful real-world consequences, Venture argues vociferously that such harm is statistically insignificant and should play no role in Blizzard's decisions.