Blizzard to remove the veil of anonymity

Also, there is the matter of friends of friends seeing the RealID names. Unless that has also been changed or I am completely misreading that. If a friend of a friend, who you may or may not know, has the opportunity to find out the RL names of others, then there is also another problem.

The only ones that should be able to see your real name are those you chose to let see it. Not friend of friend of friend, etc.

Says you :P

Obviously, a lot of people thought it was quite a bad idea indeed!

Of course not, but them backing down doesn't change that they intended to do it. Whatever they do from now on, I've learned that I can't trust them to have sensible ideas in regards to privacy. Especially since they've left the door open to try this or something like it again later, and have more "plans" for it than they've yet explained.

When it comes to a violation of people's privacy, they never should have considered it at all.

And they still haven't completely taken everything their doing back, just the posting of real names in the forums. There's still ways to get someone's name via addons involving Real ID.

Also, there is no mention of a pullback for Starcraft 2 or Diablo 3

Even in this game, customer support actively encourages players to take certain kinds of problems to the forums. Blizzard seems to have similar policies.

Even so, my exercise of control would not have been by simply electing not to post. Knowing that information was linked in the manner it would have to be, and knowing how fantastic the security surrounding such systems tends to be, I would exercise control by demanding that personal information be revoked from their databases. What I'm being told by others that know a lot more than me is that there are a lot of other loopholes in RealID than just forum posting, and lots of ways to accidentally trip over them if you don't know they exist.

I don't know, so I wouldn't take the chance until I knew for certain every way that information is used under all contexts. Which is an awful lot of research just to decide whether to sign in to play a game.

There are so many problems with ALL their Real ID, FB and policy change baloney, their stepping back on just 1 aspect of it, especially after such an uproar is not what I would prefer at all. That their "listening" comes off as completely arrogant and not understanding, and ignoring many of the issues this raised, while promising to push these issues again in the future really makes this *not* a win.

There is a slash command you can use ingame to obtain the real ID of any player. Many mods/addons have incorporated it already to make it even easier to use.

And with that, I agree, and was one of the legitimate concerns mentioned in another post.

Except it's not a violation when you have the ability to chose. In this case, you could have chosen NOT to use their forums, and thus it wouldn't be displayed. Now, as for friends of friends being able to see your real ID? Yeah, THAT needs to be changed.

No but I wouldn't be calling them valiant heroes who did the right thing either.

If you had asked someone to not touch something and then they decided "screw you I'm going to pick it up and run around with it." You probably wouldn't be happy. If they put it back after you and everyone else yelled at them it wouldn't be forgiven because the original disrespect is still there.

To put it simply bad feelings don't go away simply because someone decided to take their hand out of the cookie jar after being caught.

Have you paid attention to this thread at all? Blizzard directs technical support issues to their forums.

In this case, I make of it that anti-virus programs have a talent for false positives.

I ended up replacing my last AV because it kept trying to kill legitimate programs.

Let me tell you, internet, about how much false positives annoy the living hell out of me...!

And yet in all the times I've played WoW, I never once bothered to use their forums. Plus, that would have been one of the legitimate concerns that I consider would have needed to be addressed.

I'm not calling them "Valiant Heroes". I'm saying that it's not fair to continue to bash them for actually listening to their playerbase, rather then just essentially telling them to [censored] off.

I think this is all true.

But I'm going to wait and see. I don't trust them now (and I think it's funny that people are lecturing me as if I do trust them).

Yeah, they certainly deserve kudos

They are just putting on the back burner for now. They'll bring this back when the nerd rage is over.

Did you notice how what I wanted was them to not put real names on forum posts, and how I said several times that this was why I wasn't going to buy any future games from them? They've suggested that they're moving away from that, so I'm suggesting that maybe I'll end up buying Cataclysm.

I've been consistent in my stance. You, on the other hand, seem to think that it's pretty awesome to attack me if I say anything more positive than "Blizzard is made of Satan's disgusting bodily fluids."

This outcome was what people wanted when they protested Blizzard. I still think a lot of people don't trust them because they were willing to impose this change, and won't trust them for a long time*.

* Right now this includes me.

Neither have I, but you are so focused on the whole forum thing that you are willfully ignoring the fact that they have a blatant disregard for customer privacy.

Did you see where they said this was just the first step to a glorious RealID revolution?

Not me. I wanted to see Blizzard plunge into the Abyss, arms akimbo, flailing as their reeking corpse vanishes into the flatulent haze of their arrogance*.

* This might just be me.

Fool you once, shame on Blizzard. Fool you twice, shame on you.

I'm not giving them another chance to fool me again.

No. The minute the resolution to go forward with this idiocy was made was the point at which they were pretty much damned. Period.

The fact that it was considered A Good Thing, and wasn't shouted down, internally (or mitigated in any way), LONG before ever hitting the public with the equivalent of "like it or lump it" shows just how completely out of touch they were. And having been barely bright enough to about-face when the opposition hits you where you live is not something worthy of a reward.

They've already proven that they're perfectly capable of hitting MACH1 on the slippery slope.

Placing one's trust in them afterward goes beyond the realm of naivete and delves into the nether reaches of idiocy and carelessness.

In short, why continue to put your trust in an entity that's already shown that it's incapable of being trustworthy unless its ongoing existence is threatened?

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

No. It's worse. Misappropriation and misuse of your personal information can have far worse effects than simply losing you a little money.

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

The acronym you're looking for is CLM.

Career
Limiting
Move

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