Blizzard to remove the veil of anonymity

Sorry about the circumstances of your switchover. But welcome to the game!

We've got to take you after a couple giant monsters then.


Honestly, we have our share of jerks too. Still, glad you're finding the experience so agreeable thus far.

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

Well, we dont have dragons(well, we have lots of player character dragons, my main is one actually, thats the good thing about the costume creator, there arent really many limits of what you can be here ,unless your concept is really narrow.), but wait till you see a malta titan, big..honking..robot. and then you see a kronos version of one, and the regular ones start looking small again, and next month we will have a massive inter-dimensional godlike monster that smashed a version of earth into pieces coming back as an enemy in a upper level raid, he is ginormous ...(and yeah, i know its a meme,, but i do like our scale of giant monsters, we have a lot)

and yeah, for the making of lemons to lemonade thing, let us know if you have questions or can help your enjoyment, a lot of people like helping, can even get you our global name so you can talk to us (when we are on)from any server.

oh, one other suggestion, make a villain and do some mayhem missions. you get to smash up several city blocks, crush some cars, destroy bus stops, punch out pay phones, and mash a truck for good measure.

The two big problems:

1. Doesn't do you much good if you have existing accounts.
2. If your account gets compromised, you can't do anything to get it back.

More generally, any time the natural result of a policy is "you must lie about who you are", something is wrong with that policy.

I did notice CoH's aliases, and I like it a lot. I like that I can have "global friends" without having to use my real name (even though, obviously enough, I actually don't care who knows who I am).

Welcome to the game and the forum - spandex always beats chainmail

I think this is probably a minority view.

When you are stupid enough to float a ridiculous, insulting, invasive and downright insane policy like this one in the first place you've cut your own throat.

They aren't repenting because they realized the error of their ways and are genuinely sorry and rededicated to the privacy of their customers, they're repenting because to do otherwise at this time would negatively impact their bottom line.


IMHO anyone who ever trusts them again is a fool. They've laid their cards on the table for everyone to see.

Oh, yeah, who needs three raid-geared 80s, am I right? I can just start all over again!

I trust them... up to a point. Mostly to behave like a large corporation.

If Blizz ever spins off from Activision again, I might trust them a little more. Or if Activision fired Kotick.

I trust them a bit less, but yeah, I think it's up to everyone to decide how far to trust them. A lot of people mainly wanted Blizzard to move away from this invasive policy (and future policies like it). I did, but I'm still at a point where I'm less likely to buy their games than I would have been last week, even if more likely to do so than a couple of days ago.

Was annoying, that apparently I'm not allowed nuance and "They backpedaled" means I automatically trust them as much as I did before, per some posters here. To be fair, I doubt Nethergoat's one of those.

exactly- they've revealed their long-term agenda here.

they aren't going to abandon the profits they think are on the table just because some silly, annoying customers didn't want to be stalked and harassed, they'll be sniffing around for a less obvious way to achieve the same result.

IMHO all that's changed is the timeline, it'll come later rather than sooner.

At 26, City Of Heroes is the only game I've played in seven years, but I don't let anyone know I play it. Why? Much like ArcticFahx, I'm not ashamed of playing it, but I'm currently pursuing art and music and both fields are very image oriented. As he said, there is a negative stereotype with gaming unfortunately, and I for one cannot afford to have my image ruined considering the career path I'm pursuing. It's one thing to have the job then admit to playing after establishing oneself, it's a completely different animal if one's only on the path to establish oneself. It could make things all the more onerous in the gamer's pursuit for a professional career.

Agreed. I expect them to try to slip it in through some kind of linking ability, making it possible to connect RealID to forum handle.

If they do the alias thing, then it won't be Real ID anymore It'd be the type of global system that many MMOs have had for years. The problem I have now with Blizzard isn't just that they have this system in place, it's their mindset, for the lack of a better word.

This is promising.

I've had my own sources, and same.

Too bad I haven't talked to Chris Metzen is ages. <-- not one of my sources

Not to take this off topic too much, but if there's a 'but' coming after a statement like that, then you are ashamed to a certain degree. If you think it's a negative to bring up the fact that you are an online gamer, then at some point you're hiding that fact. Not saying you should or shouldn't, because I don't know your current situation, but I'd think the art/music field would not only not care about you being a gamer, they are both fields that flow very much into the gaming world. You might be shooting yourself in the foot as much as trying to maintain a certain image. Just something to consider.

I didn't read all the original quote, but from the quoted part, it is very possible to want to hide something for reasons other than shame. Others just not needing to know or it not being others' business are perfectly valid reasons to not share something, and there are *many* other reasons.

Actually, what he said makes sense and I didn't read that into it at all.

I'm not ashamed of playing, but I don't want to deal with employers who don't want to hire WoW players making up their minds about me because they saw my name on the WoW forum.

Not necessarily. You have to remember, not everyone in the world is a paragon of tolerance, felicity, and goodwill.

There are people with strong opinions about online gaming. Hell, until a couple years ago, *I* used to rag on "rent to pwn" games.

And the identity I establish here is JUST the identity I establish here. It's probably very similar to the identities I establish in other online venues (I'd be flabbergasted if it weren't). Yet I prefer to compartmentalize my participation. Both for security and out of necessity.

Years ago, I received a couple of serious death threats. Serious because the guy lived in proximity to me and had the wherewithal to do it. Nothing REALLY came of it. But still.

A few years after that, I got into a serious community dispute in a hacker/security forum I was running. Turns out the guy who I was arguing with was a few hundred cans short of a six pack. He'd been getting into altercations with police, not only in my area, but traveling to places across the country. Moreover, he thought nothing of hacking into machines owned/run by people he didn't like and stealing/destroying things. He actually caused problems for company I worked for, simply because I worked there, and broke into a couple of my private systems and e-mail accounts. Luckily he didn't get anything important. One of his victims had nearly 5000 credit card numbers stolen from their e-commerce system.

I wound up working with the FBI to put this idiot behind bars for a few years. Since then I've taken up other pursuits (like this game). And I'd MUCH rather he not be alerted to the fact.

My bosses know I'm an online gamer, gamer in general, and own a gaming company. They're gamers as well, with their own ties into the gaming industry.

Again, compartmentalization of facets of your life. Maybe to shield facet A from B. Or maybe to shield facet B from A. Or maybe you may just not want those facets of your life overlapping and causing the appearance of a conflict of interests.

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

It's a temporary step. Great, Real ID is unbound from the forums, but it is still there as an 'optional' system and will be part of Blizzard's Battle.net offer moving forward (and remember, no LAN for Starcraft 2 or Diablo 3 - everything has to go through Battle.net). Blizzard is still lousy about online privacy concerns and is still releasing a sub-standard social network with little consideration about how it can be misused.

Blizzard can certainly have a social network, but Real ID is wrongheaded in its implementation. Some people here have looked to blame the Activision side -they more than likely want to start earning ad revenue like Facebook - but it is Blizzard who implemented it. Someone there was responsible for delivering it and who should have spent more than 5 minutes picking a social network to copy.

To put it mildly, yeah.

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

Hiding isn't the same thing as ashamed.

Ashamed is if you think something is wrong or bad. Hiding might mean that you think other people think it's bad, and you think they're wrong, but you recognize that they have real-world power of some sort.

For an example, one of my friends is transgendered, and is still several years out from a legal name change. I'm not sure I think it's accurate to say that she's "ashamed" of her current legal name, but she's certainly hiding it. (Doesn't make much sense to talk about being "ashamed of" something you had no control over, does it?)