Blizzard to remove the veil of anonymity

Oh this is truley epic...

http://wowriot.gameriot.com/blogs/Am...nction?gr_i_ni

From my point of view the current realID currently has loopholes in it to show your full real name currently due to addons as discussed on wow.com. Anyways they have slowly moved insidiously to push realID to the point where it is no longer an option.

Most times if you need technical support you are directed to the forums if you call their offices. So yeah...this isn't really optional....

Woot! All of my info is privatized, as it should be. Lub having a brother in tech law enforcement. Oh, and btw displaying the real name of any player under the age of 18 (without their parents' consent) will have Blizzard dealing with enough lawsuits to do some real financial damage as well. WoW being a Teen Rated game does not leave them a lot of breathing room. If the game was rated MA they might have a loophole way around that, but it is, in fact, T+.

Information Update From the Blue Names:

The only valid choice is not to play.

I'm honestly of two minds about all of this, and both stem from the same source, which is about anonymity and the internet.

The single biggest complaint I've ever heard about being online and people's behavior is that their anonymity empowers them to be abusive, to get feelings of superiority and generally be anti-social, bigoted and indulgent of whatever sense of empowerment being online (especially in MMO's) give them. When someone doesn't know your name or where you live, it's a shield. Let's not be disingenuous here. Anonymity is a iron-clad guarantee that you can say pretty much whatever you want, how you want and you won't get any repurcussions from it.

So now we have a situation where that is threatening to be stripped away and the floodgates of complaint are being opened. Now, the initial impulse I had about this was to say 'fantastic! People will be in a position to be responsible for what they say and be held accountable for their actions.'

And I do think there is some argument for that. I was literally talking the other day to a friend (whose name I do know and we met online) about just this topic and we agreed that tirades or opinions expressed online can be done in a way that you would never do in the 'real world', because of their very nature. So what's that saying about people? That the online world is where we can unleash the worst of our nature to be as racist/sexist/abusive/bigoted that we can be? I don't think so, because there's equally a number of people who are mature reasoning adults who want to find a community (an equally inherent human desire).

After that, the other part of my mind thought 'Well, isn't this essentially a forced invasion of privacy?' Instead of letting the community of World of Warcraft police itself, Blizzard appears to have decided that they need to instead, and removing the veil of anonymity is the way to do it. And I totally agree with other posters here that in the day and age of internet stalking and even murder, it's a potentially dangerous move.

Here in Australia, an 18-year old girl was murdered because she was lured to her death by two men posing as part of a natureist movement on Facebook. It was a graphic reminder of how someone's identity was targetted by someone else for a horrendous crime.

I'm not saying it could happen on World of Warcraft, but at its worst, the game has been associated with suicide, parental neglect, self-harm and abuse, theft and murder. They're incredibly evocative stories that obviously generate the worst impression people can have about gamers and their personalities. Now you have an oncoming situation where if someone takes a percieved offence online that they'll act upon it.

I think the users using the aforementioned pipl site (however well-intentioned they could've been) took a dangerous tack. But arguably it cuts both ways; what's to say Blizzard wouldn't do the same to a player they considered a 'risk', and release their information to authorities?

I'm lucky; I searched myself on pipl and got two hits, neither of which revealed any information I wasn't comfortable about sharing already. But this is Pandora's Box to me. I frankly doubt the WoW community will be as responsible as Blizzard hopes, and I doubt Blizzard is being as responsible as the community hopes.

What I do hope is that if nothing else, this causes people to think a bit about what they say and do online, because I think being able to speak your mind openly and freely is a privelege we take forgranted and we can abuse it too easily.


S.

I have been careful enough with my online identity for quite a while, that there's virtually nothing since just after high school (when I was ridiculously dumb with my online security). It's kind of amazing, since I have a VERY uncommon name. There's only one other person with the same first+last combination in the States (and oddly enough she lives in the same metro area as me!) according to various "white pages" style lookups.

I use generic enough usernames (typically common names from non-English languages; see also: Aggelakis, a common Greek last name!) that they're virtually untraceable. Not a single hit on Aggelakis; there are too many famous Greeks with that last name for my pissant little posts on a City forum to matter.

I searched my boyfriend's name and laughed hysterically. Having the first name "John" makes it almost a non-starter, and his last name is pretty common too (though not "Smith" common )

Quote:

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.

This pretty much doesn't affect me at all

I took a peek at WoW's forums to see the reactions of their community.
I was stunned that there seem to be a lot of them that think this is a perfectly OK change. They're flaming the people that are voicing concerns over it. Absolutely amazing.

I could say something, but a picture is worth a thousand words.

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