So I tend to follow a Massively article called Rise and Shiny, where the columnist checks out one seldom-mentioned MMO per week, in an attempt to try out more new things, or something. This week’s game (which will get an article this weekend) is a game called Istaria. I went to their website to see if it looked interesting, and watched their little trailer. Hmm, ugly graphics, generic “evil army of undead” premise, but player-built towns are sorta interesting, I guess. I was just about to the point in the trailer where I was getting bored and about to stop it midway when they unveiled the one thing that makes the game worth looking into.

Dragons are a playable race.

Bonafide fire-breathing flying quadrupedal western-style dragons. You can have a hoard and a lair and everything.

As someone who would give almost anything to be a dragon in the real world, I immediately had questions. Can I start a dragon character right away, or by “can become a dragon” you mean that I have to reach a high enough level and then go through some kind of ascension to become one, and only the best players can be dragons as a mark of prestige (and therefore this would be too much work for me to ever achieve)? Do I have to pay extra to be a dragon? Is this game even free-to-play? I see something there regarding a 15-day trial, but someone said something about being able to play for free.

I was a little concerned about the “now works on Vista!” comment, with no mention of whether Windows 7 was supported or not. And how one of the items on their main page was a news post explaining their game’s name change over two years ago.

It took me forever to get the game installed, and while I was doing so, I checked out their payment options. It appears that there is a free-to-play option, but you’re only able to be a Human character. If you subscribe for $15 a month you can play as any race. What I don’t understand is, in a game that lets you play as a DRAGON, why you would want to be a badly proportioned dwarf for the same price as WoW. At any rate, they also have a 15-day free trial option where you can play as any race, so I made myself an account with this option.

I finally got the game installed, and tried to start up the patcher a few times, but it kept getting stuck on something, and making me look at the horribly low-quality graphics of the launcher. What is that, a 16-color scale? It’s made of gray, brown, and green, with individual pixels of each color very visible. I kept closing it and restarting it with different options disabled, and it eventually (after several hours of poking at it between Guild Wars quests) got past the patcher to the actual game.

I had a great deal of difficulty just getting from there to the character select screen. I use Comodo as my antivirus of choice, and when I start up a new program, it will pop up and ask me if I’m sure I want to allow that program to change something, usually two or three times until all of its different security options recognize the program as trusted. However, Istaria, like many programs, is on full-screen by default, and like some other programs, it is not possible to alt-tab out, since the game will merely take over again as soon as you try to leave. I even tried Ctrl-Alt-Deleting my way to the Task Manager, but as soon as I got it to open, the game went full-screen again. I ended up having to Alt-F4 my way out of the initial loading screen (it hangs there indefinitely as long as Comodo is blocking its connections), tell Comodo it’s okay, start the game back up, alt-F4 out of the game to tell Comodo the next thing is okay, etc.

All in all I didn’t even get the game up and running until around 11:30 pm, so I didn’t have a very long time to look through the gameplay itself.

I started on the character creation screen and immediately looked at the dragon, then clicked through all of the other races, judged them blocky and badly proportioned, and went back to the dragon. I am in favor of the character customization, as there were a great deal of different texture and color options for various parts of this dragon, as well as sliders for height, muscle, and fatness. Though it’s a little sad how many of the color options were bright primary colors and how few options I had for more muted accents. You can give your dragon a wide variety of different spot and stripe patterns, but the only colors available are bright, almost fluorescent, primary colors, with no options for simple white or black stripes.

I eventually went without stripes or spots, as a light blue/silver dragon (as always) and chose a character name. Though it asks you for a first name and a last name, you still have to have a unique first name. This made me sad, for Kiryn was already taken.

One thing I’ve noticed about my MMO habits: the very first time I start up a brand-new game, I immediately go straight for the options panel, and anything you put in my way to prevent me from getting to that options panel puts me into a bad mood. I want to put the game in windowed mode, turn up the graphics from the god-awful low resolution most games are set to by default (from the philosophy that people are more likely to stop playing your game if the framerate is bad than if it’s ugly?), see if the game will allow me to scale the UI up so that things aren’t teensy-tiny after switching to said higher resolution, and look over the keybindings. If the game even lets me change the keybindings.

I like looking over keybindings before I do anything else because it gives me an opportunity to change the WASD movement to something more familiar (I don’t know what’s up with games forcing me to use A and D for turning when they’re supposed to be for strafing) and it also lets me look over the possible options to see what kinds of windows they’ll expect me to open regularly.

Weird things about the keybindings in Istaria:

1. When you bind a key to something that is already bound to something else, it does not unbind the other action. It merely highlights it in red and forces you to look through the list of bindings for conflicts and change them yourself.
2. To unbind a key from an action, you left-click on it when it is already selected. I only discovered this after accidentally binding something to escape, then backspace, then resetting all of my keybindings accidentally by pressing the various buttons on the window (I still don’t know what the difference is between “Default Keybindings” and “Reset Keybindings” since pressing “Reset Keybindings” changed them back to what they were by default, I’m afraid to press the other button now) then searching through the help documentation until it told me what to do. Extremely unintuitive. I usually go through the keybindings and unbind all of the ones I don’t expect to be using frequently, and then return to the options menu later if I find that I do need a keybinding for that window after all. It’s like the Skills window in WoW: Why would I need a separate keybinding when I just just press C and then click the Skills tab? I don’t need to look at my skills THAT often.
3. Related to #2 above, I CANNOT use my left mouse button to move the camera. I was able to bind the right mouse button to moving my character around (and the camera with it), but since left-clicking is the method by which you unbind keys, it is not possible to bind it to free camera rotate, and it most certainly does not do this by default.
4. I also attempted to bind my Spellbook to P, but then when I actually pressed P later in an attempt to open my spellbook, it opened my Knowledge panel. Knowledge was the next thing on the keybindings list after Spellbook, and I did not have it bound to anything. I still don’t know how I’m supposed to open my spellbook again — the first time it opened, it was done for me automatically as part of the tutorial.

So I finally sorted out my keybindings (with the exception that I still couldn’t move the camera with left-click) and set off in the direction I was facing to talk to the nearby intro NPC. He told me a few things about how I’m one of the “Gifted” and if I want to know more about anything, there’s a book near the shrine over there. Oh, the shrine? He must be talking about that fountain-looking thing next to where I started. So I walk back over there, and start going around it, looking for some kind of book.

I found no book. Instead, I found a beetle. A very hostile beetle. I wanted to see what combat was like, so I walked up to it and clicked my “attack” button, found on a teensy tiny (no UI scaling = sadpanda) action interface that was placed in the upper left of the screen by default. I managed to find my current health and the target’s frame, hidden in tiny black boxes in the upper right corner. And my action bar (which had no skills on it) was a teensy tiny vertical bar in the lower left corner. All of these things were movable, so I crammed them all in the bottom center of the screen so that I could actually see all of my relevant info at the same time rather than all of it being spread as far apart as humanly possible. I hate it when games push all of my useful info into different corners of my 26-inch monitor. I hated it in WoW and I hated it in Guild Wars until I figured out how to rearrange my UI to actually make sense.

I thought the combat pose for my dragon was pretty neat, with my wings half-spread and my neck arched a little. Unfortunately, beetles a quarter my size seem to be the natural predators for dragon hatchlings, and I was unable to do any damage to it at all (when I finally found my combat log, it was full of “you miss” and “beetle does 5 damage to you”). It quickly overpowered me and once I had figured out where my health bar even was, it was down to 2 health, so I ran away screaming in the direction of my starter NPC, then around in some other direction, since the beetle was still following me. Eventually it stopped following and ran back to its spawn point, and I realized there was a pavilion with a book in front of me. Success!

So I interacted with the book, and it didn’t really answer any of my questions. It told me that in order to become an adult dragon and learn to fly, I needed to complete the rite of passage given by some guy (presumably also a dragon) in some town, but it didn’t tell me how to get there from where I was. So I ran through the area, trying my best to avoid the beetles that didn’t even appear on my screen most of the time until I was practically on top of them, until I found a path leading out of the starting forest into a barren mountainous passageway. I encountered a larger dragon who told me that in order to join the adventurer’s school, I needed to defeat one of the beetles in the previous area. But don’t fret, it’ll be easy if you use your breath attack!

“Breath attack?” I wondered. Thankfully, at this point, my spellbook automatically opened and showed me the (teensy tiny) icons for the various skills I had. None of which were placed on my action bar by default. I apparently have a breath attack! And a bite attack! And something called… Draconic Insight. I wonder what that does? It says it gives me a buff called Draconic Insight. Yes, but what does it DO? I tried using it, and indeed, it gave me a buff called Draconic Insight. Didn’t appear to have any effect, but I wasn’t quite sure how to open my character panel to see if it increased any of my stats. If it did, it didn’t say so in the description for the spell or the buff it caused.

So, armed with a (tiny little) action bar (that was still annoyingly vertical with no way to change it to being a more familiar horizontal) full of skills that I could use to kill beetles, I ran my little scaly self back to the forest, and hunted down some of those beetles. The first time I tried, I failed, and ended up dying, which led to a further explanation of the game’s lore reason for why you can just return from the dead (it has something to do with the fact that you’re one of the “Gifted” but still allows them to kill off story NPCs who are not similarly “Gifted”) and so after respawning at my bind point a few paces away, I went back in and tried breathing fire on the beetles again.

Success! This time I killed one! I attempted to loot it, but the game didn’t do anything when I right-clicked on the corpse, and the “gather” option in my action panel seems to be used for mining and such. Victorious, I returned to the NPC, who told me to go back and kill more beetles for a beetle horn, warning me that I might need to kill several before finding one of sufficient quality. Well, I guess I’ll have to figure out how to loot things now, eh? He also gave me a tiny brass bell that I could add to my “hoard” — I tried clicking the ? on the Equipment panel with the Hoard area to try to figure out what the gameplay purpose of the hoard was, but it didn’t even mention it in the lengthy tutorial window — it was just telling me that I could equip things, and pointing out various parts of the UI that seemed pretty obvious to me.

I returned to the beetles and killed a few, double-clicking on them to loot them this time. After killing my third one and starting to wonder how many I would have to kill until I get this quest item, I opened up my bag and actually looked at the descriptions for the (teensy tiny) items that were dropping. Turns out that bronze-colored circle with a T on it wasn’t a coin after all, but a beetle horn. Yes, that makes perfect sense. I actually had two of them. So I returned to the teacher again, and he told me how great I was and granted me enough experience to reach level 2.

At this point, the nonscaling UI was starting to give me a headache, as were most of the other parts of the game that seemed to be as confusing as possible to prevent me from having fun. It’s like the game doesn’t want me to play it. It was time for sleep.

So I decided that even though I’m probably resubscribing to WoW when Cataclysm comes out, barring any new evil from the RealID system, I remain uninterested in endgame, and realized we really don’t have anything to DO in WoW right now that we haven’t already done three times. So I’m leaving my account disabled until Cataclysm, the loss of my subscription a kind of punishment for the shit Blizzard tried to pull on us all last week.

And it’s sad, but that event broke my tie to Blizzard, and I honestly don’t see myself playing Cataclysm much longer than it takes to explore the new redesigned leveling content. I really have no interest or intention in raiding against Deathwing, despite Blizzard finally giving me the freedom to do so in a 10-man without being a second-class player.

Until then, my fiance and I needed a new game to play together in the nights after I get home from work. We were talking about all the awesome upcoming MMOs that aren’t coming out until next year, and when we were talking about how awesome Guild Wars 2 was looking, he remembered that he used to play Guild Wars, back before I got my new powerbook 5 years ago and convinced him to come play WoW with me. Literally the only reason why he came to play WoW with me rather than me going to play Guild Wars with him was because I was a mac gamer at the time, and WoW was the only MMO that would run on a mac.

So rather than recover his account from all the draconian security measures NCSoft has implemented in the past 5 years, we both bought the Guild Wars trilogy, main game plus two expansions for only $40 (when the main game alone costs $20 and each expansion costs $30 if purchased individually), free to play after that point with no subscription cost ever. If I get bored with it next week, I can come back 3 years from now and log on again.

And I have to say, my mental image of Guild Wars was rather like Everquest 2: it was pre-WoW, and not as successful, so it had to be inferior. But from what I’ve seen (up to level 4 so far) this game has amazingly gorgeous graphics, and has a lot of UI conveniences that I would have to install mods for in WoW, or things that I could never do in WoW. Being able to turn off display of my helm, or choose to display it only when I’m in town? The accuracy of my spells having a lot to do with my distance and relative elevation from the target? If there’s a hill between me and my target, my fireball will run into the hill instead of just flying right through it? Now that’s crazy talk.

The party system IS a little annoying, I admit. It’s partly because my fiance’s antivirus would disconnect him from the game every time he loaded into a new zone, and whenever he logged back on, he’d be in the nearest city instead of simply loading back into the zone I was in. It isn’t possible to join someone’s party unless they’re in the same instance of the same city that you are, and it isn’t possible to fast travel when in a group, so whenever that happened, I’d have to teleport back to the city, make sure we were both in the same instance, invite him to my party again, and then we’d both have to walk from there to our quest location a second time.

I love how there are quests that want me to pick up a heavy object and carry it somewhere, and this object does not go into my bag, and actually slows down my movement speed and prevents me from attacking as long as my hands are occupied. And how when we’re partied, only one of us actually has to pick up the quest item that the NPC wants us to recover — because there’s only one of them! “Find my missing flute” she says. In WoW, one person would pick up the flute, and then the other person would wait for it to respawn, and then pick up their copy of it. In Guild Wars, because each area is instanced just for your party, you can have one person carry the quest item back to the NPC and then you all get credit for it. My eyes open wide and I say “ooooh, so realistic!”

There isn’t a crafting system, and there isn’t an auction house. I find this to be freeing more than anything else. You don’t feel like you’re required to level up a crafting skill just because it’s there. Without crafting, there’s very little you’d actually want to purchase from other players, so there’s no need for an auction house. Thinking back on it, I feel that Champions Online would have probably been a stronger game if it HADN’T had an auction house. That game did have crafting, but I found enough stuff to level it myself from quests and drops, so there was no reason to want to buy anything from other players. But you know, WoW has an auction house, our game needs to have one too!

I especially love the class mechanics. Being able to have a main class and a sub-class, and have TONS of skills for each one is great. I like that I’m only allowed to have 8 skills at a time, and I can rearrange them to whatever I want for free whenever I’m in a town. The game is balanced around me NOT having access to the dozens of niche skills my class can learn at the same time, while making the mere act of choosing which skills I want to bring with me be an interesting decision. I love how my main class has one attribute that is more open-ended to benefit whatever my subclass is as well, such as the elementalist’s larger mana pool.

I played an Elementalist (mage) for a bit when I was checking out the game, but I eventually got bored of the fireball spam and settled on a Necromancer/Monk, or Necromonk as I like to call her. Largely because the dances are class-specific and the only female dance I actually liked was the Necromancer’s Thriller dance, and also I like having the option of being a healer. With 10 total classes, each main/sub class combination is like a class of its own, some with multiple builds of skills and attributes you can switch out. There are 90 different combinations, almost all of them viable and specialized for certain things. Some combinations are great for PvP, but suck at PvE. Some of them are great for solo grinding, but terrible in groups. Hell, you can make a combination whose only purpose is being a mana battery.

This whole game feels really quite innovative, and then I remember that it’s been out longer than WoW has. And that I’ll never have to feel guilty any more, like I do in WoW, where I feel like I’m wasting my subscription if I’m not playing — there’s no hassle of trying to decide if I want to play next week and canceling my account if I don’t, and then going to the trouble to resubscribe when I do feel like playing. It’s always there. If there’s a stretch of time when I don’t really feel like playing, or if I’m working so much overtime that I don’t have time, I can just… not play.

WoW’s answer to people not wanting to play through the leveling content every time they want to make a new alt is to simply make that leveling content more fun. Guild Wars’ answer is to simply let you skip that content if you want. With all the different combinations and only 8 character slots, I don’t blame them. I can see myself deleting and creating new level 20 alts all over the place just to mess around with different combos.

A lot of people don’t like the free-to-play model, saying that it encourages the developers to make the game less fun if you’re not buying things from the cash shop. Well I say the subscription model has a similar problem — it convinces the devs to draw out every bit of content as long as possible, make you do the same daily quest every day for two weeks to get a single piece of gear, so that you’ll keep subscribing. I still haven’t figured out ArenaNet’s deal. How do they make so much money? They don’t have a cash shop, they’re staying afloat by sheer box sales alone. That just… makes them want to make the game as fun as possible, so that people will tell their friends about it and buy more boxes? I haven’t heard anything about people having multiple accounts… I’m still not sure what the downside is here.

I ask my fiance why he stopped playing Guild Wars to play WoW with me, and he says “because I love you.” And that’s the most important thing, really.

I think I’m more excited about Guild Wars 2 than Cataclysm now. Especially since their touted “complete talent revamp” has me saying “meh, that’s the same talent we have now, boring” over and over — and my pally partner is extremely upset that the thing he gets at level 10 is the shield throw ability, and his Ardent Defender is now an active ability that can only be used below 35% health. Thanks for unveiling those, Blizzard. My interest in your expansion is less and less with every passing day.

I won’t repeat all of what I said in my long listing out of reasons why this is Not At All Acceptable. I’ll add in some new things I thought of regarding the nature of real names on the internet.

1. Unlike internet handles, real names are not unique. What happens when, through some stroke of luck, the biggest troll on your realm forum has the same name you do? How do you tell them apart, since displaying character names is completely optional?
2. What if someone bought your account from you on eBay and continues to keep it active via gamecards, and uses it to post on the forums? Employers could google you and find flame-posts from some dude you barely even know.
3. How are people under 18 supposed to post in the forums using the accounts that are registered under their parents, even with parental permission to post?

But all of this is moot now, because Blizzard backed down. I wasn’t entirely sure they were going to, to be honest, and it made me sad. Because I was not going to back down from my principles in order to play Cataclysm, but it looked like it was going to be really fun. Especially after the announcement they made the day after this bombshell that they’re more or less turning 10 classes into 30 subclasses. Normally I would have been really excited about a huge announcement like that, because Blizzard basically said “we showed you these talent trees, you said they didn’t look cataclysmic enough, we agreed and tossed them out and redesigned the whole system from scratch in a really awesome way.” But that announcement was buried under discussion of the RealID issue.

I’ve been through so many emotional rollercoasters over the last few days, and in the end, the main emotion that won out over anger, fear, curiosity, and hope turned out to be a profound sense of betrayal. Blizzard isn’t stupid. They thought this through. They knew all of the pros and cons. Someone showed someone else some charts and spreadsheets and said “we could lose 37% of our subscribers if we make such a change,” and someone else replied “Hmm, that sounds acceptable to me.”

The thing that really bothers me about that thought is that WoW could lose 90% of its subscribers, and it would still be considered a “success” in today’s market, it would still have more subscribers than any other subscription MMO out there right now. Someone in a board room must have decided that was an acceptable cost for major social change.

That’s where I draw the line. That’s where I say, enough is enough. I’m putting my foot down. I’m not going to stand for this any more. If Blizzard doesn’t care about me, then why should they keep getting my money? There’s potential for this kind of change to snowball out of control, to get so much worse. Sure it doesn’t affect me personally right now, but someday it will. And that’s when I’ll look back and say, why didn’t I speak up about this when it was initially making me uneasy?

But then, see, I go cancel my account and a few hours later they announce that they’ve changed their minds, and due to the PR disaster this was turning out to be, with thousands of PAGES of replies, you’ll no longer be required to use your real name on the forums when the system goes live. I feel like a hero. I feel like we’re all heroes. We’ve spoken out against injustice and our words made a difference. I feel like celebrating!

I feel like someone at Blizzard has discovered a way to harness the power of nerd rage to run their servers, and this was a stress test.

Edit: It looks like my next blog post is going to be significantly different. Give me some time to rearrange my thoughts.

General Reason: Poor Support

Specific Reason: Representatives didn’t seem to care about me or my problem.

Additional Comments:

You don’t have a category for the upcoming RealID forum change, so I’m putting mine here. If you read this, this is my way of letting you know that forcing real names in a video game is not acceptable. Someone has to take a stand and say NO. We do not want our game to become facebook. We do not want to risk our friends and family’s safety just to get tech support. I personally hate my legal name and don’t ever want to see it associated with me if I can help it. I used my real name when I signed up for my WoW account because I was assured that it would not be revealed to anyone. I don’t think you have the right to decide that my real name is no longer personal information. My facebook account does not use my real name, because I knew when I was creating it that everyone would be able to see that name. But I cannot change the name on my battle.net account to my preferred pseudonym without supplying documentation that it is my legal name? I was really looking forward to Cataclysm ever since I saw it unveiled at Blizzcon last year, but if this upcoming forum change goes live, I will not be resubscribing. I don’t care how awesome the next expansion is. Good luck with your social experiment. It will at least be interesting to watch.

I’ll be posting more thoughts on this tomorrow, or whenever I get around to organizing them into something coherent. The gist of it is, my prot pally partner and I have both unsubscribed from WoW tonight as a direct result of the RealID announcement, and if it is not rescinded, we will not be coming back for Cataclysm.

Edited to add:

Actually, we would have canceled tonight, except that the cancel account page isn’t actually working right now. A pity, because my next recurring subscription happens in about two hours.

Edited again 9:52 AM on 7/9:

Yay! It finally got through — and they haven’t billed me yet! Goodbye WoW, possibly forever. Cataclysm was sounding AMAZINGLY awesome… but I’m not going to let my addiction to this game override my principles.

So I was just linked a new post from Nethaera regarding some upcoming changes to the forums once Cataclysm is released, changes that are going to affect the Starcraft II forums once that game is released as well. At first I assumed this was some kind of April Fool’s joke, but seeing as how it’s July 6th right now, I’m really sincerely afraid.

In a nutshell, the name displayed on the official forums, next to any posts you make, is your REAL NAME. You can choose to also display your character name next to your real name, but you cannot post without showing your real name. And since your account requires billing information and all that, it’s really quite difficult to have the name on your account not match your real name. The point of this change, Nethaera says, is to stop the vast amount of trolling that goes on, since people will no longer be able to hide behind anonymous avatars.

I’m not sure what Blizzard is thinking, but this is going to turn the forums into a ghost town. I don’t currently use them myself because they are a hive of trolls and scum, but I think experimenting with removing anonymity from the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory is too far in the other direction.

I don’t use the forums much myself, because I don’t see a reason to outside of posting bugs I find while playing (I’m a game tester at heart, when a quest log tells me to turn it in on the wrong side of the planet I tend to want to tell people about it) and occasional awesome suggestions I come up with for the suggestions forum. I’m just not much of a forumgoer or a socialite in general.

Here’s a list of thoughts on the issue (which I have been regularly updating as I think of more things and read more posts):

1. Potential/current employers/girlfriends/boyfriends/etc being able to see all of your gaming posts using a simple google search for your name. I can respect how some people are looking towards a future in which playing video games is not something to be ashamed of, but the fact is, at this point in history a large percentage of the non-gaming public will look down on you for playing. A lot of employers will turn down your application in favor of non-game-playing applicants, especially in this economy where there are so many people applying that businesses have a lot of options. This doesn’t personally apply to me, since I work in the gaming industry and having years of experience in MMOs is generally considered a good thing, but I can see how it would be a huge problem for a ton of people.
2. Crazy obsessed players being able to find out your real name, and use this information to track down your current and previous addresses, phone number, names of friends and family, etc etc. If you think this information is only available on the internet if you put it there, think again. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of databases online that you can use to easily find this information about anyone based only on their name. I have used them myself on occasion to find old friends I haven’t seen since third grade who have since moved to completely different cities and changed their phone numbers. If you have even a slightly unique name, expect anyone you piss off in-game to be completely capable of hunting you down and stalking you and your family. Very few players will be crazy/obsessive enough to do this, but all you need is one.
3. Once this goes live, Blizzard will be violating their own forum code of conduct, which specifically states that releasing personal information about other players is a bannable offense. They will also directly be violating their own privacy policy that told us when we created our accounts that our personal information would not be given out to anyone, so there was no harm in attaching our real names to those accounts — and now apparently, if you want to change the name on your account, you have to provide Blizzard with documentation proving that the name you want to change it to IS your real legal name.
4. I can see a TON of people canceling their WoW subscriptions over something like this, canceling their preorders for SC2 and Cataclysm, and even if they do keep playing, avoiding the official forums completely in favor of some unofficial forums that continue to allow anonymity. I am coming closer and closer to deciding to do this myself. I don’t care how awesome Cataclysm is. If Blizzard is determined to do something this stupid, their game can crash overnight from lack of subscriptions. I won’t play it just to make a point. The sad thing is, even if they lose 90% of their subscribers, they’ll still have more than any other subscription-based MMO.
5. This can possibly have the intended effect of removing trolls and spam from the official forums — but on the other hand, what’s preventing people from making new accounts with fake names and continuing to spam? Some people enjoy trolling so much that they would happily pay for a separate account using purchased gamecards just to be able to post anonymously.
6. God, I didn’t even think about the fact that now, all of the trolling on the official forums will be making fun of you because you’re a girl or because you’re a certain nationality, as people will see from your name. When we post under anonymous screennames, they can make fun of us for what class we play, for what name we chose to call ourselves in the game, for what level we are or what gear we’re wearing, but real personal details about us are hidden. The troll on the other end doesn’t know that I’m a girl unless I say so (and I could be lying), and can’t make fun of me for it. If I’m forced to use my real name, it will be obvious to everyone that I’m a girl and there’s nothing I can do about it.
7. Something I should have mentioned before: I HATE my legal name with a passion. The main reason I do not use it online is because I don’t like looking at it and I don’t like the fact that it’s associated with me at all. I hate it when people call me by that name. Not because I care about any privacy concerns. I have been going by the name Kiryn online since I was in high school ten years ago. All of my real life friends call me that. I hate every moment that people call me by my legal name at work. I would have changed my legal name years ago if not for the fact that it’s a huge hassle to do so and I’m going to change my last name when I get married anyway. The main reason I would avoid these forums like the plague is because I don’t want to see my legal first name linked with ME in any way, shape, or form outside of strictly work-related things. If Blizzard goes through with this, they will no longer be getting bug reports from me on the forums until I get married and harass them over phone support until they change the name on my account to the one I’ve been going by for the last ten years.
8. If anyone was thinking of becoming a helpful name on the forums in the future, count that out. We won’t get any people standing out in the community now. If there even is a community left.
9. What about all of those celebrities who supposedly play WoW? They could be posting on the forums right now, you could be reading a post written by Vin Deisel and you’d never even know! Well now, you don’t have that luxury any more. Anyone with a name that’s even slightly recognizable by the general public will never be posting on the forums any more, in fear that it will affect their reputation in their REAL lives.
10. The role-playing forums will be nearly useless now. It’s going to be very distracting to try to roleplay with someone that you’re a night elf chick when it’s obvious to everyone there that you’re a dude. At least when we have avatars we can pretend, and interact with the character displayed instead of with this real person we’re never going to meet in real life.
11. I think a major reason this worries people so much is that they see it as a very real and very possible slippery slope towards simply having your real name hovering above your character’s head in-game, towards having your home address and phone number listed right there in the Armory, towards requiring a passport-style photo of yourself that’s displayed for everyone to see. Because hey, you can’t troll if your phone number and address are publically visible. You’d have to be really REALLY careful about not pissing people off, because they are completely capable of driving to your house and killing you. And they’d say, it’s your own fault, you shouldn’t have made them so angry.
12. I have to wonder if this is related somehow to China’s restrictions. In China, you’re required to have things like your real name and phone number visible for everyone to see, very similar to this. It applies to all online games. It’s a government-imposed restriction, and there are going to be a lot more of those soon. I’m not happy about the thought that Blizzard is getting ideas about account security from China. Asian countries do a lot of things very differently, and it’s been proven time and time again that things that are perfectly acceptable in Asia are simply NOT OKAY elsewhere. Just look at most of their free-to-play games: tons of grinding, harsh PvP penalties, the ability to simply spend money to get a more powerful character directly. These things have never been very popular in Western MMOs, so why are we trying to take their lack of privacy as well?
13. What if you’re already being stalked in-game by someone you’d rather not talk to any more? What if simply putting their characters on ignore wasn’t good enough? What if they had a lot of friends, and it got so bad that you left the server and changed your character’s name to get away from them? Or what if it was someone you were friends with, and didn’t want to hurt their feelings, and told them you needed to take some time off from the game? They’d see you posting there on the forums on a different character and say “Hey, I remember you. I thought you stopped playing!” Before RealID, you could change your character’s name and as long as you didn’t do anything stupid like leave your very unique and recognizable signature intact, they’d never know it was you by reading your forum posts.
14. This is starting to remind me more and more of the Google Buzz fiasco. All of a sudden, something that you thought was private was open for people to see — and some people who thought they were safe in their anonymity were suddenly giving their personal details out to people without even knowing about it, sometimes with horrifying consequences. I did not ask for my private email address to become a social networking site, and I most certainly did not ask for my favorite video game to become one either. If Blizzard wants to turn Battle.net into a social networking site, fine, go ahead. Have a website where each account has their own facebook-style page where you can leave comments to each other etc etc. Just don’t force this system onto your FORUMS, which are already a laughably small minority of the playerbase as it is.
15. (Thanks Avaryse!) What about people who don’t play WoW at all, and just happen to share names with people who do? Let’s say you have a really unique-sounding name, and there’s only one person who shows up when you search for that name, but that person is NOT you. Now there’s some random guy on the other side of the country who’s suddenly getting prank phone calls, death threats, buckets of hatemail, and has no idea what’s going on. They’d have to go through the hassle of changing their phone number and maybe more, through no fault of their own, just because someone who shared their name said something negative about something.
16. Are people under 18 going to be prevented from posting at all? I know there are a lot of kids between 13-18 (and some even younger!) whose accounts are in their parents’ names. How do we deal with this situation? Will we have parents getting fired from their jobs because of an angry forum post written by their children using a WoW account paid for with the parents’ credit cards? I know that you can disable RealID via parental controls at the moment, but that system is so backed up at the moment that it’s not actually possible to do that — and I know a lot of parents won’t care enough about their children’s hobbies to even use the parental controls. And how will that work with the new forum system? Having RealID disabled via parental controls also automatically means no posting on the forums?

It is simply not okay to build a community while telling people how important their privacy is, and then rip that privacy away. It was bad enough when people needed to know your login name (half of the information needed to hack your account, if you don’t have an authenticator yet) in order to be RealID friends with you. That wasn’t SO bad, because at least you were choosing who you gave that to, and presumably you can trust your friends not to give out that information to someone who wants to hack you.

They say that this is supposed to make it easier to form real, lasting relationships with real people, now that you know their names? Our parents teach us never to give out our real names on the internet to just anyone. Giving someone our real name is a sign of trust and friendship, and now that choice is taken from us, tossing our real names out on the internet for anyone to use to find out further personal information about us.

I resent the implication that only trolls and hackers want to be anonymous. I resent the implication of “if you don’t like it, just don’t post on the forums.” I think it’s hilarious that the blizzard employee who released his real name on that thread to show that it wasn’t a big deal now has his address and phone number pasted all over the internet and is probably getting buckets of hate-mail as we speak. I am waiting for the “we were so very wrong about this and we swear we’ll never mention it again, here’s a free pony, please forgive us” post.

I wish I could have seen the look on Nethaera’s face when she read the post that she was going to have to take the blame for.