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.

Just finished running two back-to-back Maraudon Purple-side runs on Temza, and saw this in Stormwind.

Pretty standard display, level 1 human warlocks lying down in order to spell out the name of a gold-selling website.

I’ve always been impressed at the ingenuity of gold-sellers. Blizzard stops then from using the chat system to advertise at every turn, so they stop using the chat system entirely. In the past, they used to use dead bodies to spell something out, but now Blizzard catches them quickly enough that they don’t have time for that. Now they just lie down instead.

So I was in the middle of writing out a quick GM report, and then…

WTF They're actually floating in the air!

I reported them anyway, then went to get shots of this from different angles.

This was just crazy. Everyone was milling around staring at it.

Then, they suddenly shifted back to being on the ground (all in one instant movement), but this time they were sitting down instead. We’re pretty convinced they were using some kind of hacking program to make such instant movements and to float in the air.

I think they're missing a piece.

The rest of them disappeared simultaneously no more than 20 seconds later. Khoa said they probably banned one of them, then traced their IP address and banned the whole IP in one go.

I am in no way endorsing actually visiting that website, I just wanted to share pics of their most recent technological advances.

So I’m messing around with a variety of free-to-play games in my downtime. Every time I try out a different game, it will either be really annoying and solidify why I love WoW so much, or give me more variety in my day-to-day activities. Sounds like a win-win to me.

My latest experiment is Earth Eternal. I’ve been hearing a lot about it on Massively lately, and it was included in a top-5 F2P games list this week. Basically described as having really simplistic graphics, but with an incredibly flexible class system.

I’ve been really quite slow in getting started with the game, because I’m just poking around with it during my breaks. I tried to start playing on my lunch break a few days ago, and it just happened to be having maintenance at the time. I finally know what it’s like to be playing a game for the first time during maintenance and not having a clue what’s going on. “Server temporarily unavailable, check schedule.” What schedule? I don’t see any schedule!

I poked around on their main site for a while, didn’t see any messages telling me that the game was scheduled to be offline. Eventually found a “Server Status” forum near the bottom of the list of forums (after checking through the equivalents of “Game Announcements” and “General Forums” without any mention of server downtime) where they did indeed have a post about the downtime and the fact that the server was scheduled to be back online at 1:30 PM, precisely when I was scheduled to end my lunch break. Damn.

During a later break, I logged in and made myself a character, looking through all of the various races available, and reading all of their colorful descriptions. No humans or elves, though there are dryads and robots and demons and a hell of a lot of furries. I was pleased to discover that one of the races was a lizard “furry”. Not quite a dragon, but I’ve been undecided about my possession of wings for years now. I was then able to customize the exact colors of the various parts of my character’s body, so I made myself a gray lizard-person with bright green eyes. Yay!

The four classes are warrior, rogue, mage, and druid. Except that the druid is basically all of your nature-based classes rolled into one, in that it is a bow-wielding class that summons wild beasts and casts nature-themed spells. Sign me up!

Meet Kiryn Silverwing, the lisian druid.

I test games for a living, so I am cursed to forever find bugs in the games I play in my free time. I often find a variety of bugs and annoyances within minutes of logging in to a new F2P for the first time. Now, most of it is because of the little things that are different in this interface or control scheme.

Earth Eternal had one initial annoyance: strafing. This is a big one for me, as it is the #1 reason why I stopped playing Free Realms after a couple of weeks.

I’m not sure how it happened, but for most of the time I was playing WoW on my powerbook, I was using both the WASD keys and the arrow keys to move. I don’t think I could have mouse-turned if I’d wanted to, touchpads are horrible for that. So what I ended up with when I got a real PC and started using the mouse more, I consolidated the strafing back onto my normal layout and ended up using A and D to turn, with Q and E to strafe. Soon after, I played another game that used A and D to strafe, with no turn keybindings at all. I then changed my strafe keybinds in WoW to match this, started turning with my mouse, and started using Q and E for useful spells.

Ever since then, no games have been able to agree on which keys are used to strafe. And the ones that don’t match my preferred control scheme, and don’t give me any way to change the controls, will fail every time. When simply moving around the game world is an annoyance, I’m not likely to keep playing the game past the first night. I have not yet acquired the ability to rewire muscle memory temporarily. I can make permanent changes, but switching back is really annoying.

This game has A and D set to turn, with Q and E set to strafe. Luckily, I was able to find a keybindings menu and change the scheme myself. Dodged a bullet there!

Bug #1: I log into the game, go talk to the very first NPC. With the default window size, the popup “completed quest objective: talk to so-and-so” was overlapping the quest dialogue window, preventing me from reading the NPC text for several seconds until the popup faded out. A little annoying, but playing from the client and resizing the window to be bigger has fixed this issue (though only because it has caused a different issue where the UI text does not scale very well with the window size).

Bug #2: Strafing is actually some weird strafe-turn combo. This has since mysteriously fixed itself, I think maybe my keybindings were stuck somehow such that it was actually pressing turn and strafe simultaneously.

Bug #3: Okay! Let’s go do this quest we just picked up, and kill some of those mobs! Coming from a WoW background, I thought it was a little strange that my druid was using a sword. Though I guess if she’s actually supposed to be a hunter, it works a little better. But then I actually looked at the tooltip of the sword I was equipping.

It's a sword! No wait, it's a club!

Bug #4: Okay, fine, it’s more of a suggestion, but I think this is dumb. Keybinding 1 is for melee auto-attack. Keybinding 2 is for ranged auto-attack. I can’t move them off of the 1 and 2 slots. I had to rebind my keys simply to be able to use whatever skills I want in those keys. And when I did so, the first two buttons still had a 1 and 2 on them, right next to the 1 and 2 of the buttons that were actually bound to those keys. Ugh.

Okay, so I continued on and did a few quests, leveled up a few times, got a few skill points. This game’s skill system seems to function on a sort of dual energy system with matching dual combo points. There is a “bar” made up of blue circles above your health bar labeled “Might” and a similar green one below labeled “Will”. There are ten circles on each “bar”, and they seem to regenerate in combat, so it’s limited, but not mana. I approve. Physical attacks cost Might, while magical attacks cost Will. I think I saw some attacks that cost a combination of these. Then there are two matching sets of combo points called “Physical Charges” (which I am going to call PCs) and “Magic Charges” (MCs), on the left and right sides of the little status circle on the left.

That sword symbol in the center changes into a raccoon face when I'm out of combat. I was a little disappointed that it didn't match my chosen race at all.

Despite there only being four classes, the skill system is surprisingly deep. Only about half of your class skills are actually limited to your class, with the other half available for anyone to take. There are several other categories of skills that are open for everyone, including weapon proficiencies and teleport, defensive, and healing skills. So theoretically, you could be a healing rogue. You could be a heavily armored warrior with a shield who lobs frostbolts.

So as a druid, I started out with two attacks: a basic bow attack that cost Might and gave 1 PC, and a finishing bow attack that cost Might and 1-5 Physical Charges, dealing more damage with more PCs. Oh, and I can shoot my bow from melee range. Once I reached level 4 and had plenty of skill points to spend, I grabbed a few more attacks. From the Druid tree, I learned a basic magic attack that deals death damage and debuffs attack and casting speed with a 30 second cooldown and grants one MC, and a reflective damage shield that costs MCs. From the rogue tree, I picked up a ranged attack that causes a slow effect with a 30 second cooldown and grants 1 PC.

I put my magic attacks on my secondary bar, keyed to the F keys like I normally do in WoW.

So now there is a rotation! Initiate combat with a slow, then hit it with magic, then pop a bubble and start building up more PCs to spend on my finisher. Sweet! At level 6 a ton more skill options open up, including an entire healing tree that isn’t tied to any one class. As far as I can tell, there are no prerequisites for the higher level skills. There’s a handy respec button on the skill panel that just costs in-game coins to reset your skills, so theoretically I could remove my points from lower-level skills in order to have more to spend on the higher-level skills.

Well, moving on from skills, I discovered a quest that basically said “hey, there’s this item in the cash shop that’s completely free! You should go take one!” It turned out it was my first 4-slot bag expansion, unique so that I can only take one of them. This is brilliant! It wasn’t located in the first tab, so it made me go and search through the tabs of the cash shop for the no-cost item, becoming more familiar with it in a fun way. I probably would never have glanced in the cash shop until I had been playing this game for a long time otherwise. I wish more games used this kind of “free stuff in the cash shop” idea.

Well, it looks like I’m going to have quite a bit of fun with this game. I look forward to seeing more of it in the future.