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.