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.