Apparently you've never seen the folks who friend each other on Farmville just to get the expansions and help with their crops and so on.

Too true, though, I never got into Farmville nor cared about the people who did, so I never really knew how bad that obsession got .

What I was really remarking on there, was that Farmville (typically) was meant to be between friends, and despite using their real names they didn't have to worry, because people connected to their Facebook profile are usually people who would've known their real names before even being on Facebook. Call me archaic, but I'm accustomed to the internet that promoted anonymity, and wasn't about using our real names in every little thing we do. I mean let's face it: is trolling such a huge problem that they have to go at great lengths to stop it? Do people get harassed that badly? Am I mistaken in thinking that this is only about trolling, and not bot spamming? Also, I forgot to ask this when I posted earlier, but would people still get to use their character names? Or is every character just under your name? I loved making creative and some-what witty (for how witty I am/not) names and making people address me by that .

I was thinking more like a text to say "Hey, I can't figure out , what's up with that?". If you call me and tell me to log on and defend or something, you'd better be Nejii.

He's got a good point though. WoW is millions of people with little to no social controls. Lusternia, if nothing else, has much, much, much more enforced RP and social decency, because the game doesn't function without it. And it's orders of magnitude smaller.

The reason I find the WoW thing so silly is that they could have mostly solved the trolling issue by just letting people look at all your toons, so if you post on your level 1 forum alt, they can still see your main. And then allow you to ignore entire accounts. Problem solved relatively well, no mass exodus from the forums. Doing it with RealID says to me that someone at Activision or Blizzard said "We have millions of subscribers, we have the base to do serious social networking for gamers, and that's $$$."

Exactly. There's no reason Blizzard couldn't've come up with a lot of different ways to solve this problem. There's obviously an underlying reason that they're moving everyone to RealID.

Cash. They needs it.

Insofar that this has any relation to Lusternia Forums, we moderate strongly enough that we can get rid of any riffraff who are a detriment to the community so there's really no reason to post first and last names. (Not to mention we are small enough that I can pretty much figure out who everyone is on the forums if I really needed to anyway!)

If it was a requirement here, I would not post at all. There are other ways to deal with trolls and the like than using a realid. I have seen first hand how disruptive peoples lives can get over internet crap ... people calling other peoples work to complain/make accusations/cause trouble to other peoples bosses. Family members getting harassed. Sweet childrens birthday pictures cropped to include porn ... blow out that candle little Suzy. It happens, it happens fairly often. In this day and age, you have a persons real name and then some other piece of fluff information (which we all have put out at some time or another .... I need to pick my kid up from Summerville elementary school, bbl ... or even worse, those who post I live in Podunk city and I have your real name. Can get directions right to your house ... a picture of it from a satalite with the surrounding homes).

I play on WoW. I have had people in random dungeons ask me for my email addy to add me to their list. I don't give it. Strangers ... in a random. No, pass. Call me Dugan, call me whatever character name you want too ... I'll keep my personal stuff personal.

The RealID is a neat idea, atleast for the fact you can stay connect to friends even if they are playing another blizz game or on another server/character. Honestly, I have some friends in wow who have 8 bijillion alts and it is -very- hard to keep track of them all. But the forum thing, that is....not so great. I mean it might reduce the trolling but I think there will be a increase of accidents/incidents in the real world because of it. Though, if the playerbase was as small as lusternia's (wow's that is) I think it wouldn't be so bad but its not. Moderating WoW forums would give me nightmares.


Honestly, for me, it isn't much of an effect. The forums I go to, I don't post on often and Blizz's official forms are not among my few forum sites. Thank god Boub isn't going to be following in Blizz's steps over at MMO-Champ!

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I had heard that RealID identification was not limited to the forums.


That being said this is taking away some privacy, which is bound to step on very sensitive toes. On the topic of WoW friends having too many alts: I'm fairly sure you can just put notes in your friends list and say "This is so-and-so's alt." And if you want to stay connected with friends from other games/etc, get their MSN or AIM names. I did that quite a bit and didn't have a problem. If anything, it's almost making yet another facet of social interaction ("Hey, this has been a lot of fun, what's your MSN?") non-existant.

90% of my Lusternian friends on Facebook, I don't even know who they play. The only reason I know they are Lusternians is that either I've seen their pics before, I know their names, or Estarra is a mutual friend >.>

Yeah, I've got a lot of friends on Facebook too that play Lusternia and only know who a few of them play. Some of them I added cause they were friends of someone I know who plays or someone friends me for the same reason.

And yet everyone knows you play.

It's not limited to the forums. But the rest of it is opt-in. If I want to friend you with my RealID, I can. If not, you only see my character name. The forums are opt-in, but only because you can just not post ever.

I did that with one game, I added every single one of them to a list where I did not see their walls and they couldn't view mine or my pictures, posts, etc. Then when I stopped playing the game I deleted them all. Yay privacy.

Let em! Maybe the fact that I play will encourage other folks to play too!

That is meant to say 'who you play' >.>

As to the WoW thing: Lusternia is close enough that we probably won't need it (at least not anytime soon...). Using someone's real name is just a privacy thing. Some will tell all, some will only tell friends they trust.

It's pretty clear that it's really not about the trolling. I mean, sure Blizz has to have thousands of mods because they have 11 million players, but that's a good problem to have. However, what they're doing about that problem is another story. They're likely going to drive a lot of their playerbase out of the game from steps like this (not just this one, but each subsequent one will result in a larger and larger drop in population). We've all seen it happen before in video games; at least, I have...

Starwars Galaxies allowing Jedi to be created from the start, instead of achieved - drove all their players from the game and it's now floundering.

Dark Ages of Camelot, which had a small/niche playerbase to begin with drove many players out with some PvP change, resulting in many of their competitive PvPers fleeing to World of Warcraft (initially the Bloodlust battlegroup (bg9)).

Blizzard's now following in their footsteps, except their losses will likely be more massive. Luckily for them, most of the people that play WoW are addicted and will go running back at the first sign of improvement. Again, a good problem to have.

Thankfully, every time they make a change that makes me want to play again, they do something like this to make me glad I cancelled my accounts.

If any of you have been following this thing, there's a real shitstorm brewing on their forums. One of their devs said it wasn't a big deal and got practically all his personal information posted within hours after he selflessly gave his real name.

Signature, line number 3.

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.h...=1&pageNo=1

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