That might be a genuine creeper, but it could also be a clever person surreptitiously illustrating why RealID is a bad idea.

Forum accounts are tied to paid subscriptions. The only way you can post on Blizz's forums is if you have a battle.net account which is what every wow player has now. I also highly doubt they'll say that you can only have one account due to people having multiple accounts helps feed their money supplies.

The RealID needs to stay in the games, and not effect the forums since the RealID is opt-in and the only time people can see your real name is if they add you and you accept that you know them.


--Just thought about this. WoW's version of "forum trolling" is creating a lvl 1 character and posting under that characters name. That way their main remains unknown and the chances of them getting harassed in game is next to null simply because you don't know the character's name or even possibly the realm. Not sure if being allowed to have 50 characters max is a good or bad thing. :|

Neither would surprise me, but either way it gets the point across and made me lol.

A comparison:

• The Lusternia forums opened on October 26, 2004. We've had 584,064 posts, or 239 posts per day.
• Battle.net Update: Upcoming Changes to Forums
  was created on July 7, 2010. It has 35,300 posts, or 17,694 posts per day.
• Our entire forums get 239 posts per day, on average. That one thread is getting about 239 posts every 19.5 minutes.

They're several orders of magnitude larger than we are, of course, but it's crazy to see how fast that moves compared to what we're used to here.

Blizzard has deleted a bit more than 10% of the thread so far, almost 4,000 posts. Approaching page 2000.

...on what basis are they deleting posts? They're sifting through it as if anyone is gonna read the whole thing? Wat.

No clue. They've got people deleting posts but still no reply since the very beginning.

The "this will stop trolling" argument really is appalling the more I think about it. They're basically threatening you IRL. People are right. If you don't fear that there will be any consequences, you'll troll just the same. The only way this will be a deterrent is if you actually fear that you'll be harassed or otherwise punished IRL. You want to stop trolling, get more moderators and have them actually do their damn job. Ban people from playing if they're being assholes on the forums. That will stop trolling. Opening up the threat of some dick finding you outside the game? Not even sane.

I'd have at least some respect for them if they'd just come out and say they want to link your name to this for advertising money, but instead they'll try to present as for people's own good.

I miss the Blizzard that was an awesome game developer. It's like we're stuck with their evil twin now.

I'm not saying individuals with multiple subscriptions should have only one forum account, period (I do believe that, actually, but I'm not proposing it here).

I'm saying that a single $15-per-month game account should furnish the owner with one forum account. As it is now, people get one forum account per character, yes? That's the problem. Limit players to one forum account per subscription, and you've eliminated a large chunk of the problem (i.e., people making alts to troll with).

That Blizzard died when Activision bought them out.

Yeah. I usually try not to slip into actual hatred, but every time I read something Bobby Kotick said, it makes me want to strangle him and leave his body in a ditch.

I was going to explain it all in words, but pictures are so much more fun!

What you see when you first hop onto the forums:

What you see once you've logged in:


And what you see what you click the link titled "Select Character":




When you log into the forums, you're logging in with your wow account essential because the username/password is the same. So you don't have multiple forum accounts per se. You just get to choose which character you post as/under. Make sense?

Which makes no difference to her argument. If you were forced to use a forum name same as we do here, and not able to make a level one forum alt, trolls would be easy to spot and easier to moderate. Or just have it like it is now, but allow everyone to see all your characters when they click your name.

To some extent, that's how civil society works. Break the mores, get sanctioned. The problem is that the internet is a much bigger place. It would be ideal if it could just be imposed on game society (i.e. post by your account name with a link to all of your characters). The problem with RL names is 1) that's not how you're identified in that society, and 2) it makes you identifiable to people outside of your regular society, be it scam artists, bullies, or psychopaths.

There's another dimension to it too. I know a guy called Mike O'Reilly. What the are you going to do with that name, google him up and beat up random Irish people until you find the right one? Then you find out he's a game dev for a certain notable indie game (notable as indie games go, anyway.) Suddenly the pseudonym he posts under is MORE important to his identity as far as the internet is concerned than his real name.

Yes.

Also, look, Blizzard decided to backstep on the forums thing. I still don't trust them, but it's a good start.

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.h...87278&sid=1

I believe 'em. I think with so many people verbally against this, they realized just how bad this would be. When the community raises up in arms against something, Blizz will listen.

Yet they're still pushing ahead with it, just not on the forums. As Tycho said over on Penny Arcade, it's PR aikido. Kotick wants this bad, and I don't see it going away entirely. Hopefully it'll end being done well and prove a valuable addition, but I'm not at all ruling out future situations like this. Perhaps handled better or done more subtly, but until we see their full RealID plans in action, I'm not putting full faith back in Blizzard. I think they're good people making good products, but I loathe Activision and Bobby Kotick with a passion.

It would be hilarious if this was all a publicity stunt.

Great, now people are going to die IRL from nerds taking the game too seriously...