It's quiet...too quiet.
This RealID thing just won’t die.
Blizzard has a habit of shaking things up from time to time, or denying fans what they clamor for the most – the recent “chat channel” debacle being a good example – but the latest horse that they’re flogging down the virtual Internet tubes is that of RealID.
It’s been mentioned here before, mostly in the context of “we don’t like it”, mostly because stupid people will give away their e-mail addresses without thinking, which will then allow their “friend”, Pervy McPerverson, to find out their real name and the names of all of their friends.
Sad face. Serious sad face.
With Starcraft II still bubbling in the polishing pot, the implementation of the RealID system has been largely left to the WoW universe, and it has been received there with a collective “meh”.
Some of the new features of the system are great – being able to see friends on other servers is a big plus – but some are stupid. We don’t really need a “Facebook-light” status updater or need to “create a conversation” with two or more RealID friends. It just seems unwieldy for no reason, created ostensibly to help gamers find each other, but seeming more like an exercise in the powers of being a total douchebag.
Right up until now.
Douchebaggery confirmed, gentlemen.
Basically, real $%#@ has hit the RealID fan. Blizzard has just announced that along with RealID change within in the game world, the forums are going to be changing too.
All of the forums. WoW, Starcraft, Diablo, the whole shebang.
How are they going to be changing?
If you guessed that Blizzard will be sending a free Dairy Queen Ice Cream log to every user that manages to avoid hideous grammatical errors and liberal use of the word “n00b”, you’d be wrong.
If you said that they are going to make every single post carry the real first and last name of the poster, you’d likely be thinking “that would never #$@%ing happen.”
Your words would be right, and your hopeful thought would be dead wrong.
By July 27, all Blizzard forums will be converted to this new model, and will apply to not only gamers who post, but Blizzard employees as well. Add to this the fact that posts will now be “rated” by viewers – the higher a post is rated, the longer it sticks around the more likely it is to attract the attention of a Blue, and the lower is goes the quicker it will disappear from the forums altogether.
Blizz’s rationale on this sounds good on paper – they’re essentially trying to prevent anonymous dickbags from trolling the forums, causing problems, and generally flexing their CPU-enhanced junk. They want to put an end to the flame wars and endless repetitions of the “why’d you post such a n00b question, you n00b, you’re so stupid!” thread, which never answers the question and leads to a statistically significant use of the n-word.
N00b. That word is n00b. Yeesh.
Realistically, this is a bad idea.
We’ve considered it, and we see the merit here, but truthfully, Blizzard has a whole heap of trouble coming their way. Angry posters will still be angry, but now armed with a first and last name. Sure, “John Smith” is a common enough name, but even those with generic (re: boring) given and surnames could be sought out by a determined individual. There is a stunning amount of very personal and very detailed information available on the web for those who know how to look for it and who have a decent starting point.
Like a name, for example.
It’s possible Blizzard will back down on this one, but unlikely. It doesn’t directly affect us, having posted on the forums are grand total of one time and since Blizzard claims the changes won’t be retroactive.
But.
This is going to cause problems. Big time. Sure, it’s a bit alarmist, but do these people at Blizzard ever watch TV or go out onto the street? We don’t live in happy fuzzy bunny town.
This is the real world, populated by real people who have some seriously screwed up real issues.
RealID = ReallybadIDea.
