Blizzard/Activision Removing Anonymity From Game Forums

http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/1851

by gossnj • 16 years ago

41 64 16 years ago

pdxmarcos• 16 years ago

This is probably the most ridiculous change ever made by a gaming company. The negative stigma associated with being a gamer and even more so being a wow player is a terrible thing to have when looking for a professional job.

oneplusone• 16 years ago

Perhaps, but I would expect that when the real names are shown people will start posting higher quality message and treat their fellow posters with more respect.

I have been making my real name accessible on a lot of websites and I have never had a problem with people harassing me. In fact, I think it increases the quality of my interactions on average.

jasonlotito11• 16 years ago

I disagree. I'd prefer to keep my identify secret everywhere I post. I work very hard to make it impossible to trace my posts. I mean, it would be easy for people to find things I said long ago (or not so long ago) I now regret.

No. I have no desire for people to know my real name or real identity.

robryan• 16 years ago

I wouldn't want to work for any company that would discriminate against me for my gaming habits in my own time.

jasonlotito11• 16 years ago

So what your saying is:

The negative stigma associated with being a company that thinks poorly of gamers and even more so of wow players is a terrible thing to have when looking for a professional employee.

gte910h5• 16 years ago

You say that now. Wait till you're out of work for 6 months.

This company is hurting their user base in an effort to not have to do what every other forum on the internet does: Police the trolls.

I'd thought about buying one of their games this Summer (Starcraft II) to play with some friends, but I'd be hesitant to get the "brand" myself after this change

jasonlotito11• 16 years ago

No.

This is one of the best things they can do. Have you ever browsed the WoW forums? They are horrible. A new player can get destroyed. Their innocence ruined.

Their is only so much policing and banning that can go on.

The key part to their announcement is this: > All posts in the future on the new forum systems will be an opt-in choice and ample warning will be given that you're posting with your real first and last name.

Old posts won't change. This will only occur on the new forums.

I don't play WoW anymore, and I admit I got involved in my share of epic flame wars. I never hid who I was in real life, but still, this is fine. And no, you can't be associated as being a WoW player unless you opt-in.

So no, this is a good thing that solves a real problem.

silencio7• 16 years ago

Guess what. Loss of "anonymity" isn't going to do ANYTHING about that problem. There will still be plenty of people with fake Real Names and the Real Names of the people being billed (read: not the actual people playing the game, i.e. in the case of minors) trolling, except now they get to do it elsewhere with other players' real names. Welcome to the Internet.

This is a big loss for people who go to the tech support forums, bug requests, and do guild recruitment. None of those need real names, and I've almost never seen any flaming going in most of those threads. This is also quite retarded for realm forums where the context of your character is more important than your real name, so what now? Now you get to associate your toons with your real name, and well shit it keeps snowballing from there.

No, this is not a good thing because it doesn't solve the problem at all.

mbateman• 16 years ago

Some priceless comments from the comment thread in the story:

"It will be pretty intresting to see the profiles on facebook/myspace of some of the 'top raiders.' Maybe pull up some DMV records and see what kind of mount they have IRL."

"Finally I can stalk that pretty Draenei even more so."

"Solution... (I hope) I'll be changing my name in my contact details. Sure, the mailman might be smirking as I have to sign under 'Zortan the Mighty' for any Blizz purchases but at least some psycho won't be able to google me"

cheald• 16 years ago

I already thought of that last point. Blizzard doesn't let you edit your name in your Battle.net contact details, apparently.

jasonlotito11• 16 years ago

This will only be an issue if you elect to link your account to various social networking sites. By default, everything is kept confidential.

Also, not be able to change your name is pretty key to elements of their security.

eru3• 16 years ago

> "Finally I can stalk that pretty Draenei even more so."

She's probably a guy.

silencio7• 16 years ago

Or, you do find out that that pretty Draenei is actually female. Guess where it goes from there.

I get enough shit for joining vent and talking as a woman that plays WoW in anything non-guild related (oh, please, I still got shit there until I became an "established" player in the guild), I can only wait with joy!!!!! to see what happens on the forums.

steveklabnik• 16 years ago

Pretty interesting. I wonder if this'll cut down on the griefing... Online gaming has such a plague of profanity-spewing 12 year olds, maybe this will help curb those tendencies.

That's one of the reasons I use my real name everywhere online: it helps keep my comments in check. Not that I'm 12, or spew (excessive) profanity. But I've become much more polite, and make significantly less 'me too' or memetic kinds of posts.

marknutter3• 16 years ago

I think more sites should end anonymity. If you're too afraid own up to what you say online maybe you shouldn't be saying it in the first place. It'd be like an entire town full of people wearing ski masks- nobody would be held accountable for anything.

hubb• 16 years ago

this doesn't make sense. the loss of privacy isn't worth a potential gain in the quality of discussion. look at any public group or announcement on facebook: lack of anonymity does not prevent people from being ignorant jackasses

rortian5• 16 years ago

Sure, but facebook is a very different model. Even if you'd like to be friends with people from your past you can ignore their future activity in a click or two.

When the quality of discussion tends to be so low, you don't risk much by trying to mix things up.

marknutter3• 16 years ago

I just think people would be a lot more thoughtful if they had to own up to what they said.

prodigal_erik3• 16 years ago

Anonymity's protection of nonconformists is the reason cities are the source of progress and villages are not. It is the only way you will ever hear What You Can't Say (http://paulgraham.com/say.html) from anyone who isn't willing to wreck their life over it. Any forum that requires a True Name is a waste of time for anything beyond small talk. It's not worth it to try to catch a few griefers (who will work around it anyway).

marknutter3• 16 years ago

By your logic we should all be over at 4chan to discuss startups and tech news. Hacker News is a perfect example of the good that can come from non-anonymity and 4chan is the perfect example as to why total anonymity will always lead to cesspools.

gte910h5• 16 years ago

I don't think gaming company employees get that gaming is stigmatized by non-gamers, especially time consuming forms like MMOs. It isn't stigmatized by them.

Friends of mine who play one of the Blizzard games (World of Warcraft) and work at a (non-MMO, console based) game company don't understand that everyone else views gaming, especially PC gaming, as a non-legitimate hobby and a questionable mark against you on a job search, funding search, or anything of the sort really.

It's not like religion, race, political affiliation. It's a very legitimate concern, as there is a tendency for people who play these games to stay up much of the night instead of getting a proper nights rest. They don't understand how much they're giving up people's privacy; lots of users will stop playing these games for professional reasons. The bank vice president: Gone. The guy running a business: Gone. The advertising exec: Gone. None of them can afford to have this come out professionally.

rortian5• 16 years ago

I think this is crazy over the top. They are not releasing game time played for every person. They are getting rid of anonymous commenting on their forums. I think it is a change for the better. If someone is a troll and/or exhibits anti-social behavior online should it effect their profession careers? I'm cool with it. If people have to think twice about being obnoxious, life just might be better.

Don't forget that your prism account is not anonymous.

gte910h5• 16 years ago

I know it's not. My name is unfortunately common enough it's hard for me get it on every website. My prism account is never taken.

Additionally, I think you'll find I'm acutely aware of how non-anonymous my posts are, and have always been relatively tame in my posting history on all sights.

It's not the acting out that will effect the professional careers of the people. It's the fact they have the hobby at all which is an issue professionally, especially in this job market.

Which is going to be hired most places: 29 yr old who has a reasonably good background and hobbies include gaming, reading and music, or a 29 yr old who has a reasonably good background and hobbies include reading and music? For many fields, the second is a more attractive candidate, and not for completely irrational reasons.

sounddust• 16 years ago

For every Warcraft 3 player, a profile¹ is created (that you can't opt out of) which lists every game the player has ever played, including timestamps and game lengths. The forum posters are already linked to these pages, so presumably their RealId will be as well when the new system is implemented. This means that if you post in the forums once (even for a technical support issue), your real name will be associated with your game history.

[1] example: http://classic.battle.net/war3/ladder/w3xp-player-logged-gam...

efsavage• 16 years ago

You think that someone who would hold gaming against a candidate really cares how much time you played? When someone does a background check or even just googles you, they aren't looking for reasons to hire you, they're looking for reason NOT to hire you. If they see your 2000 word rant about how a class got nerfed, you think they are going to say "well he's just passionate about his hobby"?

I'm all for people being able to use their Real Names to establish a little credibility, but forcing someone to do so is going to make things worse, not better, because the trolls probably don't have much to lose, while normal, sane people that give forums like this their modicum of value, will be silent.

zach2• 16 years ago

This would basically close the WoW forums, which actually serve an important gameplay purpose. Hilariously bad idea. Blizzard doesn't always figure things out the first time, but you can probably trust that this will be worked out.

Sure, anonymity plus audience, I know. There are a lot of forums where anonymity is pointless, but when we're talking about a ROLE PLAYING game, things are a lot different.

jasonlotito11• 16 years ago

Have you ever seen the WoW forums? The amount of flaming, trolling, and hate spewed filth that gets dragged across there is not worth it.

Too many people avoid the forums for good reasons.

zach2• 16 years ago

Yeah, and Barrens chat or the trade channel on a weekend night are pretty awful as well. But are they going to get RealID'd too?

If they were only doing this on the general-discussion areas with no gameplay implications, it would be a lot more reasonable. To think you couldn't post on the forum for your character's own server under the character's name is silly.

gte910h5• 16 years ago

I think this is a great policy to make women get stalked like crazy.

Obviously thought up by a bunch of lifelong, male, game developers.

Gormo• 16 years ago

Perhaps Blizzard will successfully improve the quality of their message boards by suppressing anonymity. Or perhaps participants will start considering the impact to their reputation in every other aspect of life each time they post, and undermine the vitality and uniqueness of this particular community.

The latter would be especially ironic considering that the forums in question pertain to an escapist fantasy game in which people role-play as fictional characters.

Anonymous online forums can be found across the full spectrum of discussion quality - HN and 4chan are at polar extremes - so the real root cause of poor-quality discourse is something other than anonymity.

Instead of raising the stakes of participating in their forums, perhaps Blizzard should identify the internal cultural factors of the community that encourage disruptive and inane posts, and work to remedy them more even-handedly.

jasonlotito11• 16 years ago

Except HN is far from Anonymous, and excels not because of anonymity, but because of real people. Quality posts here generally come from people that can be traced. HN would suffer if everything was anonymous.

shasta• 16 years ago

Why can't they bind your account to your real life identity, for the purposes of preventing duplicates, but keep it private?

aphistic• 16 years ago

This change is completely crazy. I don't understand the people who think that this is a good idea and I couldn't care less about the "gamer stigma" others are mentioning. People in my real life know I'm an avid gamer and so do (obviously) the people I play with. I'm typically a Blizzard apologist but in this case I just can't see the logic in this.

You can find anything about someone with their name and a little bit of time, especially when that name can be associated with a character name that could be that person's online handle on other sites.

Take this response in the official thread (http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=257123...) for example:

"Lol. This doesn't really effect me, as I know you simply can't track someone down by name alone.

Enjoy your tin foil hats everyone.

- <REAL NAME HERE>"

Just as an exercise I spent 10 minutes searching knowing just this guy's online handle that he posted as and his real name that he willfully posted in his response. Within that time I now have his real full name, age, home address and i know his dad's high school and graduation year. Pretty scary.

I don't mind this RealID change in-game where I can give out my details to friends I trust but requiring that I post on my real name for any random person browsing the forums to see? Nuh uh.

There have also been responses saying "Oh, just don't post on the forums any more". This is not a good solution because A) I pay for forum access as part of my subscription fee (otherwise you wouldn't have to be a subscriber to post) and B) I'm an officer in a guild and doing recruitment would require me to post on the forums to recruit people, thus putting my real name out there.

If they want to cut down on forum trolls they should allow people to set a Battle.net account nickname and use that instead. It would still be a semi-anonymous name but would cut down on the trolling because people wouldn't be able to create a random character on any random server and use that to post on. Everything they say would be associated with that handle and through that with their online reputation in the community. This may not cut down on ALL the forum trolls (really, using real names won't cut down on 100% of it either) but at least it won't kill the community that's there.

abronte• 16 years ago

This sort of defeats the purpose of a "Role Playing Game".

tibbon2• 16 years ago

Newsflash- nothing you do online is anonymous. It hasn't been for a long time now, and it won't be in the future.

daten• 16 years ago

This isn't entirely true. In many cases you can post things anonymously online, and they will stay so, unless they're illegal enough to warrant a subpoena forcing a provider to turn over details that can be used to identify you.

We all understand that if you include personal information or post using a known alias, a little bit of searching may identify you. If your IP address is made public in the post or email, it can be used to narrow down who or where you are. Even simply correlating known data, that is linked to your identity, with previously anonymous data can sometimes identify you. And the popular easy to regurgitate advice is that "nothing" you do is anonymous.

The fact is, if you're careful and there isn't enough of a motivation to go to the level necessary to identify you, you can participate anonymously in many discussions.

It's also possible to maintain the option of anonymous discussion in the future if people realize where it has value and make an effort not to give their privacy away voluntarily.

tibbon2• 16 years ago

I think given the time and research, that I could probably identify people just through the text that they post (if the text is long enough) based on their recurring syntax, spelling, word choice and grammar fingerprint. Probably won't work for something like tweets which are highly truncated, but for something like an 'anonymous blogger' I probably could.

csallen3• 16 years ago

This is one of those changes that people rebel against simply because it's a change. If the forums had started out like this, and were now changing to become anonymous, I'm sure at least as many people would be complaining as are now. So let's go over some of these complaints:

>> Gaming is stigmatized by non-gamers

How do you figure? This sounds like it's simply conjecture or personal experience at best... in which case I'll mention that I know plenty of non-gamer professionals who respect gamers. Even if it is stigmatized, it's becoming decreasingly so as older gamer generations age. And the widespread immaturity made possible by total anonymity is a big reason people don't respect the gaming community in the first place. I welcome changes like this, which only serve to accelerate the de-stigmatization of gaming.

>> lots of users will stop playing these games for professional reasons

Why would someone who wishes to remain anonymous stop playing a game, when they can instead simply stop posting on the forums?

>> They don't understand how much they're giving up people's privacy

The "invasion of privacy" flag is waved nauseatingly often. It is not an invasion of privacy for a site to allow you to intentionally make posts under your real name. Blizzard is not tricking you, nor are they exposing your personal life without your permission. They are simply changing the dynamic on their forums to one that places a higher value on personal accountability. If you don't like it then fine, but don't accuse the company of being unethical. I'm sorry, but you don't have a right to be anonymous in everything you do.

People really need to get with the times. For the past 10 years we've lived in a world where people can Google your name and find anything about you. And for the past 5 years, we've lived in a world where more and more online services aren't supporting anonymity. That's the future, and yes * gasp * it's different than the past. Instead of complaining about change, why not adapt and take steps to control your own online reputation?

silencio7• 16 years ago

Posting in the forums is not completely optional. I mean sure, you can go your entire game-playing life without doing so, but if you ever get a hankering for posting bug reports or wanting more help than GMs can provide in-game, the tech support and bug report forums are now unavailable to you should you wish to never post with your real name.

Also, if I ever stop playing WoW because of the Real ID changes (so far, they're optional, works for me), it's because I hate getting harassed for being female (and my real name is very definitely feminine). Not because I fear what I say in forums or in-game will have a negative impact on my life otherwise. I just don't play a game to be annoyed like that.

I normally don't care about my name being plastered everywhere, as I'm fully aware of how not anonymous the Internet is, but let's just say I don't exactly want Blizzard to go and tell the whole world my real name if I want to post cause those idiot 15 year olds in that retarded guild on my realm would probably go far enough to post IRL details of people they don't like for whatever reason in trade chat and more. I also don't see why that has to be the case, especially when they plan on introducing a big load of new features to help CMs moderate the forums.

There's a difference between keeping that information thinly shielded behind a pseudonym from in-game vs. screaming the name on your billing address for the world to hear.

But.....yeah, I ultimately have a choice. I have the choice to stop playing the game. Works for me.

csallen3• 16 years ago

Yes, WoW is full of immature people who may use your real name to harass you (so is middle school). Getting harassed sucks. Maybe you're fearful enough of that possibility that you'll never post on the forums again. And maybe the forums are so important to you that you'll quit WoW without them. Those are perfectly legitimate ways to act, and I'm not arguing otherwise. As you said, it's your choice.

What I am saying is that it's not an invasion of your privacy for Blizzard's forums to be based on RealID; they are not "bad guys" for doing so. In addition, many people feel it's next to impossible to have reasonable discussions in the forums as they are right now, where otherwise-reasonable people create anonymous accounts for the sole purposes of trolling and spamming.

isamuel• 16 years ago

It's a mistake to think that pseudonymity inevitably leads to rudeness on forums. Plenty of pseudonymous forums are civil: HN, for one. Reddit also gets a really high quality of user discussion. If Blizzard wants respectful discussions on their forums, they need a culture of respectful discussion. Real ID can't do that.

illumin8• 16 years ago

To prove that this new policy was harmless, one of the Blizzard customer service employees posted his real name. Within minutes, people had tracked down numerous private details about him, including his home address, mother and father's name, the fact that he still lives with his mother, Facebook profile, pictures of him out drinking with friends, a Google street view picture of the front of his house, his home phone number, and tons more information. The thread is over 5 pages long and continuing to grow.

http://wowriot.gameriot.com/blogs/Americans-are-bad-at-games...

What boggles the mind is that the employees are going to be using their real names to post. I have seen the hate and rage that can be spewed on the forums when a class gets nerfed in a patch, and let me tell you, some crazed teenager is going to go postal on a Blizzard employee because of this. After spending thousands of hours "ganking noobs" in Stranglethorn Vale, when little Jimmy gets nerfed, he might decide to take out his rage in the real world.

This move proved to me that Activision/Blizzard cares more about profit motives than the safety and privacy of their customers. This is really all about becoming the next Facebook for gamers. They want to create a social graph across all of their servers, and all of their gaming franchises so that they can map people to their contacts and data mine it for advertising. They've already announced that targeted ads will be displayed in loading screens on Starcraft II and World of Warcraft's expansion. This is the next step.

Unfortunately, Bobby Kotick and Activision have begun to destroy Blizzard. It is a sad day indeed.

Shorel• 16 years ago

iRacing does not have anonymity.

I has worked very well so far.

Blizzard/Activision Removing Anonymity From Game Forums

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