RealID: The Other Side

Posted on July 9, 2010 by Scott Jennings| 32 Comments

Just in case you think opinion is 100% against RealID, it’s not! It’s actually only 99% against. Here’s a writer who is representative of that 1%.

I do love how so many people are up in arms over this. And for what, exactly? All that’s going to happen is that your first and last name will be attached to what you write. If you can’t stand behind what you write online then perhaps you shouldn’t be writing it in the first place. You’re not exactly writing the Federalist Papers here, now are you?

Blizzard says it’s moving to the new system largely to clean up your wretched behavior. Sad but true. Perhaps if Blizzard didn’t have to spend all day long moderating its forums because so, so many of you decided it was acceptable to behave like blockheads while under the mask of anonymity then you wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place. So in a sense it’s your own fault.

How many of you post photos of you and yours on Facebook for the whole world to see—unless, of course, you take the massively pro-active step of locking your account down? How many of you use FourSquare to broadcast your exact location to the world? What could be more of an invasion of privacy than telling people, “Hey, I’m right here”? How many of you use BitTorrent, downloading away to your heart’s content when your IP address is there for all to see, not to mention for people like the U.S. Copyright Group to see and round up into a lawsuit? How many of you use Gmail, the service that actively scans your e-mail to sell ads? If you were that concerned about privacy you’d set up your own mail server. But you don’t, of course. You only care about privacy when it’s convenient to do so. It’s only now that it involves the fact that you spend your free time casting spells that all of a sudden your “privacy” is at risk.

I have no time for selective outrage.

Hey Nicholas Deleon – I disagree with what you said.

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  • http://stabbedup.blogspot.com/ Stabs

    it’s amazing that somebody with that much man-dick in his mouth is still able to say such stupid things

  • http://pensiveharpy.blogspot.com/ Pai

    It’s cute how some people believe the whole ‘We’re doing this for the good of the forums’ line Blizzard is touting. But seriously, they should look a bit more into this situation before fanboying all over how great it is that Blizzard wants to ‘stop the trolls’, because that’s not what this move is about at all.

  • VPellen

    This is fun. The industry should make hilariously stupid mistakes more often!

  • http://nightflyergames.com tfernando

    So.. I don’t use Facebook, FourSquare, and I only use gmail for certain non-personal communications*. I do have my own mail server. Am I allowed to be outraged? :|
    I make no effort to hide my identity, but I understand why some people want to/need to. I do absolutely despise the movement to make every game a ‘social’ game.  I’ve been playing games since the ’80s , but I’m beginning to think the industry doesn’t want my money anymore.

  • mcl

    But acting outrageously both anonymously and from afar is what the interweb is all about.

  • Merusk

    Yeah, my Facebook is locked down, especially the pictures.  I’ve done the separate little groups of friends thing for partitioning which people I want to see things.   I only use Gmail for professional correspondence and don’t own a smartphone or use any of those ridiculous shoutcast/ location broadcast things.   What a douchenozzle.

  • http://twitter.com/jdhwi Dave Huston

    Just because you’re unwilling to accept that what he’s saying is true, doesn’t make him wrong. You’ve also got your numbers mixed up. A couple thousand players out of … what? 13 million? … are upset about this. Those couple thousand can go ahead and quit and it won’t make a bit of difference to anyone. Half of them will come back quietly anyway when they realize they have nothing else to live for than WoW.

  • Reaper

    I don’t have a facebook account, or twitter, or foursquare. I do run my own web- and SMTP-server for personal correspondence and my company runs one for the professional.
    As a software engineer it can be extremely important to keep your gamer and professional alter egos separate. Blizzard will scare away all the posters they should want in their forums (the adults, basically) and trolls will still be unchecked, possibly worse than now if Blizzard decides to cut forum staff after the traffic slows down.
    Anyone who seriously believes that this move is being made to benefit you is being naive. Activision wants their part of facebooks cake and they are destroying one of the last ethical software companies in the process.
    Blizzard is one of the few gaming companies to treat their staff and fans with the respect they deserve, but now it is to be assumed that they will be forced into the “work till you drop” EA mentality.
    A sad day indeed.

  • Jeff

    @ Dave Huston
     
    It may be only a few thousand now, but we’re only talking about message boards at the moment. Not many people are talking about how Real Id will be your in game friends list as well. That’s going to get more than a few thousand upset. Sure, I may have Zimbubu the wonder tank on my friends list because he can tank icecrown like few can, but that doesn’t mean I want Zimbubu to know my real name. There are online “friends” and there are friends. Not sure that too many people will want to mix the two.
     
    There are some other games coming out that at minimum have the potential to draw a sizable chunk away from WoW, especially if Blizzard remains too ensconced in their ivory tower to realize what a PR disaster looks like.
     
    You may not know their names, but at least one of them involves something called a Jedi, and it’s made by a company called Bioware. Their games tend to a have a Mass Effect on gamers.

  • Tox

    Honest question: can someone please explain the “it’s all about Facebook” argument to me? It just doesn’t make sense to argue that Blizzard needs to display real names in order to mine a database already full of real names (and addresses, credit card numbers, etc.)

  • Gx1080

    What about all of us who, I don’t know, DON’T WANT TO BE IN MOTHERFUCKING FACEBOOK?
    Cocksucker.

  • http://f13.net Yegolev

    Poorly written opinion piece. I hope Blizzard did not spend too much on this.

  • dartwick

    So because he is comfortable using facebook that means everyone should be comfortable with this.
     
    This is a garbage argument i have seen a few places. I dont have face book and I make no effort to display my real identity online. Theres no reason I should accept conditions like this from Blizz.
    I also see no reason why it should be announced to the world that i play a particular MMO, if I choose to keep it secret.
    NOTE: I know that you can find out stuff about me if you try hard enough. But I dont want to make it easy.

  • Mr. FirstName LastName

    @Nicholas Deleon
     
    First off, I DON’T have facebook or fousquare or the like….
    Neither twitter and so on.
     
    Yes, my mail is hosted within Google servers (not a gmail account but anyway my domain use their server)
     
    One thing is automatic scanning of keywords in a mail to match advertising….
    But Blizzard is acting completely different. It expose your name to the world, easy indexable and searchable… manually or automatically from anyone.
     
    Also, I wonder what benefits woudl all this have to the claim of a better forums. Blizzard doesn’t issue certificates of identity. Nor can check validity of your identity.
     
    Who can stop me from impersonating your name registering with it and spam/troll as much as I like?
     

  • FG

    I’m not so worried about the forums themselves, as blizzard has a point with “if you don’t like it, don’t use the forums”. What I am worried about is that Blizzard has already ignored some of their previous statements regarding RealID, so I seriously doubt this is the final step of RealID worming its way into WoW players’ lives.
    I also agree that this has a very high chance of actually decreasing the quality of the forums.

  • Brask Mumei

    @Tox
     
    I’ve explained my theory in other threads here, but here it goes again.
     
    They can’t mine their billing information because that was collected purely for billing purposes.  There are a metric crap load of privacy laws that they’d run right into if they tried that stunt.
     
    So what they need to do is get you to voluntarily release the information into the wild.
     
    When they say “We’ve thought long and hard about this” they clearly are not referring to a method to reduce trolling in the forums.  They’ve thought long and hard at how to transition WoW into a full RealID environment.
     
    It’s a big pot of frogs being brought to boil.  Some at the bottom of the pot, where the forums are, are screaming and jumping out.  The frogs swimming higher up are saying: “What are you complaining about, it’s good to be warm. And if it is too hot in the forums, just don’t swim there!”
     
    After the forum experiment proves a success, (And, I am confident, that no matter what happens on the forum post-cataclysm, the higher ups will consider it a success) they can use that as justification for the next stage of the roll out.  Maybe RealID for those cross server battlegrounds to improve accountability on them.  They are optional,after all!  Or maybe for auction house sales?  Or /tells, to avoid gold farmers?

  • http://www.stefanhayden.com Stefan Hayden

    I was just thinking today that I had yet to hear anyone agree with what the blues were saying. Now that 1 person agrees blizzard can be all “teach the controversy”. awesome

  • http://twitter.com/nelson Nelson Minar

    I’m another of the 1% who doesn’t think Real ID is the worst thing ever. I’m looking forward to being able to keep up with my friends who play WoW across various alts and servers. I think Activision has made some serious mistakes in rolling Real ID out and they’ve obviously failed the people who want or need anonymity while playing WoW. They’re also confusing everyone with this sideshow about the forums; the real story is policy in the game, and the current fiasco with addons is not good. But Activision’s missteps aside,, I think Real ID could be a useful feature if they get it right.

    I can’t help but notice this very blog post has two non-sequitur gay bashing comments in it from “Stabs” and “Gx1080″. I don’t think requiring Real ID in forum posts will solve the problem, but I’d sure prefer to play games with people who don’t mike childish, offensive insults.

    –Nelson Minar, aka Flyv@Garona/US.

  • athryn

    I have yet to see a female player come out in favor of this. All the people who have have been people who are already semi public (game journalists,) or people with common names.

  • Brask Mumei

    I dunno about Gx1080, but Stab’s comment was hardly a non sequitur.  Follow Lum’s link and be enlightened.
     
    As for non sequitur’s, how’s your logic doing?   You don’t think RealId would work, but because you’d like to play a game in which it did work, you think it is fine to roll it out?  I’d love to play games with people who don’t make childish and offensive insults.  But, since I don’t think RealId will help with the issue, I’m against rolling it out.
     
    Childish and offensive insults are purely an artifact of your environment.  The more the people around you make them, the more you make them, until you all are saying “die in a fire”.  The cure isn’t RealId.  The cure is community management and moderation.  Humans are context driven.  Many 4chan style trolls will be quite polite at a dinner party.  This is the real message we should take from “internet tough guy”.  It isn’t that they become cowards when faced with RL encounters.  It is that they were an asshole online because they learned that was the correct behaviour in that environment.  Create the correct context, and the majority of users will adapt.  The few that don’t, you ban.

  • http://twitter.com/nelson Nelson Minar

    Brask: I do think Real ID will work. It won’t stop trolls on forums by itself, but I think it could help. But the forums are a sideshow, what matters is in the game. And personally I would like to have my social network extend across multiple WoW servers and alts. Real ID is flawed in-game, though. Addons shouldn’t have access to the data without controls. And I think the friend-of-a-friend sharing of identity is a mistake. But if they fix those things, I think Real ID could be a positive feature for the game.

    Thanks for explaining the context for “Stabs” comment. So it’s not an offensive anti-gay slur, it’s a reference to metacommentary about the commonality of anti-gay slurs.

  • Anticorium

    Shorter “RealID will fix the forums” argument:

    The Usenet tradition of real names is what kept Derek Smart so polite and conciliatory.

  • http://www.facebook.com/acbeckers Alex Beckers

    Make that 98%. I don’t have a big problem with requiring real names for posting on the official Blizzard message boards. Eating bees for two years at Turbine destroyed my ability to appreciate online communities in their current most common format, and I admire Blizzard for taking a gigantic risk in the hopes of improving the situation. I recognize that it IS a gigantic risk and it might totally backfire, but at the moment I’m slightly more optimistic than pessimistic.

  • http://www.facebook.com/acbeckers Alex Beckers

    (Disclaimer: I’m currently employed by Activision Publishing, but I’ve got no working relationship with anyone on the Blizzard side of the fence. I don’t even think they’re in my Outlook address book.)

  • http://beafraid.com hellfire

    I couldn’t care less about the forums.
     
    This isn’t about the forums. Not for me, at any rate. This is about Blizzard’s public positioning of battle.net as a gaming social hub for all of their current and future projects. Do you really think Blizzard intends to stop once your name is on the forums?
     
    I’m running out of gas in the tank for this particular argument. I’m done with WoW and will not be returning. All this RealID situation does is dissuade me from being a Blizzard customer in general. I will not cry myself to sleep over Diablo 3 or Starcraft 2.
     
     

  • http:/./ds180.net/specialk klaitu

    Why not just give each forum account a unique identifying number and display that instead of a name?
    I mean, it would be just as accurate at determining who posted what without all the privacy issue mess..
    What do you do about dudes with the same name? You know, like Richard Hatch (the Battlestar Galactica guy) and Richard Hatch (the gay winner of survivor 1). What a mess.

  • Freakazoid

    When I woke up this morning, NWCN had a news piece about a local salon being harassed by a former customer. Said customer was going out of his way to write bad reviews on every site that allowed reviews of this business, especially on facebook, where he argued with everyone who said anything nice about the place.

    However, this former customer didn’t recieve a bad haircut or anything. One of the female employees spurned his advances.

    That was all it took to send him into a frothing rage and take it out on the business. He didn’t even bother to hide himself.

    What used to be just tempests in an internet teapot has been bleeding into real life for some time now. Real people and real businesses are being affected. If you honestly believe realID isn’t going to make it worse for those connected to wow, you’re either incredibly ignorant or a mouthpiece of activision.

  • Sok

    Speaking of “eating bees”: even if we accept that posting under your real name will make the forums improve, there are ways to do that without having people toss out their identity to total strangers. Even though they’ve been linked to before, here they are again (as a side note, they also dispute the “make the forums shinier” argument):

    http://eatingbees.brokentoys.org/2010/07/07/real-names/
    http://habitatchronicles.com/2010/07/realid-and-wow-forums-classic-identity-design-mistake/

    There are ways to handle the situation without using people’s real names, an approach with side effects mentioned ad nauseam already.

  • http://needmorerage.blogspot.com Ratshag

    “You only care about privacy when it’s convenient to do so.”
    Of course. I share my name with co-workers, potential clients, my wife’s relatives, the phone company, newegg.com, and other people or organizations which I wish to establish a relationship with. But handing out my name willy-nilly in a forum known to be populated with stupid, malicious assholes is something I have a problem with. If you can’t see the difference, then you are truly a simple-minded person.

  • Pat

    @Stabs and Gx1080:
    Yeah! Cause faggots are so stupid, right? God, I hate those cocksucking faggots who disagree with us!

    But wait! What if a cocksucker agrees with you? Oh god, what will you retarded little homophobes do now?

  • Peter S.

    Furor aside, the fix is as easy as a radio button:

    Please select one - 

    O Use My RealID
    O Use My Battlenet Master Account Handle
    O Use My World of Warcraft Account Handle
    O Use My Custom Handle: ______________

    That the fix is easy perhaps does the most to undermine Activision’s current position.

    Quick example: City of Heroes, well known for having one of the best MMO forum communities in terms of civility and interaction, allows each account to establish a single forum login with a single handle unrelated to your account login, names of individual characters, etc.  This links all posts to the same person without compromising that person’s privacy; the person is then free to share any relevant information they care to (such as through the profile that’s visible when their name is clicked) but is not obligated to do so.

    This tying of all forum posting to a single person/account, such that one cannot create a lv. 1 forum alt, addresses (by far) the majority of what has been stated to justify the program thus far.

  • yunk

    I think we will soon see an opt-in policy. Where you can see all the friends who’ve also opted in, and maybe that will transfer to the game. It’s hard to argue against opt in (at least for players over 18) and Blizzard might slowly get the benefits they want (e.g. monetize our social interactions), and the popularity of opt-in RealID will grow especially if it can network with other social networking sites.