The past two weeks have been pretty rough for me. My husband and I were crunching on a contract until Wednesday morning, working 14 hours a day on it. (Aside: I can work 10-12 hours a day, five days a week, for months — and I have — but 14 hours a day for 10 days straight does me in.)
This was frustrating enough with a shiny new beta to obsess over … but then we got the news about Blizzard extending RealID to the WoW forums.
Like many people, my first reaction was shock. I checked the calendar: had I gone back in time and it was April again? Associating legal names with forums posts is just such an obviously, fantastically, cataclysmicly bad idea that I just couldn’t see how Blizzard could possibly be serious about it.
So instead of obsessing over beta posts and info, I spent my stolen non-crunching moments obsessing over RealID. I watched the official feedback thread grow … and grow … and grow. I read the blogs — both player blogs and pundit blogs — and I let it sink in.
And I tried to decide what to do.
My personal situation with respect to my legal name is … interesting. But that’s not the point. The point is that the action that Blizzard had announced is unethical. It’s a betrayal of my relationship to WoW. I could not, in good conscience, continue to support a company that implemented such a system.
But WoW is a huge part of my life. In addition to this blog, I run three (!) WoW fan sites. I can’t just walk away from all of that willy-nilly.
Last night I decided to start simple. I cancelled all seven of my accounts — which isn’t as big a deal as it sounds, given that I pay with time cards anyway — and started planning a post for today. I didn’t have anything particularly new to add to the discussion, but I wanted to be on record as opposing Blizzard’s announcement. And I didn’t have to make any big decisions yet — I’d just post and let you know how I felt.
Thankfully — oh how thankfully! — when I woke up this morning I found that I had missed my chance to join my voice to the legion of players who opposed associating legal names with forum posts. Because Mike Morhaime, CEO & Cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment, announced today that:
We’ve been constantly monitoring the feedback you’ve given us, as well as internally discussing your concerns about the use of real names on our forums. As a result of those discussions, we’ve decided at this time that real names will not be required for posting on official Blizzard forums.
We’ll need to keep a careful eye on the situation, specifically to see what the phrase “at this time” means to Blizzard, but for the moment … I feel like I’ve dodged a bullet.
I am incredibly proud of how the WoW community pulled together on this one. The official forums may be a bit hairy, but the WoW community is amazing.
I wonder how the immediate cancellations of accounts (by many, I’m sure) affected their decision as opposed to simply the vocal outcry.
It’s so unlike Blizzard to act this way towards their community. I can’t help but think this was Activision getting involved somehow, or if Blizzard is simply losing touch with it’s player base.
It puts a big huge hole in the security they try to implement for player accounts… it doesn’t make sense. At all.
“Unethical” is the most over-the-top illogical description I’ve heard regarding this. I was so incredibly happy that people wouldn’t be able to hide (which is truly unethical) behind their masks, and act however they wanted without retribution. For the VERY minor portion of people that could actually be harmed by posting with their real names… well, they would simply not post on the official forums.
Anonymity is the true bane of the internet.
Ixnay, your name being hidden provides no security. It isn’t like say, your bank PIN, or your social security number.
Charles, do you find it unethical that I run this blog under the pseudonym of Mania?
A clarification: I’m not looking to engage in debate on this topic. I shared my opinion, and it’s fine if you disagree with me. I don’t plan on spending any more time on this right now. I am, however, quite curious to see if you consider my behavior to be unethical. And once I have that answer, regardless of what it is, I will say, “Huh”, shrug, and drop the topic entirely.
I must admit, I was one of those that was initially supportive of the idea (although I could see why people wouldn’t like it, acknowledged there would be many people that chose to no longer participate in the forums, and thought Blizzard could achieve much the same thing by forcing people to choose just one posting name and making it difficult to change it). I can’t say I *liked* the idea as such, but I thought the benefits might justify the costs.
A number of posts made over the last few days convinced me I was wrong, so I can definitely understand Blizzard changing their minds as a result of the feedback they received. Most notable were the Shades of Grey internet dragons post (https://greyshades.wordpress.com/2010/07/08/an-open-letter-to-blizzard/) regarding the feelings of players and the Habitat Chronicles post regarding some of the practical reasons why Blizzard’s idea wouldn’t have the desired effect anyway (http://habitatchronicles.com/2010/07/realid-and-wow-forums-classic-identity-design-mistake/). Ctrl-Alt-Del weighed in amusingly on the second point as well (http://www.cad-comic.com/cad/20100707).
As to how Blizzard got their initial idea so wrong, it’s important to keep one thing in mind: every single Blizzard employee works in the gaming industry. For them, having their real name associated with the Warcraft or Starcraft forums is like me having my real name associated with a software development or technology policy discussion forum (and believe me, my real name *is* associated with plenty of such forums). That’s what I do for a living, so having my name associated with those posts isn’t going to do my job prospects any harm, and in fact will generally improve them (I’ve made a lot of good contacts through a number of online forums). Warcraft has no bearing on that, so I use Nimizar as my posting identity both on the official forums and on any fansites I frequent. A few folks know my real name as well (Hi Mania!), but there aren’t that many of them.
Inside Blizzard though, while being able to keep their in-game characters separate from their posting identities is important to them, keeping their job separate from their normal lives isn’t going to be as big a factor – the game *is* their job, so the work/hobby distinction that applies for many of the rest of us doesn’t really apply to them. I expect they tried to take that into account, but none of them are in a position to really understand how strongly people feel about maintaining that separation between “gaming identity” and “personal or professional identity”. I do maintain such a distinction myself (as noted above) and even I severely underestimated how strongly other people would feel about it.
Ack… Mania, the comment form ate a chunk of my post again… Firefox 3.6 on Kubuntu 10.04 :P
(And I wasn’t even *trying* to format it prettily this time…)
I finally thought to take a look at the page source and I see the problem – the closing double-quote for the comments_moderated class marker is missing, so the rest of my post up to the opening double quote in the first link definition gets eaten as part of the class name string. That would also explain the behaviour I was seeing the other day, as well as why the comments without any links are going through without an issue.
Sorry to leave another mess in your comments Mania, but at least you know what’s broken now :)
Thank you, thank you, thank you, Nimizar! You know how long I’ve been searching for that bug?
my trust in them is already broken. I have canceled and I am not coming back unless something drastic changes.
the fact is this thing passed all the fences and hurdles of the internal process before it reached the forum declaration stage and they let it happen.
they actually thought it was a good idea to breach people’s basic right for privacy by force for money.
the whole troll control issue is a red herring. the real reason lies in their contract with facebook and their well hidden agreement (in RealID terms of use) to sell to facebook and other third side entities our personal info without our consent or knowledge.
this info was given to blizzard for safe keeping for the sole purposes of billing. it was never intended as anything else and the reason we gave it at all is we trusted their statements and solemn promises to guard our privacy very carefully.
and now we learn that they have been working on a plan to violate our rights, steadily and intensionally, for the past year!
see the steps: battle.net was optional at first. than it became mandatory. then realID is optional. then they made the error of jumping too high and stating its mandatory for the forums.
they should have taken it in smaller steps- waited for it to gain strength in game and then make it mandatory in game and only then make it mandatory in the forums. the end result would have been a slow degradation of players civil rights from under their noses. their error was in jumping several steps.
(this is a pessimistic analysis though I would love to have more faith in people’s judgment and believe we would have rallied the same way against the stage of mandatory in-game realID)
please note that in the open letter the CEO say they will not force people to use realID on the forums “at this time”- meaning they may be just postponing the change. no appology, no promise they will never ever try to implement this privacy violation ploy. instead we get an assurance they WILL keep trying to get us to use realID, their terms agreement still opens a huge security gap for selling our info to third parties without consent and they have no intension to go back on their contract with facebook. this is not showing me a good will to do the right thing.
to me this letter is just pretty pretty words we all really want to believe in. but words do not amount to actions- except in the special cases of vows, promises and contracts- and they have given us neither.
trust is very hard to gain and very very easy to lose.
@ Witrely
First of all: I completely agree with you. The trust’s broken. I think too that the RealID in the Forums is just postponed. But:
What about this Facebook contract? I heard this a lot in the discussion(s) about the RealID. Is there any reliable source for the existence of such a contract; or is it just a (forum) rumor?
@Eberon It’s not a rumour, although I only saw the links to EU pages (I didn’t look very hard mind you).
http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=13200796713&sid=1
http://eu.blizzard.com/en-gb/company/press/pressreleases.html?100505
As for the topic at hand, I thought it was poorly thought out on Blizzard’s part but I sort of liked the concept behind it. I think they should have announced an account handle (like what we used to have before Battle.net logins took over) so people couldn’t troll behind level 1 alts, but even that would be flawed. I am certainly not disappointed they’ve gone back on it although I am disappointed the damage may have already been done and they will have lost business they won’t be able to get back over it.
Personally I don’t mind people I know knowing my name since they already know it, it doesn’t even really make much difference to me that friends of friends know my name. However, there’s a huge step from that and anyone seeing my name + main character on the forums. In many ways that’s worse than Facebook because there I am just a random name with a random picture (not of me) that only people that knew me would bother to look up or add. I wasn’t going to go to the extreme of cancelling my account though, I would have just posted on the official forums even less than I bother to now.
Not to get into any debate but I don’t think it’s unethical for Mania, or anyone, to not post their name. Just because you don’t want to disclose something doesn’t mean you have anything to hide and no one should have to defend their right to have some privacy. We all have our limits of what we’re willing to share with others.
contract with facebook:
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/gamehunters/post/2010/05/blizzard-and-facebooks-friendly-social-networking-deal-launches-with-starcraft-ii-/1
Quoted:
Blizzard’s partnership with Facebook, announced today (May 5 2010), means that players of StarCraft II and World of Warcraft can create a social network with their friends who also play those games on Battle.net and frequent Facebook.
Quoted:
Q: So what part does Facebook officially play, then?
A: The feature we are shipping with is this ‘Add A Friend’ feature. I can log into Battle.net and instead of knowing your email address or deduce who you are by Real ID, I can simply log into Facebook within a special interface we have created in Battle.net and import, if you will, all my friends who are on Facebook and are also on Battle.net into my social network here on Battle.net. Essentially, with one click I’m populating my social network in Battle.net on Facebook.
Q: I would assume that the Facebook relationship would be used to draw more casual game players to Blizzard’s games.
A: Absolutely. Our goal and vision in this partnership is to really to cross-populate the social networks and to easily find and add your friends from Facebook onto the new Battle.net service as the first step and extending it to other features in the future. … Later on, of course, we have lots of things we are talking about with Facebook. We haven’t announced anything specific, but we have lots of ideas about ways to cross-populate and share data between the two services.
I sent in my mail of concern/complaint fully expecting nothing to come of it. That more or less no amount of complaints and no possible argument, no matter how valid, would change their minds and there there was no way enough people would cancel accounts to be noticable. After all, in the end you didn’t HAVE to participate in the forums. But since they were throwing a bowling ball of a solution at a somewhat cockroach-like problem, I was more or less ready to call it with WoW since there are many more cockroaches that they could throw the bowling ball of real names at. And those I figured could not be avoided if I wanted to continue to play WoW.
So I’m just stunned that they went back on this.
As near as I can figure it, Bobby Kotick and/or his people came up with the RealID thing and decided that it should be mandatory on all the Blizzard forums.
When all hell broke loose, Mike Morhaime likely told Bobby, “See, now that’s why this won’t work.”
Sure, it may not have happened that way at all, but based on all accounts I’ve read of the two, I think it’s pretty close.
Oh, and September 8 (again)
You have seven accounts!? What do you do with all of them!?!
The thing that’s really enraged me about this whole debacle is the responses of people with the privilege to not care about having their name revealed on the internet.
I’ve relaxed from my earlier feelings, but I’m still going to be intensely vigilant about what Blizzard does in the future. It sounds like Activision is trying to interfere more and more in non-gameplay-related elements of their subsidiary companies, and I worry where that influence is going to go in the future. :/ The SCII-Facebook integration is just the first step.
Schadenfreude: Not much, actually. I usually only have one or two active at any given time. A couple are given over to hordes of hunters for testing stats.
Now let’s go slay some INTERNET DRAGONS! 8D
They will wait for everyone to buy the expansion before bringing realID back.
Mania: I want to say yes, but it isn’t as black-and-white as my first argument may have made my opinion out to be. Most professional sites (and I consider your high-standard sites professional) would have an “about” or “contact” page which would include a real name. The exception would be if you needed to hide it for legal/stalker/etc purposes.
Please accept my apology for my knee-jerkish (I tried for a pun…) reaction, as I’m just so frustrated to see so many people claim how evil Blizzard was being. A name is no protection… and any determined individual will learn far more about someone by tracking via IP address, or other methods. I feel that open communities need to use real names so that you are responsible for what you post for all to see. If they have to stop and think about what they say, since their name will be attached to it, then the dialogue everywhere improves. I’m probably just having an impossibly delusion, but ah well.
In a similar vein, I would love to have everyone’s real-id (or a number, or a nickname, I don’t care) available to “/ignore” so when I /ignore a hateful/abusive/etc player, I don’t have to fall prey to their multiple level 80 alts.
BTW, I can’t wait to raid with my sporebat without being mocked!
I’m pretty neutral to the whole RealID thing… the only person on mine is my wife (who sits in the same room with me). And the only reason for that is to see exactly which toon she is on at a given time in case we need to make a trade or something.
I have no intention of setting up RealID with ANY of my real friends… and so far, none has asked me either (I have a half-dozen friend/players who are routinely at my home). I suspect it’s because we all enjoy our anonymous alts when we don’t want to be bothered.
I do think that real names in the forums is a bad bad thing. It may not be so bad for a really common name like John Smith, but imagine how much info you could grab on someone with a name like Suzanne Dmitri-Colletti. A made up name, but you get my point.
Charles, what makes “hiding” unethical in your mind? Just because I don’t want millions (billions, since anyone can read Blizz forums…) of random strangers on the internet to know my real name; that’s unethical?
On the other hand, forcing someone to do something they don’t want to, *that’s* unethical. Feel free to sign all your posts with your real name. I’ll take my business to somewhere else that idiot griefers won’t have access to my real name, and my geek-ness is hidden to potential employers who simply won’t hire people because they play WoW.
Charles: Apology accepted (and in fact hardly necessary).
You (and this is a generic you, not *you*) can easily find out my real name with just a modicum of searching, but I don’t post it on the site because I don’t want to call attention to it. As I mentioned, my personal situation is … interesting.
I do agree that more permanent identities can really improve internet communities. I wouldn’t mind seeing something like Gravatar come to be used more often for cross-community identification.
But there will always be a need for a single person to have multiple (possibly permanent) identities. I use my real name for my day job and Mania here, but the important separation to me is the identity that I use on my mental health blog. I’d much prefer that my daily struggles with bipolar disorder do not come to the attention of my future employers. And I’m not even going to mention my identity in the non-binary gender community.
I wasn’t going to say anything in this thread,but then figured…what the heck!
First of all,like many others,I HATED the idea of RealID on the forums.Just.A.Bad.
Idea. And since Charles apologized,there’s really nothing more to be said about the word “unethical”,so that’s that.
What I would like to say,though,is that WoW is,has,and always will be a Role Playing Game. And as such,people use unigue,creative,silly and sometimes stupid names for their characters avatar in game. It has always been like this,and I cant see it ever changing. I know that my interest in WoW would not last long if ALL my toons had my real name attached to them. Seriuosly?! A Night Elf named “Billy Bob Smith”?….umm….no.(obviously,that name is made up…I’m a girl,after all..lol…
but you get the idea.) Roleplaying is the key word in this…I am not a Night Elf in real life(I wish!),and my friend is not a Draenai,Undead or Orc. But WoW gives all of our five-year-old inner child the chance to pretend we are,and then plops us in their world and says..”go play!”
With real names comes the realization that we are,in fact,humans. All of us. Which is good,in the real world. But when I log into WoW,all I want to be is Kitairra,my Night Elf hunter with a lot of pets,and play in their world for a few hours.
And frankly,the Official Forums have been and will be a cesspool of craptacular trolls,flame wars and the like,for many years now. I only posted rarely,and so to me it would have been nothing not to post there. But that wasn’t the point…the point was my name would be all over the net,and that was something I did not want.
Well,I’m sorry for this long,rambling nonsense,I think I’ll let my inner child go play some WoW…lol!
Kitairra
I hate the idea of Real ID being mandatory anywhere. Having our name or any other personal information displayed online (whether in a game or on a website) should ALWAYS be an individual decision. There are people who have a real reason for not having their name posted, and even those who would initially not have a problem with it are opening themselves up to being stalked or harassed if someone had a mind to do it.
Also, since we don’t have to provide proof of identity when we create our WoW accounts, this would cause people to use fake names when registering, such as “Mickey Mouse” or “Spongebob Squarepants.” Then if there’s a problem with their account, they won’t be able to call Blizzard to address the issue.
If trolling is Blizzard’s problem, they should make it mandatory to have the player’s highest level character as the one they’re posting as. If there are multiple level 80′s on their account, they choose which one to associate with their posts, but must wait a set period of time to change it to another.