World of Warcraft and Real IDs – A personal experience…

As I am sure most of you World of Warcraft players have heard, Blizzard/Activision is going to be rolling out a new identification system for players.  The basics are what they call a “Real ID” (which is your real first and last name associated with your account) being used as your way to communicate over Battle.Net.  This also is being applied to the use of their game forums.  Currently, you chose which of your possible 50 characters you want to post with, that name showing as the poster.  This has created a lot of issues, since you can hide behind many different “alts” to avoid any personal stigma from your posting habits.  It has created a sub-culture of WoW gamers that are called “trolls”.  While I agree this is a real problem, it is more of an annoyance than anything.  I should also note, the implementation of “Real IDs” are not to eliminate this problem, but it is going to be a side effect.  The real reason is a purely a cash grab on Blizzard/Activision’s part.  But, that warrant’s it’s own article.

So, while I like the idea of “trolls” having to use their real names and not run behind countless level 1 alts, I am not too happy about having to share my name with the whole of the WoW community.  Because of my problems with this, I made a post today on their General Forums explaining some very real problems with their new plans.  I found another interesting blog that was really showing what information can be found about people with use of only their first and last names.

Here is what I said (copy and pasted from the post, not altered at all):

http://asnowstormbyanyothername.blogspot.com/

This is an interesting blog post about what can happen with the use of just someone’s real name.  The information that can be gathered is pretty extensive, enough so that I can’t understand why Blizzard/Activision’s lawyers would approve this sort of change.

In a game that so many people are “too deeply” involved with, it seems like a bad idea to give a chance for real identities to come out.  Most people will never feel the effects of it, but this definitely opens the chance for some imbalanced person to find out the real identity of someone who they think wronged them.  And this doesn’t just lie with obviously “immoral” players (i.e. ninja looters, etc…).   I have been accused of doing stupid stuff when really I just didn’t know any better.  New players or non-hardcore players often don’t realize the implication of certain activities, such as rolling on items or wiping a raid party.  I have been on the receiving end of some overly zealous players because of a honestly noob mistake on my part.

Anyways, I think you can see where I am going with this.  Hopefully it will help the powers that be reconsider this new approach they are planning.

Guess what happened to me?  I was permanently banned from the forums for “Posting harassing or defamatory language towards others”. Now, call me crazy, but I don’t see anything defamatory posted by myself in that post?  Do you?  All I see is what I consider to be a very level headed post about the reality soon to befall all who use Blizzard’s forums.  Sure, if you followed the link, you can see some personal information about some people (mostly Blizzard employees).  But, the point was that all this information was gathered with only the use of First and Last names.  Something Blizzard is about to force upon anyone who uses their game forums.

Suffice to say I am very pissed about this.  I am attempting to reverse this ban, but if I am not successful you can rest assured that my time paying Blizzard for adventures in Azeroth is over.

-Nate, CustomPCMAX

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Update: It has been approximately 5 hours since I petitioned Blizzard for a reversal on this ruling.  Surprise… no response yet.  I suspect I am not the only person to be unfairly banned, so I guess they probably have a lot of emails to review.

Click to view

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Update 2: Apparently enough people were complaining about this new system that Blizzard has decided against mandatory use of ‘RealID’ (or your real first and last names) on their forums. I guess they do listen to something… though I am curious if it was the forum posters words or the people cancelling that made the difference.

All that said, I am still waiting for a response on my petition to have my ban removed. Strangely enough, I did get an email asking me to fill out a customer satisfaction survey regarding my ban… what do they think I am going to say?

LINK to new update: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=25968987278&sid=1&PageNo-1