Also on AOL
- Autos
- Technology
- Lifestyle
- Gaming
- Finance
- Entertainment on AOL
- Lifestyle on AOL
- Sports on AOL
- Travel on AOL
- More on AOL
Featured Galleries
Joystiq
© 2013 AOL Inc. All rights Reserved. Privacy Policy | Terms of Use | Trademarks | AOL A-Z HELP | About Our Ads
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
7-07-2010 @ 8:10AM
BubblePriest said...
I don't think this is a good reason for several ideas, the first being security concerns. Admittedly, the chances of your security being compromised from the changes are quite low. But when you multiply that by millions of players, the odds of it happening to someone become a near certainty. Does the financial advantage to Blizzard and some theoretical improvement on the forums justify the risk to a few people?
Second, I suspect that for every troll that is deterred by the loss of anonymity, another will spring up in response to the discovery that people who aren't like him (or her) post on the forums. There will be women's names, or ethnic names! The possibilities for offensive attention-seeking posts abound! Not only that, but instead of the ubiquitous "Nice armory bro" posts we will instead see trolls discredit legitimate posters by criticizing their profession, city of residence, or perhaps lack/existence of a significant other.
Third, I am concerned that Blizzard plans to extend Real ID to more facets of the game, without giving us the option to remove our real name from the equation at any point. If we could simply make an account-wide alias I would be much more comfortable. But at what point will opting out of all these opt-out features impinge upon our enjoyment of the game? Until Blizzard can answer that conclusively, I will continue to feel quite uncomfortable.
Reply
7-07-2010 @ 1:44PM
Lissanna said...
As a prominent female poster with a totally unique name (thanks, Mom!), I will NOT be continuing to post on the forums, because I refuse to give my real life info to the people who troll me on the forums, because I refuse to give them my phone number and address to make the trolling personal.
7-07-2010 @ 2:50PM
pwherman said...
@BubblePriest "If we could simply make an account-wide alias I would be much more comfortable."
An account-wide alias is the simplest answer to player's concerns about security (one more unique layer of information that is not a real name) that also addresses Blizzard's stated goal of improving the forums by reducing the amount of trolling (one name no matter how many alts are rolled.)
But Blizzard wasn't really trying to solve this problem, as much as evolve their business model, much as Facebook recently tried to evolve their business model by making more information publicly available, much to the consternation of its users.
The "there's no privacy anyway" arguments don't seem to have much merit, because other sites do give us choices. Twitter lets us create a unique name. So does the New York Times, and probably your bank, your phone company, etc. These companies don't ask us to reveal more than we wish to publicly convey. There is nothing in the concept of an umbrella ID that would have necessitated eliminating the option of creating a unique, but unchangeable, user-created account name.
To other arguments that forum management is expensive, and thus a cost that must be reduced, I would think that the opposite is true. Providing support forums, which involves the community in providing answers and input, is much less expensive than providing dedicated (account & password-bound) technical support to individual users. (I'm talking specifically about support forums here. Opinion forums might be considered extras to eliminate, but isn't it a nice problem to be so popular that people want to come to your site?)
If you think the gaming community already has a generally bad rap in the general media as a haven for social-misfits living in mother's basement on the one hand, and as clever child-molesting predators on the other, a few well-publicized incidents either of harassment or identity-theft originating from Blizzard's "evil video games" {insert video on angry and distraught parents here} is not going to help those perceptions.