@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.