Blizzard Gets The Cold Shoulder
posted Sunday Jul 11, 2010 by Josh Henry
One of my favorite aspects of posting on forums is the anonymity behind it all. So if I have something to say about a particular thread i can use my alternate account or something to put in my honest two cents in. Blizzard however doesn't or rather didn't think that I should have that privilege. For those of you that have been on a public forum before I am sure you are familiar with terms like flame wars, or trolls ect, and keeping those terms in mind, is how Blizzard came up with the Real ID system.
The Real ID system essentially requires you to give your real life name, and have your name show up on every official forum post you make. Can you say privacy concerns? After the announcement on their brilliant idea...lets just say that the Blizz Boys had a ton of complaints to deal with. So much in fact that they ended up deciding that it was in their best interest to not go ahead with the plan.
Blizzard stated Tuesday:
Removing the veil of anonymity typical to online dialogue will contribute to a more positive forum environment, promote constructive conversations, and connect the Blizzard community in ways they haven't been connected before
So you can kind of see where they are coming from but forum users didn't see it the way that Blizzard did. After all of the forum posts made by users the following quote basically sums up the communities thoughts in saying:
I know a lot of people are going to just simply STOP using the forums when you do this, you're not bringing us together, you're making us all too afraid to interact with each other out of fear of identity theft
Blizzard also made it clear that the Real ID system they were going to implement in the forums was not the same as the optional feature to link the real life names of players on your friends list. In its effort to improve forums, Blizzard said Friday, it will still move ahead with new features such as the ability to rate posts up or down and highlight posts based on rating, as well as improved search functionality, and more.
