Update: Suspicions confirmed – Blizzard has officially reversed their decision, and Real ID will not be required to post on the forums. I’m letting the post stand, regardless.
On Tuesday, Blizzard-Activision announced that all forum users, including Blizzard “blues”, or moderators, would have their Real ID names displayed on their forum posts. They claimed it was part of an effort to “reduce trolling”. Apparently, they’ve rescinded the part of their policy concerning Blizzard employees, but not the general player base.
As you can imagine, there’s been an uproar: the official thread has reached a thousand posts, and that’s not counting the dozens of protest threads springing up on both the general and realm forums. Many players are publicly canceling their accounts.
WoW players are, in short, not happy. The real ID system has been a subject of controversy since it’s inception. Some players are delighted, citing convenience and cross-faction utility, while others feel it displays a worrying breach into user privacy and a sleazy “e-Harmony” or “Myspace” social-free-for-all attitude. However, I think we can tentatively say that the majority of users feel the forum changes are a step too far.
I’m part of that majority, but I’m alarmed that so many players are descending into a frenzy. No, I don’t believe the forum changes are positive, but that doesn’t mean that the Real ID system as a whole needs to be totally trashed. Real ID has benefits for some players and would benefit from some minor tweaking – namely, don‘t display the “friends of friends”, and keep the old forum system of posting as characters. Avaryse over at Rolecraft makes a good suggestion, as well: the use of a global handle instead of your real name.
A few of those benefits of Real ID are (in case they have been forgotten in this media flurry):
- Cross-faction roleplay
- RL friends aren’t separated by server
- Keeping track of the friend with altitus
- Real ID is not mandatory
Here are the most common arguments against Real ID that I appear to be seeing:
Argument #1: “Stalkers and other unsavory types will use this information to slander, defile, and harm you, going so far as to post your personal information for all to see.”
Any time you connect to the Internet, your unique IP address can be discovered and then plotted on a map via satellite. It is particularly easy to figure out someone’s IP address if the user posts on any kind of forum or blog, pseudonym (character name, in this case) or not.
Put another way, hackers don’t need your name to find you. If anything, snagging your IP address is easier, considering the fact googling your name will bring up hundreds of false hits. So, while having your name attached to your form posts is anything but desirable, it is not “suddenly” putting you at risk. You already are at risk.
Oh, and by the way, your argument loses some effectiveness if you use Facebook. And please, don’t try to say you “don’t use Facebook“. It’s like saying you don’t eat fast food – statistically, you have.
Argument #2: “I have [a young sibling, a son, a daughter, a cousin, a niece, nephew, small street urchin] that is [X] years old and this is making the internet not safe for them.”
I hear this “think-of-the-children” argument far too often for my liking.
Sorry, but the internet is inherently unsafe by its very design, and insisting that we must baby-proof the internet is ignorant of human nature*, insults the mental faculties of the children we seek to “protect”, and unnecessarily restricts the actions of reasonable, critically thinking adults.
Children are, contrary to popular belief, not that different from their adult counterparts. Sure, they may make mistakes and they may not have yet formed their own opinions, but that’s a reasonable condition considering a finite amount of time on the Earth. They are just as inquisitive and capable of learning as their adult counterparts – perhaps more so.
Sit down and discuss internet safety with the kids in your life. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.** And keep in mind if little Johnny doesn’t understand the basics, he has just as much a chance of getting in trouble without Real ID: names, phone numbers, and emails are shared just as easily through a regular whisper.
All in all, there’s an easy way to avoid all this melodrama: don’t use Real ID, and don’t use the forums.
But, Versed, you say, I pay fifteen dollars a month to use all aspects of the game, and that includes the forums.
Technically, the forums aren’t part of the game – they’re a supplement, a supplement only a small fraction of players use. If chatting in-game doesn’t suit certain purposes, there are other ways to connect with your fellow WoW players – community sites and unofficial forums, for example. We won’t wither and die if the forum changes go through (which, between you and me, I don’t think they will).
In closing, a fellow resident of my server raises some of my points here if you’d like further reading.
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*: I’m referencing the fact that we, as human beings, have reasons for using the internet as we do – we like the illusion of anonymity because it enables us to do and be what we may not be allowed to in our non-virtual lives, find the answers to questions we’re afraid to ask, etc. And we will continue (regardless of age) to use the internet for “inappropriate” things. Any safeguard will become woefully out of date in the face of our own ingenuity.
**: I’m not saying that the family unit is the sole institution responsible for raising a child – on the contrary, I think it’s simplistic and insulting to say, in general, “[So-and-so] did [X] wrong because you didn’t raise so-and-so the right way.” But it is also wrong to place all the responsibility on all the other institutions – the Government, the Public School System, and so on, partly because they can’t handle it and partly because the words that come from our loved ones will always mean more than some obscure edict.
Versed 