The RealID Fiasco!
The official WoW forums have been abuzz these past few days. The reason? Well, Blizzard announced 2 days ago plans to introduce the RealID system onto the forums. This would have meant that instead of logging into one of your in-game characters to post under, you would have been forced to write forum posts under the alias of your real name. That is, the name associated against your account.
The implications of such a change would have been absolutely insane. Blizzard’s reasoning behind this was to attempt to wipe out the troll infestation by forcing people to post under their real names, meaning anything they said essentially went against them as a person.
Naturally, the forum community didn’t take it too well. And who can blame them, really? I mean, I occasionally post on the forums — never anything interesting — but even I wouldn’t want to post anything that could implicate me as a person against a game I play.
A lot of peoples’ reactions were the same. Some took it — in my opinion — a bit too far into tin-foil hat territory, making suggestions along the line that if you were looking for a job, the potential employer could carry out a Google search and find you ranting about shitty DPS in a raid on WoW.
The best summary I could find about the implications of the new features was this scene from what I assume is Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back (feel free to correct me in the comments if I’m wrong):
And it was covered in-depth by various wow bloggers and vloggers, such as (long video, but makes many valid points):
It even made BBC News.
In addition to this, the forums themselves went into an uproar. Every single thread (bar a handful) posted in the last 48 hours was about this new implementation and opposing it (there were a small number in favour, but the number of Pro-RealID vs Anti-RealID must have been about 10,000;1), despite Blizzard forum moderators insisting people keep to a single stickied thread (a forum thread that went over 675 pages [with 19 posts per page], and that was only the European realms, was said to be over 1,000 pages).
In any case, today, that 675+ page thread has now gone, replaced with a post from Vaneras.
So, there we have it. I think we all owe a bit of a thank you for the forum community for being so vocal in their opinions, which had them so quickly reverse their decision.
