Online users
- tanitha
RealID to be implemented on Forums
From a blue post Here, bolded portions the rage part...
Recently, we introduced our new Real ID feature - http://www.battle.net/realid/ , a new way to stay connected with your friends on the new Battle.net. Today, we wanted to give you a heads up about our plans for Real ID on our official forums, discuss the design philosophy behind the changes we’re making, and give you a first look at some of the new features we’re adding to the forums to help improve the quality of conversations and make the forums an even more enjoyable place for players to visit.
The first and most significant change is that in the near future, anyone posting or replying to a post on official Blizzard forums will be doing so using their Real ID -- that is, their real-life first and last name -- with the option to also display the name of their primary in-game character alongside it. These changes will go into effect on all StarCraft II forums with the launch of the new community site prior to the July 27 release of the game, with the World of Warcraft site and forums following suit near the launch of Cataclysm. Certain classic forums, including the classic Battle.net forums, will remain unchanged.
The official forums have always been a great place to discuss the latest info on our games, offer ideas and suggestions, and share experiences with other players -- however, the forums have also earned a reputation as a place where flame wars, trolling, and other unpleasantness run wild. 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. With this change, you’ll see blue posters (i.e. Blizzard employees) posting by their real first and last names on our forums as well.
We also plan to add a number of other features designed to make reading the forums more enjoyable and to empower players with tools to improve the quality of forum discussions. Players will have the ability to rate up or rate down posts so that great topics and replies stand out from the not-so-great; low-rated posts will appear dimmer to show that the community feels that they don’t contribute effectively to the conversation, and Blizzard’s community team will be able to quickly and easily locate highly rated posts to participate in or to highlight discussions that players find worthwhile.
In addition, individual topics will be threaded by context, meaning replies to specific posts will be grouped together, making it easier for players to keep track of multiple conversations within a thread. We’re also adding a way for Blizzard posters to “broadcast” important messages forums-wide , to help communicate breaking news to the community in a clear and timely fashion. Beyond that, we’re improving our forum search function to make locating interesting topics easier and help lower the number of redundant threads, and we have more planned as well.
With the launch of the new Battle.net, it’s important to us to create a new and different kind of online gaming environment -- one that’s highly social, and which provides an ideal place for gamers to form long-lasting, meaningful relationships. All of our design decisions surrounding Real ID -- including these forum changes -- have been made with this goal in mind.
We’ve given a great deal of consideration to the design of Real ID as a company, as gamers, and as enthusiastic users of the various online-gaming, communication, and social-networking services that have become available in recent years. As these services have become more and more popular, gamers have become part of an increasingly connected and intimate global community – friendships are much more easily forged across long distances, and at conventions like PAX or our own BlizzCon, we’ve seen first-hand how gamers who may have never actually met in person have formed meaningful real-life relationships across borders and oceans. As the way gamers interact with one another continues to evolve, our goal is to ensure Battle.net is equipped to handle the ever-changing social-gaming experience for years to come.
For more info on Real ID, check out our Real ID page and FAQ located at http://www.battle.net/realid/ . We look forward to answering your questions about these upcoming forum changes in the thread below.
[ Post edited by Nethaera ]
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Please tell me this is Blizz trolling hard.
Beyond that, we’re improving our forum search function to make locating interesting topics easier and help lower the number of redundant threads, and we have more planned as well.
Stigg, that should have told you they're trolling hard. We all know that nobody uses a search function on the forums :)
However, I guess not. Because Real ID is starting to sound like a REALLY good idea now. They did however indicate it will be opt in, so there is some comfort there. But damn man. It's like Blizzard is saying: "Please, we want your accounts to be hacked."
Or maybe it is Blizzard saying: "We want more money so buy Authenticators".
There are even more reasons to loathe it as well.
Blizzard is opening a new data center in Singapore for the Star Craft 2 portion of Battle Net that deals with Asia / Pacific. Now guess what is going to happen to Real ID communication across Battle Net and how that will impact on Oceanic players that are ALREADY working with the latency of a link between Australia and US. It is going to have yet another impact on our ability to play the bloody game competitively.
And ... well. Yeah. It's like somebody at Blizzard had a wet dream about beating Facebook with Atiesh's long staff and suddenly threw all the security holes into the game.
They either want us hacked or stalked...
I know I refused to tell anyone my last name ingame unless I knew them well because it was a less common name. It seems like people are willing to give out all kinds of information about themselves online anymore, and I think names are a big deal. People can Google and find out where you live, your phone number, etc. with just a name and perhaps a few other pieces of information.
I might be a bit paranoid about the name thing, but what's next? Our phone number and billing address appears next to our RealID name?
BigBearButt, perhaps the best Feral tanking Druid blogger for both his knowledge, his rants and his lovely flowing style of writing had this to say:
Going much further back, and using nothing but my name and some clues about what city I live in, and probably a story about where I’d lived in the past, I had somebody post a link to my real street address, and threaten to come over to my house and kill my son because I love bacon.
From here
Now that scares me. Yes, he is a blogger and in the public domain but now Blizzard wants to put all of our names in the public domain. That is already one part of the shared secret between them and you and their own Loading Screen says "Do not share your account details with anybody except Stigg"
I don't want to be hacked or stalked either. And my plan was, when Ely is old enough (About 2 years now) to gently introduce her to Azeroth. Can I let my kids play now with the real threats around this?
So I guess no more Blizzard forums and careful, restricted in-game conversations.
I'm not happy about this either to say the least.
Then again, I don't post on the official forums anyway, so that's at least a small consolation.
And your Blogger fellow isn't just whistling Dixie. I've managed to track down a person as well. Said person was stalking a friend of mine, but the police didn't want to believe that said person was doing so, because they believed said person was in another state and too far away to be doing that.
Spent about 2 hours, going through name combo's and cities in the state etc etc. In the end I was left with 6 possible hits. Gave them to my friend, she took them to the cops and Nr. 2 on the list was the jackpot.
And this was back around, I think it was, 2002. Well prior to Facebook and such sites.
It's one reason why I always use a handle as opposed to my real name, and I once did a google search for my name. Lots of hits. None about me. Most were convicts for some reason. :D
Back in 1999 on new years eve I had some people over at my house. We were in an AOL chatroom and decided to troll a user (trollin' like its 1999). Anyways, AOL had user profiles where you could list just about anything, very similar to a Facebook profile. (Note: All information hereforth is made-up, I don't recall anything specific).
So we were talking to a user that went by "Soccer86"... we looked at her user profile and all it said was her name was Mary and she lived in Walkersville, Utah.
So we did some googling (it wasn't google they weren't around yet) and found out there were only two schools in Walkersville, Utah. We googled the schools and discovered the student population of one far exceeded the other, so we told her we went to that larger school and had a crush on her.
We then pulled up a school roster and discovered that only four girls had the name Mary... we deducted she was born in 1984 from her username which would have put her in 10th grade at the time, and there was two Mary's from that year. So we googled "Mary" and the school name and discovered that one of the girls was a prominent field hockey player... so we asked the user if she was going out for field hockey next year. She replied "of course" or something like that and we knew we had the right girl. We even had a picture of her "dribbling" or whatever the hell the field hockey thing was doing.
Anyways, we also looked up some other school stuff and discovered the name of a senior on the football team. We told her we were him, we thought she was beautiful (lol@blurry newspaper photo) and that we were going out to a movie that night to celebrate new years. We looked up movie times in that town, found an accurate time and cinema complex and asked her to meet us there. She was soooo freaking excited.
And then we logged off.
Moral of the story: Even in 1999 I could have completely kidnapped a girl using the intrawebz. Also, New Years Eve for the year 2000 completely sucked ass for me... I spent it trolling on a dial-up connection.
so now, i'm sure some mook will come across this story, log onto classmates and look to see what came of this shady "love connection" you started for those two poor shmucks.
Katie Vampire rawr.
Hah. I do not sparkle.
Oh, and do you feel like having a wet shit?
No, you can click on that link. Nothing about girls and cups, I promise.
Did any former security professionals whinge long and hard about Blizzard introducing an additional attack footprint to their software by adding RealID?
So now Add Ons can expose your details without you friending somebody and without your consent. Whoop. Dee. Fucking. Doo.
I don't know what Blizzard has been smoking, but they're completely, totally, off the wall, alice-ain't-got-nuthin'-on-'em, utterly, stupendously retarded when it comes to these changes.
I honestly trying hard to think of a way to properly express my disgust at this new "Let's be the facebook of the MMO's"-attitude, but having a hard time doing so without reaching for expletives.
Just swear in Dutch. Most folks here wouldn't understand it anyway.
Tan might get the gist of it, but that's about it.
The rest would be clueless, and I just don't care, not after tonight anyway. :P
Tbh, I'm actually more well-versed at swearing in English.
But calling Blizzard a "maergat hoender poes" sounds so much better, doesn't it?
It has a certain, catchy ring to it ;)
I prefer:
En welke achterlijke tijfus mongool heeft dit nauw weer bedacht?
Zit hij soms te veel lijntjes te snuiven? Je hoofd moet wel zo diep in je reet zitten, dat je je eigen amandelen kan tongen, als je denkt dat dit een goed idee is.
Vergeleken hiermee is Geert Wilders het toonbeeld van rationeel denken. :D
I'm not sure I want to know what an "amandalen" is and why you'd want to put your tongue to it. But yes, I can hear this our Dutch neighbour rant that out :)
The English term would be Tonsils.
Should illustrate the profanity a wee bit better. Least for you and Aerath anyway. :P
Well. Now I know which end the head was going in :)
Unlike some other forums we also couldn't give a flying fuck, so long as you aren't being a complete dickwad towards any of us.
This is true as well. <3 Stiggly
Problem is, you wouldn't know what is being said.
So I could call you een ouwe rukker, and you wouldn't know what I'd said, without having to ask Tan or Aerath. :P
But I'm "nice" and I'll tell you anyway: You're an old master debater. :P
It's cool. I do debate well, though I really get going when my hands start moving.
Google translate is your friend =)
Is this the result of the Activision merger? All this shit... it's not the Blizzard I knew. And there I was thinking BioWare's new social forums were bad!
I'm very disappointed. This is so ridiculous it's April fools worthy.
I'm with Darth on this.
Just watch. Coming soon, a new forums plan for a mere $30 a month where you can post without your real name being revealed!
Wow. Just wow. People grabbed the details of an (at least one) blue poster and put them in the thread. Siblings, phone number, home address, facebook (which now is deleted...), photobucket files...
I would hope it's the actual Blizzard poster rather than some poor sap, but either way it's one unlucky sod. Go go number change.
Whilst I disagree with this, it does show exactly what might (nay, will) happen. I hope this can wake some folk at Blizzard up.
[WoW forums thread], which is growing beyond belief.
And apparently you'll need realID as well to even play SCII, if I'm reading that thread that Aerath linked correctly.
Update. It wasn't the real Blizzard employee. Someone had a really miserable day, for no reason other than sharing names with a blue.
And the thread is nearing 25k replies. Amazing.
Terrible.
It will be interesting to see how Blizzard deals with this. Stick to the plan or listen to the community? I've never seen such a large thread, and the scope of the issue goes way beyond mere gameplay mechanics. Surely they can't completely ignore this mess.
Sure they can. Activision already proved they don't give a fuck regarding any form of petitions from players. CoD:MW2 proved the hell out of that.
Problem for them is, some Canucks have written to the respective Governmental Organization responsible for privacy in Canuckia, and they got enough responses to start up an investigation.
This could result in WoW being banned in Canada, and all Blizzard games utilizing RealID.
And the EU is no slouch on privacy matters eithers, and I this might just fall under the perview of Neelie Smith Kroes, who did a real number on M$. Could also fall under John Dalli or Viviane Reding. No idea how competent those two are, but if Kroes gets involved, then Bobby has bitten off more than he can chew.
Because she's not above levying fines so high that it'll simply be unprofitable to do business in Europe.
Plus the mainstream media is also getting interested.
link
What would happen if Blizzard were to simply make it optional, but then make future features dependant on using RealID?
I think it is optional in that you can disable RealID via the child protection whatsits or not visiting forums. But as someone pointed out, what about technical issues and such where your main route of troubleshooting IS the forums?
Blizzard keeps arguing that they're doing this so that trollers and flamers will hopefully hesitate when they post on forums, but how many people have fake names associated with RealID and will just go on and troll and flame anyway?
Speaking of, has anyone tried changing their name on RealID/Battle.net? I'm assuming you can't, right?
Their own MVPs are apparently saying that they'll stop posting once this goes live. And those are the guys doing free tech support, amongst other things.
Haven't tried it, haven't logged in for a while. Too busy with the APB Beta at the time, so my account has lapsed. But if it's anything like your regular account system, then changing name won't be possible.
Seeing how you have to call Blizzard to have them change the name, in case of marriage/divorce etc.
You can not change your name. You can change your email address and contact information (address, etc, not name). In order to post on the forums, you will be logging in with your battle net account which has your real name which will be used.
I read a blue reply to a question regarding technical support. (side note: if any of you have bluetracker RSS feeds, they have blown the hell up) The reply said "If you require technical assistance and do not wish to show us your real name, you are more than welcome to give us a call at XXX-XXX-XXXX. CHances are we have already answered the question anyway and a simple search of the forums can find you the answer."
I have also read blue replies saying, quite literally, "If you don't like these changes, feel free to go to a non-official forum to post your guild recruitments, guides, etc."
No idea.
Privacy laws are funny sometimes.
At times they've been written in such a way, that even if you consented to something, that you still do not have the right to waive your rights.
And I forgot, in another thread some Argentinian guy replied. Said he was a lawyer over there with his own firm, specializing in International law and that Blizzard's plans kinda contravened a number of international treaties in addition to Argentinian privacy laws.
Course he could be BS'ing, but if he's telling the truth. Just another wrinkle, that Bobby and his greed didn't count on.
I haven't heard anything about what valas said regarding SC2 requiring the use of RealID, but for the time being, everything is optional. You don't HAVE to post on the official forums. They offer a phone service if you require technical assistance (though the two times I have used that it took over 3 hours to get in contact with a person).
So they are not forcing you to show your real name ever. YOU choose to show it. Of course that also means if you have some awesome information to share about your class or a raid strategy or guild recruitment or anything else, you either find another source (like one Mangara mentioned) -or- you use the official forums and are REQUIRED to show your real name.
Did add the addendum, if I'm reading things correctly. :P
It's in that thread anyway..
Somewhere. Skipped a lot of pages. lol
Phoning them would be a viable option if we all lived in the same time zone and on the same continent. But paying for an international phone call when we live 12 hours apart is painful.
As a Canadian, I've been a bit concerned about this too. Facebook has made the headlines a lot recently and the media enjoy encouraging paranoia with identity theft stories and the like. This might not end well at all.
Yup. Not a day goes by I don't read some headline about facebook security flaws.
And the BBC is wading in as well.
The hell, thats Raws' image!
Just the new geezer from SC2 iirc.
Amazing stuff in that BBC article:
One World of Warcraft player, *** ****, contacted BBC News to say how disappointed he was over the change. "I have been using the forums for over five years, reporting bugs and trying to be helpful. Now, to have the privilege to help people on the forums I have to reveal my real name; I'm dead against it," he said. "I work in a charity and deal with governments officials. If they do a search and see I am a gamer, it could affect my employment prospects," he added.
So, this guy calls the BBC about how he is against Blizzard's new policy of posting your real name because it could damage his professional career and they instantly publish an article with his real name that says he's a WoW player? GG.
Yeah, found that facepalmy as well from Aunty.
Wow. GG indeed.