Sennadar Forums

I'm glad I quit WoW a while ago.

http://www.tgdaily.com/games-and-entert ... ame-policy

And several other sites.

What are they thinking? Are they insane?

I have to say, though, I saw this coming. Blizzard has encroached more and more into the game, eroding it and its pillars in favor of profit. I dug a little, and found out that the root of this is that Activision and Facebook have made a deal to go into business together. That's the profit motive fueling this push to enforce Real ID into the game. It's all about that targeted marketing at WoW players through Facebook's advertisers.

/sigh.

I remember when they said battle.net was purely optional.

Then I remember when they started giving out in-game pets as incentive for people to merge their WoW accounts into battle.net.

Then, they made battle.net mandatory.

I can only wonder when they're going to come out and say "Real ID is now mandatory for WoW." Meaning that anyone who plays WoW can get access to your personal information.

My account expired like 4 months ago. I believe I'll contact Blizzard and ask them to completely purge my battle.net account and completely delete my WoW subscription.

Good news, I've struck a deal with Facebook to sell off your personal information.

Effective immediately, everyone must provide:
- Full name, address, and contact phone numbers.
- Mothers Maiden Name
- Last 4 digits of your Credit Card, Expiry, and CCV2.
- Scan of your passport, drivers licence, or other legally recognised photo identification in your jurisdiction.
- For Americans: Your Social Security Number
- For Australians: Your Tax File Number.

For this, you'll get HTML Signatures and animated avatars. What a deal!

(Yes, this is a joke)

Fel wrote:I'm glad I quit WoW a while ago.

http://www.tgdaily.com/games-and-entert ... ame-policy

And several other sites.

What are they thinking? Are they insane?

(edited for brevity)

My account expired like 4 months ago. I believe I'll contact Blizzard and ask them to completely purge my battle.net account and completely delete my WoW subscription.

I caught a mention of this on the BBC news site under 'Technology' and noticed that some sucker did sign into the forum using his real name -- inside of five minutes other forum members were posting his telephone number, address, work number and a lot of other info on the forum. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/10543100.stm

So, yeah, if I were you I'd ask for any and all info to be deleted.

KP

For everyones info. blizzard ent. does not send an email asking for account info of any type. I had a tech person tell me that. so if you got a email asking for it then delete that message and do not reply that is a hacker message

wolfy1 wrote:For everyones info. blizzard ent. does not send an email asking for account info of any type. I had a tech person tell me that. so if you got a email asking for it then delete that message and do not reply that is a hacker message

Actually, IMO, one should always delete such like emails.

I almost never give anyone any real information about who I am or where I live. When I want to get on a site that asks for name & address info, I use a bogus name, make up a street address, and use "Santa Claus, IN, 47579", or "North Pole, AK, 99705" (both of which are real) or use "2601 East Jackson Chicago, IL, 60600" which is about a mile out in the lake.

Personally, I'm a fan of the RealID system as it is currently enacted. I have a current subscription to WoW and I try to keep up with news. As I understand it, RealID does record your real information, but it does NOT hand that information out to anyone who asks. The account has a privacy setting that restricts who can see what information. People who know you can find you by using your real info, but a stranger can't (under normal non-hacking circumstances) find your real info by searching your character profile, unless you let them.

Is there room for Blizzard to create a disaster? Of course. Welcome to the Internet Age. Is it a disaster yet? No, and it might even be a good thing for now.

-DigitalMaestro

DigitalMaestro wrote:Personally, I'm a fan of the RealID system as it is currently enacted. I have a current subscription to WoW and I try to keep up with news. As I understand it, RealID does record your real information, but it does NOT hand that information out to anyone who asks. The account has a privacy setting that restricts who can see what information. People who know you can find you by using your real info, but a stranger can't (under normal non-hacking circumstances) find your real info by searching your character profile, unless you let them.

Is there room for Blizzard to create a disaster? Of course. Welcome to the Internet Age. Is it a disaster yet? No, and it might even be a good thing for now.

-DigitalMaestro

You're playing WoW. You do a PuG raid.

You roll on and win something.

Three days later, you're getting troll emails from someone you've never heard of, making all kinds of nasty threats, and to your shock, he knows the name of your mother, sister, and your wife. You get home to find the police at your door, wanting to ask you a few questions about some child that lives 4 blocks from you and you don't know. After a few minutes, you find out that someone called in an anonymous tip and said you'd made inappropriate and illegal sexual suggestions to her, and after the girl denied it, they were just following up their investigation by talking to you and getting your side of it. Then, after getting that sorted out, you receive a phone call where a teenager is threatening to come to your house and kill your dog. You hang up, the doorbell rings, and there's a pizza delivery guy there bringing you the 3 large anchovy pizzas and breadsticks you ordered.

The person behind it all also rolled on that piece of gear, and he lost. Instead of shrugging and moving on, he instead nerdraged. He searched the forums and found a post you made to the technical support forum when you updated your video drivers and had some graphical issues with the game and connected it to your in-game character. He got your real name. Thirty minutes and a visit to 123people or intelius later, and after spending $.99, he got your address, telephone number, names of your family members, address of the property you own over in the next county, and your facebook page. The facebook page revealed all the intimate details that allowed him to tailor his trolling and threats to make it very personal.

Is this likely to happen? No. It's quite unlikely.

Is it POSSIBLE for it to happen? Very much so.

And when you're dealing with a game with about 6 million players, the possible is only a statistical inevitability.

Blizzard has a responsibility to protect its players not just from the trolls and the flamers on the forums, but also from the POSSIBLITY that something that happens in their game can affect someone out in the real world.

My personal perspective of this is that this is a GAME, not a social networking site. When I signed up for battle.net long ago, when they made it mandatory, I admit that I rather naively used my real name, because I never once dreamed that blizzard would ever do something this insane.

Does it bother me having my real name on the intertubes? This site answers your question. My real name is plastered all over around here, and it appears in a copyright tag in some of my oldest chapter files (I stopped doing that when I found out that copyright laws didn't require the tag to appear in every chapter for copyright to be in effect). My address is also publicly listed on this site, so people can send me the postcards I collect. (I got a new one on Friday, YAY!).

But, would I feel comfortable knowing that some whackjob who thinks WoW is the most important thing in his entire universe whom I inadvertantly pissed off in game might get access to my real name and decide to go 4chan all over me?

Absolutely NOT.

Because of this Real ID change, I will not renew my WoW account, which saddens me. I'd let it lapse because I ran out of things to do, but I was going to reactivate a month or so before Cataclysm came out and play the expansion. I was also going to buy Starcraft II and Diablo III, but now I will not.

Because I value my privacy far more than I enjoy their games.

EDIT: woah, I just saw a story about this on MSNBC.

As in TV network news.

The anchor had no idea what WoW was (she called it "wow" until no doubt her producer corrected her in her earpiece), but they made mention that the players of the game are up in arms over the change.

That's some serious bad publicity for Blizzard/Activision.

This is a bigger story than I thought, lol.

Ditto Fel, I was thinking much the same.
First Blizz chose to make SC2 activation mandatory with your battle.net account, that already made me very, very wary of going out any buying the game. I may still do, for the collectors edition, but I probably won't activate it, and instead get a crack to play single player.
Now they did this, and the first thing I thought of was that this was so going to backfire.
They already had an 80+ page thread on the official forums with the announcement two days ago. I can only imagine it being much larger now.

Quin

As an amusing note, apparently if you tick the box which says "someone under 18 plays on this account" they have to disable RealID. So that's one way around it.

For once a benefit to the child protection laws.

I honestly could care less about the change as they've announced it since, the only way anyone actually gets your real id is either you allow them to in game, as in they make a friend request and you respond. Or around the release of the new expansion, when they redo the forums, you make a forum post. Any current posts made are not going to display your real idea. I do agree that people have the right to privacy, and in my opinion if you'd like to protect that privacy when the changes come through you have a bunch of options. Don't play anymore, which is the option that blizzard wants to discourage, or don't post anything on the forums.

I will admit i don't think blizzard seriously thought this idea though, since they also announced "blue" posters will also have their full names shown. They tried to calm down alot of anger and rage on the forums after this was announced by giving out their own name, and had it turned on them, when in 15 minutes of posting, there was the blue posters name, home address, telephone number all on the forums. That thread was promptly deleted.

I think that the ones who will suffer the most is actually going to be blizzard. This is a very polarizing issue, and yes it is a game not facebook and thats exactly what plenty of people see when they see these changes. The forums can at times be absolutely filled with trolls, but occasionally there is some really well thought out and well written stuff on them. I think the well thought out and positive advice is actually what blizzard will see less of.

ahhh big brother is upon us.

Wonder how Blizzard will react to this real life example:


Blizzard Employees Face Denial Of Privacy Attack
Protesting the end of anonymity in Blizzard's forums, a self-proclaimed 'nerdy white male' aggregates information on Blizzard employees to highlight the privacy risks of real names.

http://www.informationweek.com/news/sec ... 10-07-09_h

Due to the uproar Blizzard has decided not to required real names while posting to the forums:

http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.htm ... 9821&sid=1

Greymist wrote:Due to the uproar Blizzard has decided not to required real names while posting to the forums:

http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.htm ... 9821&sid=1

Yeah, which I'm glad to see.

Activision was the one pushing it, and I'm glad that they saw that sometimes you can even push MMO addicted basement dwellers too far.

When your decision about a game hits the front page of a major news webpage (MSNBC, Yahoo, if you consider their news news), you know you did something VERY WRONG.

Because of the change, I will now feel comfortable buying cataclysm when it comes out, and checking out Starcraft II (though I suck at RTS type games).

I may even go buy a game card this weekend and piddle around in WoW, since Civ4 is losing my interest again.

DIABLO III. zoinks.

*tic!*