Real ID comes to WoW

[Draegan]

Internet Detective indeed.  lol 

[Soln]

This is pretty funny.  All of it.

[Dren]

Keep in mind, he's doing that all for free.  You can easily get more if you are willing to pay for reports.

[Azazel]

Well that's a good backpedal. I still think the entire realid system needs some fine tuning, though. I'm not that fond of the friend of a friend thing.

]

Penny-Arcade sees the same thing.

You should be careful about any kind of celebration, though: the third paragraph tells you why.  They're still tying incredibly useful Battle.net functionality to it, so this is the Public Relations equivalent of Aikido.

[Sheepherder]

I wasn't trying for an address, is the photo I sent of you?

And how did you find his real name?

Yeah, I'm kind of perplexed.  He doesn't have my RealID.

I was making a point and trying not to be too much of a dick while doing it.  I don't do anything difficult and I also don't think I'm that good at it.  Belated congratulations on the Certificate you got in fifth grade for the essay on how to say "No to Drugs" though.

Ha, they gave one of those to everyone in the school district.

[Azazel]

I wasn't trying for an address, is the photo I sent of you?

Yes.  Four years old though.

You really should write a book about stalking people online.
---
Yeah, I'm kind of perplexed.  He doesn't have my RealID.

You really should accept that you got pwned hard and shut the fuck up now.

The point is that shit like that is even easier if you know someone's first and last names. Now pretend that instead of you being you, that you've got a female name, and that AP is some creepy guildmate guy, who'd really just like to get to know you a little more, but is a bit shy sometimes.

[waffel]

I wasn't trying for an address, is the photo I sent of you?

And how did you find his real name?

Yeah, I'm kind of perplexed.  He doesn't have my RealID.

I was making a point and trying not to be too much of a dick while doing it.  I don't do anything difficult and I also don't think I'm that good at it.  Belated congratulations on the Certificate you got in fifth grade for the essay on how to say "No to Drugs" though.

Ha, they gave one of those to everyone in the school district.

I'm sure it had something to do with going through your post history, pulling some relevant information about you, possible finding 'you' on another forum and doing the same, and then combing info in a search.

[Paelos]

It's funnier if he keeps going.  

[Azazel]

ok, sold. 

[Arthur_Parker]

I'm sure it had something to do with going through your post history, pulling some relevant information about you, possible finding 'you' on another forum and doing the same, and then combing info in a search.

I've sent him a pm with links so he can cover his tracks, but basically yes.

Edit to add, I forgot to say, I found it funny that Sheepherder doesn't do facebook, but his primary school certainly does.

[Sheepherder]

You really should accept that you got pwned hard and shut the fuck up now.

It's actually pretty lulzy.  He explained the magic trick, he's better at it than he gives himself credit for.

EDIT: I was out of primary and secondary school before they did Facebook.  I'm going to have to find if they've retroactively added information.

[Ingmar]

You really should accept that you got pwned hard and shut the fuck up now.

It seems sort of risky to me to go around posting contentious comments like this that might piss people off given how easy it is to track someone down on the internet! 

Just about any person who has posted on f13 long enough could probably be found - I know I would be trivially easy since I've not attempted to hide my tracks in any way and have linked stuff directly from things in my name on multiple occasions.

[Sheepherder]

Arthur Parker has an inhumanly accurate ability to recall factoids.  It's pretty fucking cool.

[Pennilenko]

Arthur Parker has an inhumanly accurate ability to recall factoids.  It's pretty fucking cool.

I hope your previous opinions are a bit more tempered now.

[Paelos]

Arthur Parker has an inhumanly accurate ability to recall factoids.  It's pretty fucking cool.

I hope your previous opinions are a bit more tempered now.

This is the internet. Once you've made a statement you cannot change your mind. HOW DARE YOU SUGGEST IT!  

[Khaldun]

The thing is, when you're in a pseudonymous environment like this one, where people have stable long-term identities and stable long-term forum personalities, it would take a really scary sociopath to NOT reveal information. You'd have to play weird, skanky kinds of identity games where you revealed false details, had several personas or attitudes, and so on. There are people who do in fact act just that way in blog comment areas or asynchronous forums and they are almost always obvious *as* psychopaths or disturbed people, even if that's all you know about them. Occasionally you even have forums where everyone is encouraged to act like that, where that's the local culture, but mostly, if you've got adults talking to each other over a period of years, they're going to give up a lot of information about who they are, what they do, where they live and so on.

[Ingmar]

And of course all that same sort of social information sharing goes on in guilds in WoW as well, which depending on how concerned or not you are about your privacy in general, could make RealID almost an afterthought in terms of your stalkability or whatever.

[Stabs]

Judging from Arthur's picture I think he may be part bloodhound.

The point I was making is that the leap from in-game anger to real life action is a smaller mental transition if the cocksucker corpse camping you is called Robert Foster than if he's called Thongor the Orc Warrior. Using real names puts people, angry people, in a social space where they're dealing with annoying real people rather than annoying game people.

It's not that RealID includes your address and where your little girl goes to school. It's that it gives other players the idea that you're a real person they can really get back at.

[Sheepherder]

I hope your previous opinions are a bit more tempered now.

Yes.  Humanity is doomed to the fire of Arthur's eyes.  No exceptions.

[Khaldun]

And yet keeps you just unreal enough that you're still someone "on the Internet". That's the dangerous combination: where what you know morally about a person is that they've been camping your corpse for two hours in Stranglethorn and emoting /assrape on you, but you don't know that the camper is a 32-year old accountant with two daughters who has been crying because they got fired yesterday but most of the time loves the same TV shows as you do. You only know the social information in the game, but you may know just enough real information out of the game to feel capable of ordering pizzas, making a creepy phone call, sending a message to their employer, and so on. And there's enough young people playing who also tend to have an underdeveloped understanding of consequences in any respect. It's a bad environment to be playing games with mix-and-matching the wrong forms of information.

[Ingmar]

Judging from Arthur's picture I think he may be part bloodhound.

The point I was making is that the leap from in-game anger to real life action is a smaller mental transition if the cocksucker corpse camping you is called Robert Foster than if he's called Thongor the Orc Warrior. Using real names puts people, angry people, in a social space where they're dealing with annoying real people rather than annoying game people.

It's not that RealID includes your address and where your little girl goes to school. It's that it gives other players the idea that you're a real person they can really get back at.

I think if you're at the point where you're worrying about random people you run across in a BG or something, you're probably going to drive yourself crazy for no reason.

Really if there's a group you should be concerned about, it is people you have at least some kind of regular social contact with. Situations where someone you don't 'know' is going to do something like track you down and do something over a random PVP kill somewhere are random crazy stastical outliers that are really not worth worrying about. In other words, if you have a creepy guildmate or something along those lines, that's the guy to watch out for, not someone from the opposite faction who you can't even talk to in game. I don't have a source at hand but I'm pretty sure the vast majority of stalking/harrassment type incidents come from people you know.

Humans are just bad in general at balancing risks. We take much bigger risks every time we get into a car and drive somewhere, but car crashes are commonplace and not sensationalized like the occasional 'guy drove 500 miles to attack someone with a samurai sword because he ninjaed his Cloudsong' situations.

And I know I'm being flippant and I don't really mean to minimize the risks - obviously it is a good thing they toned down the proposed forum system, it wasn't really necessary. But otherwise with the people you're likely to want to use it with - RL friends, guildmates you've known a long time, etc. - what they can do with your RealID is not really any different risk-wise than the information you've probably already shared with most of them. And if you're a person who already keeps their information very close to the vest, then it seems unlikely to me you're going to want to use the features that RealID enables at this point anyway.

[AutomaticZen]

And of course all that same sort of social information sharing goes on in guilds in WoW as well, which depending on how concerned or not you are about your privacy in general, could make RealID almost an afterthought in terms of your stalkability or whatever.

Pretty much.  Hence why the extra mouth-froth on top of everything else is interesting.

The point I was making is that the leap from in-game anger to real life action is a smaller mental transition if the cocksucker corpse camping you is called Robert Foster than if he's called Thongor the Orc Warrior. Using real names puts people, angry people, in a social space where they're dealing with annoying real people rather than annoying game people.

It's not that RealID includes your address and where your little girl goes to school. It's that it gives other players the idea that you're a real person they can really get back at.

Well put.

[Nevermore]

And of course all that same sort of social information sharing goes on in guilds in WoW as well, which depending on how concerned or not you are about your privacy in general, could make RealID almost an afterthought in terms of your stalkability or whatever.

That seems to use the same logic as "Why bother using a seat belt when I could still die in a car crash anyway?"  People can still try to minimize risk even if it can't be eliminated completely.

[Stabs]

I'm not actually worried for myself that someone is going to show up at the door with an axe. I am worried that some people will die, especially young people. I would feel very uncomfortable if I went along with RealID because I simply must play Diablo 3 and later saw on the news that a young woman had been murdered by a WoW-related stalker. I watched an interview with the parents of the girl murdered by a Facebook sexual predator and it haunts me.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/wear/8556914.stm

Possibly I'm overly sensitive. It won't really be my fault if Blizzard exposes their customers to a one in a million risk of being murdered and the statistical 11 murders happen. But I would feel that I should have taken a stand.

Personally what is far more likely given my career as a librarian by day and gamer bastard by night is someone would phone my boss and tell her what a terrible person I am. I'd probably lose my job if I upset a 9 year old girl so much she couldn't log into World of Warcraft but I'm regularly upsetting other players (ganking, auction house undercutting, assigning raid loot to someone else, etc). It wouldn't be hard for a pissed off person to get me sacked.

[Ingmar]

And of course all that same sort of social information sharing goes on in guilds in WoW as well, which depending on how concerned or not you are about your privacy in general, could make RealID almost an afterthought in terms of your stalkability or whatever.

That seems to use the same logic as "Why bother using a seat belt when I could still die in a car crash anyway?"  People can still try to minimize risk even if it can't be eliminated completely.

Of course - but at the same time there is a line where you can be so risk-averse that you end up costing yourself something useful for no significant gain. The issue is finding where that line is for yourself. For you obviously it is in a different place than for me.

EDIT: To provide what is perhaps an extreme example, if either Sjofn or I had been as risk-averse about social contact through the Internet as many (most?) people in this thread seem to be advocating, we'd never have met, gotten married, etc. Obviously I prefer the result I've got to that.

Possibly I'm overly sensitive. It won't really be my fault if Blizzard exposes their customers to a one in a million risk of being murdered and the statistical 11 murders happen. But I would feel that I should have taken a stand.

At the moment (pending the definitive answering of the RealID mod channel loophole issue) it isn't really accurate to say "Blizzard is exposing their customers to X risk". Blizzard is providing you a tool that you *can* use, that has some tangible benefits, but also some downsides. You have the choice to use it, or not. Some people will choose not to use it; others will and will consciously be deciding to have their name out where it can be found. I can't really call that Blizzard's fault, any more than I can call it Facebook's fault when someone blabs about their sexual escapades and forgets that their wife or mother can read their wall.

Yes there are people saying "clearly this will eventually be required in order to do anything in game at all!" You can choose, or not, to be that cynical about it, but the only thing really worth discussing without getting into what is essentially pointless speculation is how it works now.

[Sheepherder]

Stabs, you've probably already shared enough that you can be found if someone really wants to look.  Ask Arthur if you're curious.

[Stabs]

As you say, Ingmar, it's a tool I can use (but won't). It's also a tool stupid people can use.

Ashleigh Hall was possibly stupid to arrange a meeting with some guy she met on Facebook, she was definitely stupid to go alone and she was especially stupid to get in the car with him.

Transitioning from an identity system that is safe for everyone to a system that is dangerous for foolish people is not ok. Even though I'm not foolish.

@ Sheepherder Oh I know that, but I'm not actively corpse camping any of you and I didn't give the purple Ingmar's been raiding for for half a year away to some pug who just joined our raid for the evening. It's pissing people off PLUS being traceable that I object to, I don't mind being vaguely traceable.

[Ingmar]

As you say, Ingmar, it's a tool I can use (but won't). It's also a tool stupid people can use.

Stupid people can also buy liquor, operate vehicles, have children, and vote. I mean I guess we could eliminate all these things as options for everyone for fear that stupid people will do stupid things with them...

(And yes I realize my hyperbole is a bit extreme here.)

[Paelos]

As you say, Ingmar, it's a tool I can use (but won't). It's also a tool stupid people can use.

Stupid people can also buy liquor, operate vehicles, have children, and vote. I mean I guess we could eliminate all these things as options for everyone for fear that stupid people will do stupid things with them...

(And yes I realize my hyperbole is a bit extreme here.)

I wouldn't mind a 5 question exam before you had to purchase a bottle of booze. It would be like a quest!

[Musashi]

It's like saying you should have your real name on your car's license plate.  In reality, if you wrote down someone's license plate number after he made you rage, it's probably not too difficult to find them.  But people generally don't do that, because that person's personal information isn't looking them in the eye, taunting them, daring them even, to make it personal as it would be if you could read the person's name during the act itself. 

Instead we just use an innocuous number, like that dirty corpse camper Gorlac is not really Showanna Johnson.  Where Gorlac is inane and predictable, Showanna will illicit a response in some people, and so Showanna is likely happy to conduct her corpse camping business under a pseudonym.  There doesn't need to be a good reason for that.  The reason is that there's just no reason for it to be otherwise, other than in this case, Blizz wants Facebook money.  People aren't perfect, and bad shit is going to happen.  It's not simply being paternalistic to try and limit it.  It's self-preservation, as I think everything is - another discussion, perhaps.

As soon as we get into whether or not it's better for us to be more open on the internet through closing the door on anonymity, you lose.  It's just not true.  People are going to be willing to fight that notion for real.  That's when people's license plates start getting looked up.  And not the people you thought.

[Lantyssa]

Of course - but at the same time there is a line where you can be so risk-averse that you end up costing yourself something useful for no significant gain. The issue is finding where that line is for yourself. For you obviously it is in a different place than for me.

EDIT: To provide what is perhaps an extreme example, if either Sjofn or I had been as risk-averse about social contact through the Internet as many (most?) people in this thread seem to be advocating, we'd never have met, gotten married, etc. Obviously I prefer the result I've got to that.

There is a huge gulf.  I've gone up to Edmonton to meet a group of MUD friends and did a return trip with my girlfriend at the time a few years later.  Vu moved here because of an internet friendship.  Many of you know my name.  (Not that it's at all hard to figure out with a minimum of searching)  However there are ways to allow for privacy that don't involve such binary systems.

If Blizzard had presented this as a tiered system with a fixed handle ala CoX and a further option to share your real name like Facebook, they would have made internet history.  As is?  They fucked up and it'll be a long time before people trust them again and they cost themselves subs because of stubbornness,  If internally this went over as well as the rumors suggest, it was doubly a stupid monetization scheme.

[Quinton]

The interesting thing is that Blizzard is not stepping back from RealID anywhere where it might slow the facebook-ization of WoW/SC2/etc and that they continue to misrepresent the purpose of it.  There's no need for RealID to allow for cross-realm chat, etc -- you just need a universal ID within Blizzard's services.  This is a solved problem.  Insisting on tying it to a subscriber's actual realworld name doesn't benefit the subscriber, only Blizzard as they try to find exciting new ways to monetize their users (these money hats are great, but why stop now?!)

[Ingmar]

Benefit is a strong word for it but I actually tend to prefer using the real name thing for people who I knew first outside of just the gaming context - I don't think of my college friends as "Xlegolasx" or "Vuvuzelaman" or whatever, I think of them by their real names and I find the nicknames kind of jarring at times.

I could obviously suck it up and deal if it was an alias instead of a real name thing, though, it just isn't that important to me either way.

EDIT:

As far as the "never trust them again" thing, while I'm seeing a fair amount of that from some quarters, I'm betting that in the long run they probably earned a lot of points with people as "the company who is willing to listen to their customers".

[sickrubik]

If Blizzard had presented this as a tiered system with a fixed handle ala CoX and a further option to share your real name like Facebook, they would have made internet history.  As is?  They fucked up and it'll be a long time before people trust them again and they cost themselves subs because of stubbornness,  If internally this went over as well as the rumors suggest, it was doubly a stupid monetization scheme.

I'm not sure I see what stubbornness you mean. There was some initial "this is what we are going to do", but no company is going to make a decision on something this integral to their development plans in a span of an hour.

I understand the frustration with the change in the first place, but they did what people were hoping, they changed their minds. Yes, they probably will still implement it in one form or another, but for now, things are going as they were. Hopefully they learn and make changes for this system down the road that appease some of the unhappy people.

[Ingmar]

Yeah a company the size of Blizzard is always going to take at least a day or two to make a decision like killing this. You have to get all the stakeholders together, get people to sign off on whatever you're going to do instead, etc. Really I'm surprised this didn't drag on at least through the weekend.