Real ID comes to WoW

[Fabricated]

If you don't think this is a bad idea you are terminally stupid and may want to kill yourself for the good of mankind.

[Lantyssa]

One of my wee female friends has an unusual name and it comes up with her Facebook instantly.  Complete with picture that I can only imagine could be put to some extremely poor geek use.

This is one of my concerns.  My name's pretty unique, too, as you know.

[kildorn]

It's also possible they just want to shut down their forums, and this is a quick way to do so.

[Ingmar]

I just don't see why a_priest_0007 needs to know my real name to know my opinion on healing efficiency. I'm fine with them being able to see the characters I have, their specs and accomplishments.

All the real discussion about that sort of thing takes place on other forums anyway. 

[tmp]

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=25712374700&sid=1&pageNo=34

All posts in the future on the new forum systems will be an opt-in choice and ample warning will be given that you're posting with your real first and last name.

It's "opt-in" in the sense "you can choose to post or not", isn't it?  

[Fabricated]

Even better: Addons can access your full battle.net account name and so on without RealID!

your battle.net account full name is exposed to all your addons (and thus potentially to anyone) without ever adding any realid friends

proof:
/run for i=1,100 do if BNIsSelf(i)then BNSendWhisper(i,"RealID whisper from yourself..");break end end

note: enabling parental controls on your account will prevent this from working

[Ironwood]

We need her name to know for sure

In any case people post stupid shit on Facebook and Twitter using their real names (or easily determined real names) all the time. To young people anonymity and privacy are overrated concepts.

Aye, but like the Nitwit above, you're making the same mistake and missing my point.  Sure, there's 'stuff' out there that we all agree and accept as bits of our privacy that we've 'given' away.  But when our Cloud links start conspiring against us, that's just massively unfair  and wrong.

If I post an amusing, yet embarrassing pic of myself on the net for a small audience and then, due to some cockfuck disagreeing with me on a forum, find it shared with 6 million people...  Well, that would suck.  And, by the looks of it, I get two choices.  I give up my infringing entertainment or I...  Actually, I have no fucking idea what the other option is.

[Ironwood]

It's "opt-in" in the sense "you can choose to post or not", isn't it?  

That's my major beef here also ;  You don't get a choice.  Give out your papers or hit the fucking road.

It must be fucking great to be John Smith these days.

[DLRiley]

The result will be the exact opposite. The majority of posters on the forums will be kids after this, because most people who work aren't going to risk a prospective employer googling their name and the first result being a page long guild advertisement. I've never posted anything dumb or offensive on the forums, but I'll absolutely be stopping posting once this goes through. It's simply not worth the risk on any level.

I have the same cynical outlook on this. I feel like this is going to do some severe damage, but at the same time, I'm trying, hard, to look at this from the other side and give some good reasons for it.

I EXPECT to read doom-casting and hating from everyone else on the internet. I just don't share that rage, because I'm someone who knows what happens when you lose anonymity and become accountable for your activities. I don't think "oh shit now I need to take further steps to maintain secrecy", I think "My actions have consequences now; they always did, and thinking myself anon was a mistake because all it takes is one person with the right tools to take it away. I can't keep doing what I was doing, and need to think about what it is I do from now on." Granted, there are still some things where I've maintained the barest of separation between online and offline identities, and if that barrier was removed, it'd suck, but I know when that barrier is removed I need to adjust how I do things and just move on.

People will make the same debate within themselves when this change goes through, and they will either continue on or stop posting. You want to see the good posters stick around and not let privacy concerns detract. Blizzard likely sees, and has the metrics to back up, the amount of negative posting and general shit that happens on *their forums that they foot the bill for* and want to see it stop.

This is stupid. Why have your government name out there? Why? I don't understand this there is no real justification for this and people who think this "ain't" that bad...i mean come on please don't be sheep on this one.

[Simond]

Hey, it could always be worse. You know, like letting addons hook into RealID and pull RL names in real time.
Blizzard would never do anything that stupid, right?

your battle.net account full name is exposed to all your addons (and thus potentially to anyone) without ever adding any realid friends

proof:
/run for i=1,100 do if BNIsSelf(i)then BNSendWhisper(i,"RealID whisper from yourself..");break end end

 
e;f,b.

E2: The MMO-C bluetracker is pretty hilarious right now.

[Ironwood]

And, with that, the gold spam I'm forced to listen to in the trade channel is directed straight to my hotmail account.

Fuck all of you.  That's right;  I mean the entire world.

FUCK YOU ALL.

[Nevermore]

Even better: Addons can access your full battle.net account name and so on without RealID!

your battle.net account full name is exposed to all your addons (and thus potentially to anyone) without ever adding any realid friends

proof:
/run for i=1,100 do if BNIsSelf(i)then BNSendWhisper(i,"RealID whisper from yourself..");break end end

note: enabling parental controls on your account will prevent this from working

And here I was wondering if I was being too careful using parental controls to disable RealID, aka 'Stalking Made Easy', completely.

As for using real names on forums, now people with RealID privacy concerns can't complain about RealID on the forums anymore.  Thus, Blizzard will have 'proof' that people accept the invasion of privacy because no one is complaining anymore!  

[Ingmar]

Yeah the addon thing is a pretty massive  .

[Ironwood]

lol

[kildorn]

Hey, it could always be worse. You know, like letting addons hook into RealID and pull RL names in real time.
Blizzard would never do anything that stupid, right?

your battle.net account full name is exposed to all your addons (and thus potentially to anyone) without ever adding any realid friends

proof:
/run for i=1,100 do if BNIsSelf(i)then BNSendWhisper(i,"RealID whisper from yourself..");break end end

 

e;f,b.

Not really seeing a huge issue with this, exactly. In theory someone could write a shit mod to harvest this. In reality, I don't see a reason to do so. The EU thread however is hilarious about how people are convinced you can buy things online with just someone's full name, and somehow saddle that person with the bill and legally require them to pay it. Which is.. silly in any logical court system. Because it's obvious the name used doesn't need to be real, and I could just buy things as Jon Smith all day long and some random asshole would get the bill.

[Simond]

Chinese accountstealing bot, go!
initialsurname@gmaill.com (dictionary pass for pw)
initialsurname@hotmail.com
initialsurname@yahoo.com
intialsurname1@gmail.com

etc etc

[Ingmar]

Yeah that would seem to be the major risk with both the mod loophole and the forum posting thing. Certainly if you have an easily guessed email address you shouldn't be posting on the new forums without an authenticator protecting your account at least.

[kildorn]

some of us like to live dangerously.

One day you'll log in, and all the glass vials will be GONE.

[Paelos]

If I actually have to sign up for a RealID account to play the game. I'm quitting. That would be the bright bold line they can't make me cross in the name of entertainment. If it's just a forum thing I don't give a shit because I never used them anyway.

[caladein]

You already have a Real ID on your Battle.net account, it's the name on your account.

[Fordel]

This is fucking Clown Shoes.

[Paelos]

You already have a Real ID on your Battle.net account, it's the name on your account.

It's not displayed for the world to see, nor is it accessible in the game via addons atm.

[Minvaren]

I'm curious however if this is a sign of us...all of us here, being the old guard. Are the times changing and suddenly we're the old people complaining about how loud the music is?

The times have changed, and the music has too.  But I swear I signed up for an MMOG and seem to now be playing a Facebook game. 

[Simond]

You already have a Real ID on your Battle.net account, it's the name on your account.

It's not displayed for the world to see, nor is it accessible in the game via addons atm.

You've turned on the parental controls?

[Ingmar]

You already have a Real ID on your Battle.net account, it's the name on your account.

It's not displayed for the world to see, nor is it accessible in the game via addons atm.

You've turned on the parental controls?

I know a few people who have, since that's the only really concrete opt-out they have at the moment.

[Lum]

Even better: Addons can access your full battle.net account name and so on without RealID!

WoW addons are sandboxed pretty heavily. I don't think there's any way to actually communicate your RealID (or anything else) to a third party outside the game. It could concievably spam it in game but I think that's about it.

[Ingmar]

Even better: Addons can access your full battle.net account name and so on without RealID!

WoW addons are sandboxed pretty heavily. I don't think there's any way to actually communicate your RealID (or anything else) to a third party outside the game. It could concievably spam it in game but I think that's about it.

Presumably it could communicate it to another person running the same mod on your server, though, since I know mods use chat channels to talk to themselves - this is how Gatherer passes on node information to people you're sharing with, for example. Or at least, that is how it used to work, I haven't looked into that stuff in a long while.

So theoretically at least, I think some hacker dude could be manually listening in on such things.

[Simond]

Or just dump it to a private chat channel and parse the logs generated.

[Numtini]

I really truly can't believe that Blizzard is this stupid. It's really incredible.

I'm a big defender of the the reality that adults play these games. But WoW isn't exactly the most adult oriented MMO and it's not small enough to fly under the radar. I can't imagine we're not going to see "Children's personal information revealed on internet by video game company" stories. Maybe Senator Droopy Dog can hold some hearings on it.

On a personal note, I really try to keep personal information separate from games because I work for the local government in a very small town and everyone and their mother thinks they have some inalienable right to investigate everything about me and run my life because they pay taxes.

So by enabling parental controls everything gets turned off?

[caladein]

So by enabling parental controls everything gets turned off?

From http://us.blizzard.com/support/article.xml?locale=en_US&articleId=33186:

If Real ID is disabled via Parental Controls, your child will not be able use Real ID functions, and only their in-game character name will be displayed when communicating with anyone.

On the AddOn thing, there's really no way around having an API call for it.  If they didn't, the chat box and social panels (at the very least) would be completely unmoddable.

That said, it's an easy thing to check for and if you only use mainsteam mods, there's no reason for them to get added to it.

[tmp]

Not really seeing a huge issue with this, exactly. In theory someone could write a shit mod to harvest this. In reality, I don't see a reason to do so.

It's the intrawebs; when was reason mandatory for something to happen on it?

If it can be done, it will be done. And someone will make rule34 pics of it, too.

[Fordel]

I like how Real ID went from "something you only use for your in real life friends you already know" to global identifier in all of two weeks.


 

[LK]

I imagine we'll start seeing Parental and Privacy Controls soon.

[Malakili]

And, with that, the gold spam I'm forced to listen to in the trade channel is directed straight to my hotmail account.

Fuck all of you.  That's right;  I mean the entire world.

FUCK YOU ALL.

You wouldn't say that to our face if you were posting under your real name.

[Ingmar]

I'm guessing at the very least they'll probably back the tech support forums out from this policy, but given the response to the official forum post it may be back to the drawing board entirely.