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Wow, this is terrifying. I agree with not one but two Jubbergun opinions in the course of a week. What is this community coming to?
Discussing this Real ID thing is like discussing whether or not Osama bin Laden deserves to be shot. Consensus is so total discussion is moot. But of course Blizzard, like any institution, can always find some shill out of the 6.3B people on god's green earth and say NOT EVERYONE agrees...and failing that, well, they can always post on a "grey"...
So, moving on past saying this is bad (because that's obviously totally subjective):
This is driven by the same thing that's driven every change we've seen lately, whether it's RealID, designing raids for nonraiders, LFD, homogenization, OMFG REACTIVE PATHING, or stereotyped quest design...it's all the product of design by devs who have no real understanding of the character of the playerbase. They talk about "casualization"...but the truth is, they have no idea what that term actually means or how to make the game appeal to casuals.
I firmly believe that casualization is the future of MMOs but the WotLK/Cata design paradigm is a dead end, because it was conceived by people who don't understand the nature of the genre. Case in point: does anyone really think those terribad DKs and FOTM rets who AFK through heroics for days are "casual"? Or are they just terribad punks? Do real casuals who have "lives" want to play a game that has been designed to appeal to that segment of the playerbase? Nerds who hate PLAYING the game but take it so SERIOUSLY they want the purples for status even more badly than the so-called hardcores?
How can anyone believe that real casuals are anything but repulsed by the disgusting attitudes of the community these days, the seediness of gold farmer spam and constant phishing attempts? It's like the online equivalent of visiting a bowling alley on Skid Row.
The answer is...the devs believe this, because they don't understand the game they design, and more importantly, they don't understand the community they're designing it for. It's driven by greedy producers and hubris-high devs.
This Real ID thing is nothing more than another iteration of this fundamental issue. But of course eventually someone will get shot over WoW drama, the feds and the media will get involved...
60 Minutes: The Deranged World of Warcraft And Creeps Who Play It
It will, of course, end with a massive blow to Activision's rep that they'll never fully recover from. Just another case of Corporate America's greed proving self-defeating, just like GM and every other company that's been undone by their arrogance.
In the longer term:
People have a lot of stuff connected to their email addresses these days. Accounts are, by EULA, property of Blizzard. But I believe what will eventually happen is that there will be a series of abuses, not specifically connected to gaming, that will eventually lead to legislation that will mandate that individuals be granted franchise over their internet personas - their Gmail/eBay/Google/etc accounts...and Activision's policies here will run in the face of that.
Make no mistake, the world of gaming will be collateral fallout of this inevitable legislation - the driving force will be consumer services - and it probably won't come to pass for decades if not centuries. Point being, though, this Real ID thing is a portent of things to come.
The pendulum will swing the other way, and eventually, the legal world will create protections for people's personas, and this will probably take the form of a legal guarantee of end user franchise (sovereign ownership of account and information). Also, advertising-based revenue models will likely be banned as being dangerous to society and the economy. This will not come to pass until many decades after WoW is obsolete.
Needless to say, it annoys me deeply almost no one who actually bothered to read that preceding paragraph will really understand much less believe what I am describing.
Aestu of Bleeding Hollow... Nihilism is a copout.
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