Kitai (Staghelm) wrote:
This decision, which by now is almost certainly going to be implemented regardless of this acrimonious outcry, is inconceivably tone deaf. It is a subversion of the way that all but a scant handful of forums on the internet function, and it blends the game world with RL in a manner that many people assumed would never come to pass. Yes, many people could have their real names stuck next to their posts without any ill effects. But many people would be affected negatively. And quite a few of those probably wouldn't expect to be.
A lot of people in this thread say that it's just a name. We all give our names -- and much more than our names -- to people every day. To our friends, our coworkers, to every cashier everywhere we write a check or hand over a credit card. But this does two things much different from the use of our names in daily life. First, it associates our name with an hobby that does not traditionally involve the use of our real name. And second, by placing it indelibly on the internet, it preserves that association forever. Blizzard may (and will, I'm sure) place a robots.txt file to prevent search engines from indexing it -- if those engines respect the file. I could write a crawler for the Blizzard forums in no time at all. Private mirrors are plausible (and potentially valuable for social networking accumulators), and may not have indexing exclusions at all. One way or another, it will be possible to connect names with posts long after the posters have moved on.
There are a lot of posts in this thread from people who have been victims of stalkers. It's not something to make light of. And it's a significant problem. For one thing, people who have gotten some relief via a restraining order may or may not be able to apply that order against WoW-mediated interaction, as the parties are still a very long physical distance apart. Really, anyone in that situation isn't going to be posting on these shiny new forums.
I know several people in game whose RL careers are in hard science positions. People with a publication history (or who are working to develop one) in scientific journals. When they interact with potential employers, with clients, and with colleagues in the field, an internet search for their work is an expected part of the modern research industry -- with more and more publications moving online and becoming searchable each year. Not everyone in those industries thinks highly of the world of online gaming. Millions of dollars of contracts can be at stake. These are people who can ill-afford to conflate their real-life identity with their entertainment venue.
I had a friend, who, sadly, I have not kept in touch with over the years. I suspect that she still plays WoW. Hers is a career in child psychology. She is prohibited by the ethics guidelines that govern her profession from knowingly engaging in activities with her patients, or former patients, outside of the clinical setting. That ethical guideline doesn't stop her from playing WoW. No one -- right now, anyway -- can know who she is in the game unless she reveals herself. Likewise, she has no way to know if any of the people she meets in the game world are people she meets in the therapy room. But if Real ID Forums happen, she likely cannot ever post here, because that would put her at risk for being identified by someone she works with in her real-life job.
The worst part about this idea is that (like all of these social networking experiments) many of the people who will be hurt by it will be hurt in the future. Sure, you may have a workaday job now, with no external responsibilities. But we all want to move up that employment ladder, right? Like it or not, this is not a hobby that is well-respected by people not part of it. It might be discriminatory to pass over a promotion to someone whose internet presence shows their active gaming history, even five or ten years down the road, but that's not a legally prohibited form of discrimination. People every day are denied advancement for far less. That goes double for any position that includes the phrase "fiduciary responsibility". Or, outside the business world ... politics. There probably aren't many of us here who are currently active in the political spectrum. But unless things change, having our real-life tied to this game means that we probably aren't well-advised to ever do so in the future. And I don't just mean national-scale stuff like Senate seats or Presidential candidacies. If you do not believe that someone's affiliation with WoW has a strong chance to become a campaign issue even in something like a school board election ("Do you want <name here> playing games with our children's futures?") then you are sadly mistaken about modern politics.
Me? I work in a programming and statistics position, but I don't expect to publish. I'm not quite ambitious enough to aim for a company role where my actions have to be carefully measured for how they'd affect the next day's stock quotes, and I'd be a poor politician for other reasons. Heck, in a two-minute search, savvy users can probably find who I am without my name printed here. But I wouldn't post here if it required my real name. Because I just don't know how that might echo in the future. And that's not the point. The point is that this change hurts people who could otherwise use these forums. And it has the potential to hurt people in the future in a way that they cannot undo. And for what? To stop trolling? Seriously? A substantial fraction of the people likely to engage in trolling won't care. They'll still be here.
But the kinds of people who build your addons, who do your theorycrafting, who figure out the bugs and quirks through data analysis, who help with technical questions ... who aren't trolls, in other words ... they are the people most likely to be hurt by this (or know and care that they might be hurt by it later) and so are the most likely to simply never come back. Nice job fixing it, Blizzard.

Akina: bitch I will stab you in the face