World of Warcraft forums are according to Blizzard (publisher of World of Warcraft) “where flame wars, trolling, and other unpleasantness run wild”. The pubisher thinks it knows how to get everyone to behave much more nicely. However they might be quite worng and become the new Facebook!
With the next iteration of the Battle.net forum, Blizzard intend to publish users’ real names in full on the official forums. According to the publisher removing anonymity will “contribute to a more positive forum environment, promote constructive conversations, and connect the Blizzard community in ways they haven’t been connected before”. As expected users didn’t exactly react positively!
Current posts are not affected, however many World of Warcraft (WoW) subscribers are concerned about the privacy implications of the change (theres a huge surprise).
As one reader of the register has said: ” So every man, woman and child who plays World of Warcraft or the upcoming Starcraft 2 will only be able to post on their forums if they’re perfectly happy for anyone who may want to know what their name is. The mind boggles at the security implications from social engineering passwords, email addresses and account names or even safety if people have ex partners or stalkers etc. And then there’s the idiots who you meet in the games themselves who can now take their abuse to real life with just a little googling and rare name or background info.”
No doubt, Blizzard has carefully considered this and is willing to wave goodbye to anonymous forum participants: damn the traffic – or dam the traffic? It simply wants people to behave themselves, to create a new and different kind of online gaming environment – one that’s highly social, and which provides an ideal place for gamers to form long-lasting, meaningful relationships. ”
Bless.
However will their community of gamers agree? Maybe not!
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