Even if you aren’t a fan of any of Blizzard’s games, Diablo, Starcraft, and the 500 pound gorilla of MMORPGS World of Warcraft, you may have already heard the outcry over their announced change in policy regarding the use of the official community forums for those games. In an attempt to merge the world of video games and social networking Blizzard has implemented “RealID”, a system that allows you to chat with anyone you have added as a friend any time they are logged in to any Blizzard game. Recently Blizzard also announced that in a effort to crack down on flame wars and trolling on the community forums for their various games they were going to start requiring the use of RealID to post on those forums rather than allowing pseudonyms and the use of in-game character names as they had in the past. As someone who has often despaired of trying to find useful information on the World of Warcraft forums because of the overwhelming amount of troll posts this sounds, on the face of it, to be a noble goal. The problem is that Blizzard’s RealID is just that, your real ID. Blizzard’s official announcement put it this way;

…in the near future, anyone posting or replying to a post on official Blizzard forums will be doing so using their Real ID — that is, their real-life first and last name — with the option to also display the name of their primary in-game character alongside it.

If the idea of posting your real name on a public forum on the internet doesn’t give you pause, it should as one Blizzard employee has already discovered. Blizzard employee Drysc posted his real name on the forums in an attempt to demonstrate that there was no risk with predictable results. The BBC, reporting on the controversy, quotes a source saying that “within five minutes” Drysc’s phone number, address, picture and other personal information had been posted. As a result, Blizzard telephone support personnel have been quoted as saying that Blizzard employees “cannot risk having their personal lives compromised by in-game issues” and will not be posting under their real names once the changes go through although Blizzard forum posters are still saying that they will be.

In addition to privacy concerns, it is more or less standard practice now for employers to Google the names of potential employees and with the generally low opinion the wider world has for the video game community it is understandable why people may not want their real name associated with posts on a video game site.

This is a very poorly thought out system if the goal is really just to improve the quality of the community on Blizzard’s official forums. It is clear that the current system Blizzard uses, under which people can easily create multiple completely anonymous forum identities, lends itself to abuse. The use of a unique ID that is associated with your game account would reduce that abuse, but there is no reason to require that unique ID to be your real name.

Another option for Blizzard would simply be to more heavily moderate the forums. Aggressively enforcing the terms of service with temporary bans, permanent bans for repeat offenders, deleting posts and generally raising the profile of Blizzard’s moderators on the forums would go a long way to improving the community. People abuse the forums because they think they can get away with it. Change that attitude and things will improve. Requiring the use of real names will only discourage the thoughtful and intelligent people from using the forums to protect their privacy.