Shadee’s Blog

There’s been quite an uproar among the WoW community due to Blizzard’s *coughActivisioncough* announcement of going ahead and adding players’ real first and last names to their forum posts.

Their reasoning is that it will discourage trolling. Then they also mention the forum moderators will be more vigilant. Wait, how about you just do that?

Your “blanket policy” Blizzard, doesn’t cover off-site trolling with the personal information you’re handing out. People can now take this info and spam people’s facebook accounts, possibly look up employment history, addresses, phone numbers and harass people in real life. So in a nutshell, you don’t care about people being trolled as long as it doesn’t happen on your forums.

Then there’s celebrities and other public figures. They’re not going to be able to post without being harassed by rabid fans in game ever again.

Another thing I keep seeing in articles about this issue is the writers of the article going: “Well this is my real name and there’s only this and this info out there on me and I’m fine with it. STFU. You’re a lousy article writer if you’re going to be a selfish little tard and not observe the fact that other people might not be like you and your amazing employment history. Some people might have information out there which is none of their fellow wow player’s business.

In a nut shell, people should be able to play a video game without a bunch of strangers being able to find out their name, home address, phone number, names of family members, employment history and god knows what else for the trolls who are really good at digging for dirt. If you want to make it optional, sure, I’m all for it. If your name is as uncommon as John Smith or if you’re not female and not worried about getting spammed to death by creepy guys and you feel comfortable putting it out there great!

But a lot of people aren’t.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 9th, 2010 at 6:38 am and is filed under WoW. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.