WOW Forums Now Going To Require People To Use Their Real Names

Is this retroactive?

 

Yea, pretty dumb. Clearly all Activsion's fault for trying to compete with Facebook

No, old posts won't reveal your names.

 

Yeah, this whole thing seems a bit odd to me. If their sole intent was to clean up the "Trolling", all they would have to do, was add something to their armory page such as a list of their characters on that specific server, or even every character if they wanted to go that for.

In no way should they ever require a first and last name.

 

LOL! Great stuff.

 

Will it translate into ingame? I left the game b/c of the player base. If this makes the player base more civil it might be a good thing. I play LOTRO. People there range from the insanely Tolkien nut rider, to really cool people. Of course you have the occasional ritard, but they usually come and go.

With the recent news of LOTRO going "freemium" I wonder how things will change. Hopefully it stays enjoyable.

 

People gunna die!

Spoiler

 

Blizzard will eventually cave on this.

.

 

this...

 

Go play a real game, like allods.

 

Well damn that suxs. I was such an awesome internet tough guy on WoW. Now I'd have to be all timid and shizz.

Speaking of which... hey maybe some of us will be lucky enough to beat on Yao Ming.

 

In before you guys know my name...

Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries.

 

Seems like a good idea to me. With Facebook's success, they have a model for success without anonymity. Besides the effect on trolling, it can help increase the social cohesion which will make the gaming more fun and therefore more sticky and profitable for the company. Customers being more personal and social on their servers also would open other avenues social media development.

 

Spoiler

 

I know most of you don't care, but Activision-Blizzard listed to the voices of their customers and decided against using real names in forum posts.

Link: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=25968987278&sid=1

And 1,000th post for me! Yay.

 

Mike Hawk.
Mike Hunt.
Haywood Jablome.
Hairy Cox

The list goes on and on...

 

This was inevitable. The only surprising thing about this PR blunder was how stupid Blizzard was for even considering it.

.

 

I think the idea is good in theory. It would certainly reduce the trolling and lead to more constructive discussions on their forums.

But this is the Internet. Anonymity is key and is highly valued. Strip it from your Internet-based product and you'll lose a large sector of your market.

 

They should make them post pictures with their real user names.

Let us expose the World of Warcraft user base once and for all.

I'm sure we would be shocked by who some of these people are, i.e. tough guys, hot chicks, CEOs, Dick Cheney, celebs, etc. .

 

Sam Fisher, Carl Herrera and I are ahead of the curve on this one.

 

So if CF.NET were to ever do this, we'd be able to weed out the nerds by looking them up on facebook huh.