Not too long ago, Blizzard announced the implementation of the Real ID system which was going to be tied to Battle.net accounts in an upcoming update. What Real ID boiled down to was a system which would bind your real name to your World of Warcraft and Starcraft II accounts. This idea was met with support; the new system would add some really cool functionality that wasn’t found in any other game on the PC to date. It would allow players with Battle.net accounts to communicate across the two different games, and would provide the user with information about what their friends were doing in the game. So, if you saw that your buddy was just wrapping up a match of Starcraft II, you could invite him to join you on World of Warcraft to run an instance of Icecrown Citadel with you. The Real ID update also provided convenient functionality; adding friends would become much simpler when you could add them via their Real ID. This also would allow you tell whether your friends were online, regardless of the character they were playing. This saved you from having to re-add all your friends each time you created a new character in World of Warcraft. Personally, I also liked that when I received messages from my buddy, Joe Smith, it signed his messages as: “From [Joe Smith]”. I thought this was a nice step up from the old system where I would have instead received a messaged signed: “From[xXxLegolasxXx]”, because this is the dopey name my buddy chose for his Blood Elf Hunter.

The description, straight from Blizzard's Real ID FAQ.

So, the system was rolled out in the next patch, and besides the occasional privacy complaints that would be expected in an update like this, it was implemented rather smoothly. I quickly went and added my friends from real life using their Real IDs; the friends I had made in the game I kept as regular “in-game friends” so that they had no access to my Real ID, and from there, my real name. Everything was going great for Blizzard; mostly everyone really enjoyed the new update, and accepted the Real ID system as just one more piece of awesome functionality for the game. It wasn’t until a few weeks later that the real issue hit. Blizzard, after the success of the Real ID update, had now announced that the Real ID update was making its way to the forums. Essentially, everyone posting on the forums would have to post under their real name.

The user base went ballistic. People started complaining about a myriad of different privacy issues that would come up if they were forced to post under their real names. Some frequent complaints were:

  • “My boss, my co-workers, and I all play World of Warcraft together. What would my boss think if he saw me making posts on the forums at two in the morning?” or,
  • “I’m a girl gamer who’s really worried about this update. Sometimes when people find out I’m a girl in the game, they start to get really creepy, and constantly message me all the time about really personal stuff.”

Or, my personal favourite:

  • “What happens if I get into an argument with another user on the forums, and he decides to track me down and throw a brick through my window?”

Personally, I thought the idea of Real ID was awesome. I felt that, given the way that people interacted in the game and on the forums, forcing people to post under their real name would finally give some people the reality check they needed. Most of the complaints I heard voiced seemed stupid to me, and it was my hope that Blizzard would stick to their guns and roll out the update as promised.

Real ID, the true face of evil.

In regards to the first complaint, so what if your boss knows you’re posting on the World of Warcraft forums at two in the morning? As long as you come into work and do your job to the fullest extent of your abilities, it shouldn’t matter how late you stay up. If you’re fired on the basis that you spend your nights typing away on video game forums, I believe you’d find a lot of people who would quickly come to your defence.

Secondly, the “girl gamer” comments really infuriated me. I’m not saying this is true of all girls who play World of Warcraft, but in most of the cases I’ve experienced, these “girl gamers” can’t shut up about the fact that they’re girls. They seem to think that this makes them somehow awesome, special, and deserving of special treatment based solely on their gender. Again, I’ve met a lot of girls in World of Warcraft who just play the game and make no issue about the fact that they’re female. In fact, I played the game with many of them for a few months before suddenly noticing, “Hey, wait a minute; you’re a girl aren’t you?” In these cases, they typically just tell me that they are, and then we go on and play the game without making much mention of it again. However, there was still that class of girl gamer who would constantly make it known to everyone that they’re a girl, and not only that, but a girl who plays games. It was typically these girls who were the loudest to complain about people stalking them before the update, and how it’ll get even worse after the update is rolled out. Personally, I feel that most World of Warcraft players are like me. We just want to play the game and have a good time, and we’re not really too bothered whether it’s a girl or guy playing on the other end with us. Those people who would send women on these games creepy messages because of the Real ID update would likely have done so the second femininity was inferred anyway. It wouldn’t be a difficult thing to report them to the forum admins, and then walk away.

Alright, I might be stereotyping a little too much now.

And finally, my favourite complaint, what if people started to track me down outside the game? My initial, and selfish reaction, was good. Perhaps if this update were to roll out, people would take a moment to think about what they’re saying on the forums, and maybe even stop being huge jerks to one another. But, after taking some time to think about it, I started to agree with the people voicing these complaints. I can acknowledge that there are some crazy people out there who go to great lengths to track people down who made them angry in a video game. However, I quickly flipped back to my earlier position after considering how people treat online privacy these days anyway. Almost everyone has a Facebook or Twitter account, and most people do nothing to protect these pages containing vast quantities of personal information. So, regardless of whether or not you post under you real name or not on the World of Warcraft forums, chances are eventually someone would be able to find out almost everything there is to know about you through some other channel (some instance of your screen name linked to your Twitter account, for example). My point is; if someone was willing to go to the trouble of tracking you down because of something you said online, the fact that your name is or isn’t easily displayed to them is not going to be a deterrent. These people were crazy to begin with and have other, just as easy ways to track you down.

In the end, three days after their initial announcement, Blizzard backtracked on their decision to require people to use their real name when posting on the forums. Real ID still exists as I described it earlier, but the forum update died before it was even released. This news made me sad in a way, as I saw it as a step forward in the way we perform social interaction online. People use the mask of anonymity to say and do terrible things to one another online, things they wouldn’t do normally if they were out in the real world (where they could be easily identified). I was interested to see how this update would have performed, and how interactions on the forums might have perhaps changed for the better.