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Blizzard Made Me Change My Name
First of all, the reason that my account is in violation is that my name contains a title prefix. It took dozens of inquiries to get that explained. 'Cmdr' is the problem. I'm told that since the game has an internal honor system with titles, my name is not allowed. Never mind the fact that 'Cmdr' is not one of their titles. Never mind that countless other titles abound in the game: Mr, Sir, Sensei. Am I in violation of their policy? Probably. Is the policy stupid, meaningless, or inconsistent? I think so, but that's not really why I'm writing this.
I've been using 'CmdrTaco' online for around a decade now. It predates the existence of this website. It has followed me from game to game, both local, networked, and massive. My only problem with it is that as Slashdot grew in popularity, I started finding places where an impostor has taken it. I was excited when I was able to get it in Warcraft. It's like a warm blanket. It's stupid I know, but it's mine.
But Blizzard chose to take it from me. Now let me be clear: this is certainly their right: They own the dice and the board and the rulebooks, and I only play in their world. But If the US Government told me to change my name... let's say Congress passed a law making it illegal to have a first name that is a verb (Don't laugh, the White House cease and desisted The Onion!) Well I guess 'Rob' would have to go. My friends would still recognize me: I'd still have the same face, address, and social security number. I'd just have a cool new name like "Captain Fantastic Malda". With a name like that, the auto mechanics would never try to rip me off!
In this virtual world, two levels gives me a couple new pieces of armor, and suddenly I am unrecognizable to anyone who may have run an instance with me. In guild chat, I am a total stranger to people I may have chatted with for months. My history with other players has been erased. It almost makes me wish that I spent my first 45 levels ninja looting!
It's not like Blizzard decided to change gameplay dynamics. I spend a lot of time working on the Slashdot moderation system, and I never have any problem changing any "Rule" in the system if I believe it will improve the overall functionality of the whole system. If blizzard wants to make my mace have 5 less DPS and 3 less stamina because it's unbalanced, well I can accept that. Balancing gameplay is really hard. But in a massive multiplayer game, your name is different- that isn't about balance, it's about identity.
A friend of mine actually quit Everquest over a forced name change. His name was Marilyn Hanson and while fighting something he was disconnected without warning. When he returned, his name had been changed to a randomly generated one. When he asked GM, he was told that he could not have celebrity name. When my friend asked who Marilyn Hanson was, the GM could not answer, but instead just said arguing wouldn't matter. My friend quit EQ that day.
I don't think I'll quit WoW over this, but I will take away some lessons. The GM I talked to had a nickname of something like Lathanian. I found this disconcerting. If you were arrested by Officer Snuggles or found guilty by the honorable Judge Lawtron, it's hard to take that seriously. In this case 'Punishment' is being dealt. A real human is wearing a shroud of anonymity and handing out the bitchslap to a total stranger. That really makes the whole experience even more dehumanizing. In a massive virtual world, we're still people.
You don't see names and faces, which is why you'll see a 60 corpse camp a 30. When you don't see the real person on the other side, the tendency is just to forget. You expect it from opposing factions- but it feels different when it's the GM. Personally this is something I struggle with in my work too. You deal with a hundred support requests and it starts becoming abstract. Unreal. Virtual. I doubt it's much different if you work at the support counter at a retail store, but I think it's easier to forget when the only communication is chat.
Second, the GMs at blizzard really have no power. I asked for contact information. For email information. For names. For an appeal. To talk to a supervisor. And the best they would give me was the generic help phone line or a mailing address. Like with a stamp! I was told that almost every question I asked was unanswerable in game. I gave an email address but they never emailed. They wouldn't even tell me what was wrong with my nickname until after a half dozen inquiries of why. You have really no recourse against a GM. That scares me.
Lastly, I didn't really realize that I was so attached to my nickname. It's not because I'm "Famous"- We have a lot of readers, but these days very few actually know who I am. And of those, the percentage of people who play warcraft, and are alliance, and on azgalor... well it is very tiny. As CmdrTaco I probably had a total of 5 people actually recognize my nickname (and nobody ever gave me gold because they read Slashdot!). As Violated, nobody ever will recognize me for my day job. But that's really not what bugs me. I was really attached to my name. This character bounded through Azgalor slaying monsters and meeting new people. Now that character is erased and another character stands in its place. Same armor. Same class. But different somehow. I like my nickname. I wish I had it on every system I used. I'm annoyed that someone else registered my nickname on gmail before I could. It's always the first name I try when a system asks me to create an account. I feel strangely possessive about it. I doubt I'm alone in being attached to a pseudonym. And I feel kind of stupid admitting it.
Anyway, I've said my piece on the subject. And just to be clear, I'm not really mad at Blizzard. I think what they did was needless and inconvenient, but not evil. Their policy may be silly, but I still was in violation of it, so I guess I got what I deserved. But I wonder about others. And not just in Warcraft, on any online forum. I wonder about our attachment to virtual names. And if nothing less, it will make me take changes in Slashdot a little more seriously next time.
Heck, I even registered it, defensively, at DKos.
Best Slashdot Co
After the bnetd garbage, I've refused to purchase any new Blizzard titles. In my eyes, Blizzard has gone from one of the best video game makers in the world to pure evil, deserving nothing but derision. Perhaps you, armed with this fresh experience, will now agree?
If you regard this as petty, I understand, but I tried not to write in an agressive tone. My intentions are anything but petty.
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
It works on macs.
If you wanted people to think about the importance of virtual identity, you could have done so without making a personal rant. The fact of the matter is that it is a personal rant, it has no signs of trying to promote discussion about virtual identities, its certainly not news, and its on the front page of Slashdot. I know Slashdot isn't exactly a shining example of excellent or unbiased journalism, but this is a new low.
No. He just runs /., he doesn't own it anymore. He sold it some years back to OSDN.
I've bitched about it on the forums over at worldofwarcraft.com since beta (when it was started)...
The policy is stupid, harmful to the overall community and just lame. It is one of the reasons I cancelled my WoW subscription.
You vote with your dollars, folks. If you find this policy stupid--or it has affected you in a negative way, VOTE. Stop paying Blizzard money to Violate you.
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
Ah, so he descends the throne to post among the proletariat. ;)
;)" In the case of "CmdrTaco", yeah, it's pretty much spelled out right there, and even though your online identity in general revolves around using that name, once you get into the game, that identity has to fit through the "Carry-On Baggage Size Checker of Justice". The GMs should try to help you maintain that identity while conforming to the rules (suggesting "Taco" as an alternative, for example, assuming you're not on a RP server), but they can't treat you any differently than anyone else whose name they've changed.
;)
I will say, though.... Back in the day, I was a senior guide in EverQuest. One of the things that senior guides did was enforce the naming policy. Mostly this consisted of changing obvious troll names containing misspelled profanity or an off-color reference. But it also included rules such as "no title prefixes" (this was long before EQ added AA and tradeskill titles, way back in 1999) and "no non-fantasy names". And yes, there were times that I changed character names despite the pleadings of their owners and their friends. Made me feel like a turd doing it, too. These characters had gotten well into the 30s or 40s (50 was the limit at the time) with no problem, and in a way, their being able to get to that point without having a GM or SG talk to them was almost tacit acceptance of their name - and by that point it had in some fashion become their identity.
However, I am lawful neutral at heart, and when a name fairly obviously violated a rule, I had no qualms about changing it - in many cases where the violation was obvious (even if it wasn't vulgar), the person would laugh and say, "You finally got me.
Of course, you probably already know all this, but I think it's important to drive home the point that the society of World of Warcraft or any other MMOG isn't the same as society IRL. There are different rules in this society that go right down to the essence of one's identity. But they're there at the outset, and the decision is ultimately up to the player as to whether they want to participate in a society where the rules might not grant them the freedom to choose or make use of a particular online identity.
On a side note, I don't know why you would want to name a character "CmdrTaco" anyway. Seems like an invitation for constant spam tells to me
Yes, WoW has meta-GMs. There is a email address at which you can complain about GM actions.
As far as the argument, people who have played WoW and bothered to read the forums have heard about this many many times. People make names that break the rules all the times (and yes, CmdrTaco breaks the naming rules in several places), and then complain on the forums when they're changed. I'm not sure how this rant is going to change anything.
It prefixes all you chat converations with [$Selectedname]:
It's called Incognito, it was on curse-gaming, but they haven't been up for a while, it's on our wiki, but I don't want to link that on /., but I assume that you can e-mail me or something if you are intrested.
Take any newspaper, it will have rant from the editor everyday dealing with some aspect of concern he/she would raise opinion on, from this aspect, slashdot isn't any different and this story is suitable.
As for the name thing, they should use some sort of filtering while registering users or rethink their internal rank systems instead.
Randomly abusing paying customers has tendency to lower income in any business.
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
In the comments tab of the preferences panel, you can choose the percentage of new users (1% id default), and the amount to 'boost' their post up so they are rated higher without moderation.
Don't think that the irony of all this is lost on me either- I've said many times that over/underrated mods on Slashdot are problematic. We're definitely removing them when we rewrite the system. And we've talked a lot about some sort of feedback system so moderators and meta moderators can figure out a way to explain their actions. My problem with that is that I don't want the thing to degrade into namecalling. I don't have time to meta moderate the comment on a meta moderation ;)
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
Slashdot is Rob's personal blog. We are all guests here.
Reality has a liberal bias
Right. CmdrTaco's male friend's actual real-life first name was "Marilyn." His last name also happened to be "Hanson." In a hilarious coincidence, it also rhymes with Marilyn Manson.
Any other dumb statements you wanna throw our way?
"Sufferin' succotash."
This got modded up funny, but crap like that happens all the time in WoW. It's not uncommon for someone's name to be reported just because someone else is mad at them or felt like being an asshole. On my server we had a guy whose name violated the policy (it was considered gibberish, i.e., unpronounceable) but he was fine for months and months... until he killed our server's forum troll and douchebag in-game and then all of a sudden his name was reported.
Anyone who's played the game and had a real issue that required GM contact knows that they are completely impotent. I've had at least a half-dozen issues where the GM ticket menu specifically says they'll help with something and then the GM gives you a blow-off answer and tells you to write to the GM feedback email address. I don't know why taco treats this like big news.
This is not the greatest sig in the world, no. This is just a tribute.
I've used my family's "nickname" -- rather than a long cumbersome Southern three-part name with a Roman numeral trailing it -- since about age five. Nothing in the world except my Social Security card and birth certificate had the long form.
Until this year when the PeopleSoft company took over my employer's staff database, and had to change everyone's name on record (they say because it has to match the Social Security database).
So Blue Cross simply terminated the health record file (close to three decades worth of records) attached to the name I've been using, discarded it, and created a new file under the Social Security file name -- with of course the same SSI number.
So they bounced a bunch of medical bills reporting "that subscriber terminated his health care coverage." Although they claim they do use the SSI as their internal identifier so they shouldn't have thrown the files away. And they told my medical practitioner's office to discard the old files as well -- and they did, the pea-brains -- and opened new empty files for the new SSI-official name Congress now insists I use.
Keep your own medical history as I have done -- else I'd have no health records.
You worry about an online game? Trying to get your life back after your identity is stolen by your government. Or maybe it's not the government, but PeopleSoft claims that's the reason they did it. Or maybe it's Blue Cross, but they blame PeopleSoft.
It's happened to other people I know too -- blindsided them as well when their files went away.
War of Worldcraft, I think this is.
Yes. Blizzard provides a 1 way feed for you to complain about GM action. They do not, however, act on these complains. Its simply a way to get you to argue to somewhere where you can't hurt them as opposed to, say, calling their investors at vivendi. My guess is if people stopped bothering with the established complain lines which don't work and, say, started calling up Vivendi when things went wrong, an effective GM support system might actually occur.
I do security
I've been playing mmorpgs since the beginning of UO. I'm sorry to say that I've found Blizzard's overall ability to respond to player concerns effectively inexistant in general
The only feedback mechanisms is the forums, which are unreliable, unsearchable, and lose their history due to posts mysteriously disapearing after a while with no evidence of their existence ever. I can see every post I've ever made to Slashdot over the years, but I can't see posts I made to the Blizzard forums just a few months ago. It's simply just appalling that with the resources their customer base affords them they can't put toghether a decent bulletin board system.
More importantly, however, I can't begin to count the number times I've seen posts with a lot of effort put into them and huge feedback from the player base not even get a single reply from an rep. there. After a while, when people don't get a personal response from their feedback, they stop making it. What's keeping the wave of feedback happening right now is the huge base of players who have yet to really experience the mediocrity of the wow player forums. Simply put, in my book Blizzard gets abysmal marks for community interaction.
World of Warcraft remains a fun game to play. However, in my opinion, without significant community improvements Blizzard stands to lose out massively to the next wow that comes out.
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
As more M3, thats just to crazy ;)
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
What should someone's UID have to do with the validity of what they post?
Wow, that flew totally over your head didn't it?
The great-grandparent was posting the truth. Slashdot is Rob's blog. Whining that it isn't is just an indication that you haven't been around that long and don't know what the site was started as.
Has it grown in scope? Certainly. But it's still Rob's blog. If you don't like that, you're welcome to setup your own site, or to simply use other sites that don't offend you so often. Heck, you can even block the apparantly incessant whining that CmdrTaco spews forth on his own site by blocking all stories posted by him.
Put it in your journal or something.
Ummmmm... That's what he did.
FAQ YOU! Funny no karma.
Remember?
I have no pitty for a millionaire bitching about how he can't have his username on WoW. Seriously, do you?
It's less of an issue now, but in the early days we allowed users to be created with almost any combination of numbers and letters... over the years we had to tighten up the rules to prevent abuse.
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
I'd like to point out the * beside his name.
He is paying.
C17H21NO4
If only to get parent modded up, yaknow, 'cause parent, you really should be, but I suppose many people might just go "bah, no link? That's no use" and just walk away, but a quick google search confirms that this little script rather directly takes on the problem CmdrTaco was noting with people not knowing who one is . . . so, here's the script for prefixing comments in WoW so people know what character you're an alt of; technically not the situation here, but obviously the solution would work exactly the same.
In other words, mod parent up. I mean, he may be wrong about Curse Gaming being down, but anyone reading parent and feeling like getting the mod will find it pretty much immediately through all-knowing (oh, if only that were true, one wouldn't even have to type the search parameters!) google, so again I reiterate, mod parent up!
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
I had the exact same problem and was most frustrated by my in-ability to check-in online. I found it very ironic that "Thomas Paine" is on the terrorism watch list. I would joke that it's a really old list that we got from our former colonial masters. The saddest part is that it's not our actual name on the list, but the Soundex of your name. So in theory "Thomas Paine" could have the same soundex as "Osama Bin Laden", it doesn't but you get my point.
So I was going through the same dozen hoops that you were until I found this out, at which point I came up with a solution. The next plane ticket I bought I used "Thomas Anthony Paine" on my plane ticket and was able to check-in online (a necessity with southwest) without any issues. I still use the same southwest club card and everything, just a slightly different name on my card. Note that Thomas A Paine would not have worked because vowels aren't used to create a soundex.
"I can not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presents danger, the solution is ignorance" - Isaac Asimov
Second, some things are old. Know how many times I deleted 'funny' posts submitted with Bill Gates' mugshot? Probably at least two-thousand.
Third, some things are boring. I don't mean that they're obscure or uninteresting, I mean that they are boring in the sense that they aren't interesting or fun to talk about or discuss. There's not a whole lot to talk about when the subject is something like, 'Gosh, Microsoft Outlook really blows, and a study says so.' While it may create a lot of funny schadenfreude, it's pretty obvious to a whole lot of people. The people that it's not obvious to probably aren't reading Slashdot anyway.
Fourth, you might have a history of being a pain in the ass, and I might have rejected your story because you called me a jerk one time on IRC.
There are a lot of other reasons, but the primary reasons that people complain about getting stories rejected are usually untrue. There were conspiracy theories all over the place that somehow we were gaining financially through the spread of Linux (ha!), through adoption of perl over python, pretty much everything including phase of the moon. Totally unfounded. See points 1-4 above.
I would venture to guess that the reason Rob doesn't discuss why stories are rejected is because it's more than just him. I got very little top-down direction when it came to picking stories from Slashdot from Rob or Jeff. Rob and Jeff are totally different people, I'm very different than CowboyNeal and Jamie, and anyone who knows my politics knows that I am very different than Pudge (though Pudge and I seem to get along fine).
I think Rob's not trying to be secretive or coy, he's just being aware that there are more people behind Slashdot than just himself. Do you really think Rob wants to be in the position of having to chase down Slashdot authors every single time someone wants to know why their story was rejected? He'd have to send an E-mail, ask why, get a response, and then reply to the submitter. Also, he might have to do this two-hundred times a day. Not fun, and totally fruitless.
Anyway, there you go. Hope this helps, etc.
Emmett