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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.
Believe me the irony of this experience was not lost on me. As it happened, and while I wrote this article I thought a lot about the similiarities of what I do, and what the Blizzard game designes, and what the GMs over there do.
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
No prefix?
Guess the obvious solution would be:
* TacoCmdr (postfix)
* TheCmdrTaco (infix)
* Taco (nofix)
* AlmightyCmdrTaco (dogmatix)
Slashdot used to run quite a few opinion and rant pieces written by the editors. Probably the most well-known of these is JonKatz's "Voices from the Hellmouth" series of essays on his thoughts on the whole high school shooting thing of the late 1990s.
Yeah, this hasn't happened on Slashdot in quite a while, but honestly, I'm glad to see it happen again, and I hope that this means it will happen more in the future.
Of course, I think the reason why it ended in the first place is that the comments section for every single opnion piece that Slashdot ran was filled to the brim with slashbots' knee-jerk rants and flaming of whichever editor wrote the article, to the point that the opinion pieces brought Slashdot comments sections to a new low in that absolutely no intelligent discourse would happen whatsoever.
Given that your flame of CmdrTaco hit "+5, Insightful" so quickly, I have a feeling that things haven't changed much since the first time the slashbot crowd killed opinion pieces on Slashdot. So yean, even if I want them back, I admit they probably shouldn't come back.
To be fair I'm not exactly sure how long it took. 10 minutes maybe? The GM apparently had to talk to his supervisor before telling me it was the prefix that was the problem. I type pretty fast, so it might have been 8-10 lines of me asking various questions, it might have been like 25. I also explained to the GM that I was a journalist, and i would like to write a story about attachment to on-line identity, and asking to get contact information with someone with some authority so I could get some quotes or feedback for this article. I don't know if he wasn't taking me seriously, or if he thought I was just trying to threaten him. None of that was my intent, but as everyone who communicates via a chat system knows, subtleties of communication are often lost when translated to line-by-line text ;)
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
You can have your name back. Just create a new character with the name "cmdrtaco" or whatever it was that just got changed. The folks at Blizzard will happily abuse their power, but they're too stupid to be consistent. Case in point:
A friend of mine was forced to change his name. He was a paladin named "HolyWarrior". After some amount of chafing and resistance, he found it was because someone complained that it was offensive, invoking terroristic imagery or something. Two weeks later, he has a new name, and sees a newbie running through the Auction House named "HolyWarrior". Note the past tense, he did quit the game over this.
Suffice to say, they'll make you change your name, but they won't do something intelligent like implement a database of names that are illegal. Hence, you can keep creating your favorite illegal/offensive name, and just use it until someone notices, rinse and repeat.
Of course, that is probably what happened. Someone complained about your name, because they wanted it. Now it is free, since you don't have it; so anticipate seeing someone using it in the near future. This is worse than someone beating you to your own nick on gmail... They actively stole your nick, by skillfully wielding the incompetence of others...
P.S. If you want to see if your
name is in use, instead of not
permitted, try sending mail to that
name in game... Game Mail will let you
know if there is no such character.
Problem #2: These games require naming policies of some kind that are non trivial to automate. Since they are non-trivial to automate, there will always be people who slip through. Even if you have a human monitoring each new name (Everquest used to do this), Borisyeltsin may slip through because the human monitoring name approval that day happened to not known who Boris Yeltsin is.
In this specific case the core issue wasn't that CmdrTaco was not a valid name, or even that it was changed, it's that it was changed at level 45, after 100s of hours were invested in the character. This makes the impact of #1 very real.
In WOW name petitioning is basically a form of griefing. There is no review process for names. I've seen people who have petitioned and spoken with GMs (who obviously saw their names) and then weeks later their names were changed because someone petitioned them, their name was reviewed, and then changed. All name petitions come from players essentially. Why did the other 10,000 people who saw Taco before not petition? Probably because they weren't jackasses, and the guy who petitioned was.
I don't have a perfect solution but it seems like the best one is a combination solution:
The grandfather-clause policy would apply to a player's name after some period of time (say 48 hours of play time and one week of real time have passed). It would basically say, by this point a number of humans have seen you and have not complained about your name. Your name was reviewed by customer service. At this point while we can still change your name, we recognize the social impact, and as thus will be more lax in applying the policy.
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I support spreading santorum
I considered moderating you down as flamebait for cussing... but you actually express my opinion pretty accurately here. Slashdot is not a normal news site. Never has been. And if it ever has to be one, thats probably when I quit and move on and flip burgers somewhere.
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
The other problem with the editor participation is that some percentage of people don't like "Authority". Why should my opinion be more valued just because I picked the story? I already said my bit by selecting the story in the first place- beyond that, I'd rather let the community voice their opinions.
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.