I would guess, being October, that he also 'forgot' several reminders and a sternly worded note about his house burning down w/o coverage.
You might be surprised. I just found out I haven't paid my property taxes in six months. I would have bet money I'd mailed in my cheques, but since they say I didn't & my bank records back them up, I have to believe them:P I have no idea how hard they try and remind you in his county but it took the city of Toronto several months to get around to letting me know I was delinquent.
And like I said, I absolutely agree he might be lying. I still think its a terrible idea to let the house burn down. I hope to God someone on the 911 call at least asked if there was anyone in the house before deciding to let it burn.
Also, its easy to assume this is some kind of 'anti-tax culture' but until we hear that this guy has often been heard to brag about this or how anyone paying the Fire Department fee is an idiot, its a bit unfair to him -- and, frankly, the South -- to proclaim its some kind of anti-Big Brother reactionary move. Stupid crap does happen. Hell, he just might be cheap;)
Here's an alternative: Since this is an outreach coverage, the fire dept is guaranteed to be 'staffed' by the city, even though they don't get to opt out. After dousing his house, they should have presented him an clinic style bill... if you walk into the hospital uninsured, assuming they'll treat you, you pay the list cost. He probably would have paid less than the gap in his coverage, and it would have been a good 'memory jog' for everyone else that 'forgot'. Of course this only works if you have a group (the city residents) paying the upkeep for the deadbeat arsonists in the country.
Yeah, I wondered about something like this. I suspect he'd rather have had this than the burned down house and it would have pretty fair.
I agree that's a possibility, but I feel that's contradicted (at least somewhat) by the fact that he does pay for house insurance. It's pretty odd to pay a monthly (yearly?) premium to protect your house from disaster, but not pay a (pretty cheap) yearly premium to protect your house from disaster. Still, it's entirely possible he said "Screw it, what are the chances I'll need the Fire Department?". Either way, I still maintain opt-out on these kinds of thing is dumb, for all concerned.
Well, if you RTFA, you'd hear that he didn't not pay his taxes, he forgot to pay an annual fee. He didn't say anything about not wanting "government interference". Granted, he might be lying, but either way this seems like a pretty stupid thing to let happen. Over $75 you let a house burn down that does how many tens (hundreds?) of thousands of dollars in damage? He's got insurance too, which kind of supports the idea that he wasn't trying to weasel out of paying for anything (if he's willing to pay insurance premiums, presumably he can afford an annual fee of $75) -- and the insurance is going to fork out a fair bit of money too. The net gain for everyone on this is probably minus$100k. Thank God they stuck it to him for the $75.
The bottom though is that this just demonstrates how stupid is it to have 'opt-out' on these kinds of things. What if his wife or son had been trapped inside? Would people still say the firefighters were right to stand around and watch them burn to death? The county has options on the table that include things like adding $3 a month to the electric bill (note that's less than $75 a year!) -- though I was unclear on whether it was on everyone in the county or just on the people outside the city limits (those are the only people required to pay this fee). At any rate, some things should just be part of your taxes and you should be able to expect them; having firefighters or cops or EMTs checking a list to decide who should get help is not only stupid & inhuman, and its downright counter-productive. I suspect most of the firefighters on the scene would agree with that (it sounds like several of them went home and were physically sick from having to refrain from helping).
Seriously, the exceptions are rare and notable - the horsecrap about "what journalists are supposed to do" is a fantasy right alongside Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. I can't understand how anyone over the mental age of twenty can continue to believe in any of the three.
Unless I'm misunderstanding you, I have to disagree. It absolutely is the job of a journalist to fact check. That's what's supposed to elevate them above a crazy person on a street corner screaming about stuff he overheard in a pub.
If a journalist ran into a guy selling TVs out of the back of a van, you think he'd be doing his profession credit if he wrote an article that proclaimed that Panasonic had cut TV prices by 80%? Or do you think that he should be professionally obligated to just maybe inquire about the legality of the transaction being proposed?
I'm not suggesting that it never happens that they fail to live up to this. It clearly does happen, and certain news agencies are speeding it along (and eroding their own profession at the same time). But that doesn't mean you shouldn't expect better. That would be like saying just because a particular city's police force has a corruption problem that anyone who thinks cops should be honest is an idiot. That's a pretty cynical viewpoint.
1. The 'Friend of a Friend' functionality is something I only recently discovered myself, since it’s a little bit buried. At first I was perplexed and a little annoyed, but then I realized it doesn't actually do anything more then let you know someone with that name is playing; e.g. while it does give the person's name, it actually doesn't indicate any of their characters. Once I realized that, I better understood it -- this is a 'Facebook'-like bit of functionality, in that I might look at a friend, see someone we both know and maybe try add them to my own list.
Now, that said, you're right, they could implement this in-game, but the only reason would be if they wanted to enforce a 'continuity of identity' -- a phrase I've encountered reading on this subject that is rather handy for putting a name to the idea I think I've been grasping for. In fact, I think that more than 'real identity' is what I'd like to see implemented. The main annoyance on the forums it that people can be asshats today, and easily shed that persona and post as someone else tomorrow. I guess I don't actually need to know that person's name, so much as I'd like them to not be able to switch to a different posting character when they want to be an asshole.
Now there's an argument to be made for making this change in-game as well -- e.g. someone might become well known as a prim donna tank or a ninja looter, etc. -- and want to shed that identity too (they can currently pay US$25 to change their name & race). So I suppose its possible they might someday make it clear which characters belong to a single account, but I suspect there'd be a similar uproar (probably not as vigorous, but still load).
I still think the chances of seeing your real name under your character's on the character sheet is extremely unlikely though.
3. Well, it’s harder to argue with you this point now that I know you have a communications degree;) (usual caveats about how anyone could claim anything, blah blah blah).
I'm not sure if this came across in my original response, but while I'm not sure I buy the 'danger scenario', I do have a great deal of sympathy for concern a woman might have for remaining gender anonymous. I've been part of a guild for nearly four years now and we've had many women come through (mostly on our raid team) and to a one they all at one point or another remarked that the way they were treated with us was one of the main reasons they opted to stay. Some went so far as to say they only admitted to being women once they saw how well the other women in the guild were treated (or perhaps more accurately, not mistreated).
Amusing (hopefully) aside anecdote: I myself play a female character, and raided with this guild for a few months before I bought a mic so I could speak up in Ventrillo. I even avoided typing anything that would infer a gender (never actually misleading) -- it was sort of a meta-game I played since when I started raiding, I wasn't sure I'd actually stick with it. I later learned it was generally assumed that I was female, which explains some of the incredibly offensive (well, they would have had I been who they assumed I was; in this case, it amused me) whispers I got from a few players (they were eventually weeded out, even before I said anything). One of the worse was still around when I finally spoke up and I like to imagine him re-enacting the shower scene from the end of Ace Ventura, scrubbing himself madly. Frankly, it would serve him right.
Back on topic! Of course, you can still avoid this by simply not posting on the forums in a way that ties that back to your character, but it does lend itself to the idea that an obvious woman posting there might be treated more negatively (from her point of view; the offending parties probably don't actually see it that way). Though I still think its a little overstated (this is nitpicky, but meh) because I do think at least some of the mistreatment probably comes as a result that there is a perception o
I'm not quite sure why you posted this in response to my reply to a crackpot, but since its a thoughtful post I figure it deserves some thoughts back. I don't agree with some of what you're saying, but I think its a far more interesting discussion that most of what's being screamed at each other in this story's comments:P
Anyways, on to your points:
1. I disagree on this 100%. I don't see any reason why this would be migrated to the game itself -- they already have RealID there, they don't use it the way you're suggesting and the fact that they have made tying a forum post to a character optional suggests to me that they have no plans to make this change anywhere but the forums.
2. This is a fair point. But the signal to noise ratio on the forums is insanely bad. It'd be ludicrous to assume that if you chased off some of the noise you'd lose none of the signal, but it might actually be possible to have a real discussion about these issues in a way that's not really possible now. That said, you're right, there's going to be -- if not a decrease in eyes -- a decrease in feedback of some kind. How much remains to be seen.
3. This could be true, but I'm not sure I'm ready to subscribe to the idea that as soon as a name goes up, you're in danger. There are plenty of people posting on their real name in other avenues on the web, and while I'm sure there are cases that turn ugly I suspect if it was a major problem people wouldn't be posting under their real names on blogs, news articles or anything else. Still, I don't want to belittle the possibility, since maybe being male makes just make it seem less a concern.
Having an unusual name would be a concern to anyone posting on the forums -- male or female -- though there's a lot of thought on the subject that says we're not nearly as anonymous as we think we are already (which isn't to say that this RealID stuff doesn't make it a heck of a lot easier in this case).
Anonymity can be a powerful thing, and I'm not against it per se. But at the same time, I can also see the point of someone who says "If you're willing to say something, you should stand behind it." Sure, there are times when that's not a smart option (whistleblowing comes to mind) but this is a video game. And ultimately, its not a right to post on their forums, so if someone deems it an unacceptable risk, that's their choice.
Sorry, I didn't mean literally 'call support'. I know a large amount of their 'support time' is spent chasing down hacked accounts, restoring items, that kind of thing. I'm guessing that's a significant amount of money that could be saved by making the authenticators (I couldn't remember what the heck they were called!) mandatory, or at least making it super easy for people to get one.
Yes, there are digital copies, but even if you put one in every boxed copy, that's a lot of accounts you've 'upgraded' security-wise (assuming they get used). I'm sure there's someone at Blizzard who can put a finger on what hacked accounts is costing them every day, and break it down to a per-account cost. Whether that makes it worth doing something like this or not, who knows? As you say, time will tell.
That's a different issue than what the GP was talking about. He's raving about how this change someone gives Blizzard information they didn't have before (clearly, this is not the case).
The connection to a character on the support forums is a valid concern, though the line Blizzard seems to be taking is that there are two more avenues for getting technical support that don't involve posting on the forums, so making an exception for that case isn't necessary. Personally, I think the guild recruitment angle is more interesting.
As for trolls getting back at you, this has been raised before, and has potential for an interesting discussion. But surely this isn't the first forum to try something like this? Is this new territory, or is there previous case history we could look at to see how likely that kind of behaviour is?
Okay, I get you. A friend of mine has that concern because his email address (the one used for his login) actually includes most of his name. Though I'm not sure that particular vector is much use, since there are a lot of variations on the suffix (though I suppose you could just guess @hotmail.com, @gmail.com, etc.). A better one would be to look for that name and get used emails off other sites, though I don't actually know how easy that is myself. Still, all of that gets you the login, not the password, and if you have one of the $6 security thingies it makes it pretty hard to beat.
Frankly, I half wonder if Cataclysm will ship with a free security thing for everyone. I don't think they're selling those things to make money; in fact, I suspect for everyone one of those they sell for $6, they probably save $60 in support call time.
The first and most significant change is that in the near future, anyone posting or replying to a post on official Blizzard forums will be doing so using their Real ID -- that is, their real-life first and last name -- with the option to also display the name of their primary in-game character alongside it.
Your 'RealID' is your first & last names. And note the bolded part (emphasis mine). From amending posts later they make it clear that linking it to a character is off by default.
Well, that's true, but we can only discuss what's announced, right? We can yell when they say "We're going to implement X" if that's going to cause that kind of problems.
Though I'm curious: what kind of scam issues are you worried about? I'm assuming not in-game from friends, because presumably you'd only accept from people you trust. Are you talking about out-of-game?
Fair enough, though that's not what the GP was talking about. If you read his post, he's raving about linking between your name and chat logs of various channels, all of which they already have.
If things are linked on WoW to real names, it's a fucking goldmine to these services.
But linked to what? By default, its just your name. Granted, that's something of value, but the only thing they can use that to scrape for is what you say on the forums. So they could maybe figure out you play a priest or a warlock or what race you have or something, but how much of that is valuable? There are some threads of a more frivolous, personal nature ("What do you listen to while raiding?" was a recent thread) so those might provide some information to scraping, but they're by far the minority.
I understand the concern about scraping, but I'm having a hard time seeing what a scraping would come up with on those forums. Maybe I'm just missing something obvious though.
There's an interesting sub-thread on guild recruitment in the same vein. Realm forums are another problem area, that's true. It'll be interesting to see if they have any plans for those. Though with LFG and the Raid Browser, they're less critical for what you're talking about (though still useful, particularly when looking for a raid at a future date). Hopefully someone is asking these questions in the official thread on the subject, though it's probably be drowned out by the people screeching.
By forcing real names to be displayed, that makes it public info. They may already have swaths of logs on hand but with this, they could say the info was already out there and users have consented to spreading it around.
I'm not sure I agree with that. I'm assuming neither of us is a lawyer, but that's seems like a stretch to me. I posted in a forum that had my name but nothing else, so now the terrabytes of chat logs from the last three are fair game? And that's assuming they aren't already, which I bet they are.
Are you being deliberately obtuse while you whiteknight Blizzard in here?
I'm getting pretty tired of being accused of that. I'm mostly posting in here to correct the mis-perceptions of the topic. This is one of the more interesting sub-threads, because it does raise the point about how guild recruiting, but I'll get to that in a second. Half the people in here are looking at the current forums, imagining their real name plastered above their character and getting mad. 99% of my posts in this story are to say "No, it shows nothing by default". If Blizzard would put that in blinking, large red text or something, we could move on to more interesting things like recruitment.
Now as for recruitment, I was involved in it for three years. As I said in my original post here, I can see the problem for that. Though you should not assume that everyone does it the same way -- the only thing we ever used the recruitment thread for was to announce we were looking, and give our website. We never did any actual back & forth on the forums. This primarily was because it avoided the inevitable asshats who'd pollute such threads -- we can delete posts on our own forums, and you can still post links to the Armoury from there.
I don't think there will be a mass exodus from the WoW forums over this, but hell, maybe. It'll be interesting to see. Posting on their forums has never been a right though, and if people don't want to post there afterwards, that's certainly their prerogative.
That'd be hard, since in the new system it doesn't display a character unless you choose to associate one. If you choose to do so, then yes, it would probably link it.
It's all spelled out in the actual article, which you haven't read closely enough;) (Though to be fair, there's a LOT of people who miss that point. They really should be bolding that or increasing its font size or something)
But we're discussing the forum change, not the Real ID change in-game. That's a separate discussion. I could see how one might think the linking between people could be used that way, but the forum announcement has nothing to do with that. The only connection is that they both use the RealID system, but they are two distinct discussions.
I'm still inclined to disagree about the 'facebook' argument people keep piping up with, but at least I can see how there's a case there w.r.t. to the in game friending (though I use it and love it). Unfortunately a lot of the concern about that feature spills over into the forum discussion and makes things very confused.
We can talk about displaying your real name on a forum, but that's really the whole ball of wax. And we can talk about the effect of linking accounts with distinct relationships. But they really don't have much to do with one another other than that they use the same underlying identification system.
It could mine names, but what else? There's nothing else there except the contents of the posts. If you're posting under your real name and giving out crazy amount of personal information, you're clearly not concerned. By default, it won't even display one of the servers you play on; just your name. The only thing you could datamine, really, is someone's opinion. Which is bound to be how much your warlock sucks or how overpowered Death Knights are. I can't imagine that's of much interest to anyone (even Blizzard).
The age-gate is typical of a lot of websites, so I assume there's some basis in law for it being there. And I think you can disable the ability to post in the forums at all using the Parental Controls.
That gateway question screams a lawyer was involved in some way, shape or form, so its probably got some validity there.
At any rate, if its a concern for a parent, I believe you can actually disabled an accounts ability to post on the forums at all in the Parental Controls.
Fair enough, it doesn't work for the Guild Recruitment forum, though technically the only person it reveals is the recruiting officer belongs to that guild. I suppose if that's a problem they could always rig something up to make that forum a special case if they really want it.
I don't agree that it's only a matter of time before this gets shifted to an Armory connection. The very fact that you have to opt-in to get a character to show on the forums indicates they're well aware of the concern.
You can't look at their server unless they choose a character to post with. And even then, you're assuming they rolled on a server in their timezone, which a fair number of people don't.
Names on the forum are not connected to a character unless they choose to. So, none of what you're talking about applies unless someone wants to make that possible.
There seems to be a lot of confusion about this feature. It doesn't change anything in-game. The RealID option in-game requires you to opt-in completely.
Similarly, on the forums, you are not associated with an in-game character unless you choose to. So if you don't use the forums at all, this doesn't affect you. If you do, it doesn't affect you in game unless you choose to display a character.
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I would guess, being October, that he also 'forgot' several reminders and a sternly worded note about his house burning down w/o coverage.
You might be surprised. I just found out I haven't paid my property taxes in six months. I would have bet money I'd mailed in my cheques, but since they say I didn't & my bank records back them up, I have to believe them :P I have no idea how hard they try and remind you in his county but it took the city of Toronto several months to get around to letting me know I was delinquent.
And like I said, I absolutely agree he might be lying. I still think its a terrible idea to let the house burn down. I hope to God someone on the 911 call at least asked if there was anyone in the house before deciding to let it burn.
Also, its easy to assume this is some kind of 'anti-tax culture' but until we hear that this guy has often been heard to brag about this or how anyone paying the Fire Department fee is an idiot, its a bit unfair to him -- and, frankly, the South -- to proclaim its some kind of anti-Big Brother reactionary move. Stupid crap does happen. Hell, he just might be cheap ;)
Here's an alternative: Since this is an outreach coverage, the fire dept is guaranteed to be 'staffed' by the city, even though they don't get to opt out. After dousing his house, they should have presented him an clinic style bill... if you walk into the hospital uninsured, assuming they'll treat you, you pay the list cost. He probably would have paid less than the gap in his coverage, and it would have been a good 'memory jog' for everyone else that 'forgot'. Of course this only works if you have a group (the city residents) paying the upkeep for the deadbeat arsonists in the country.
Yeah, I wondered about something like this. I suspect he'd rather have had this than the burned down house and it would have pretty fair.
I agree that's a possibility, but I feel that's contradicted (at least somewhat) by the fact that he does pay for house insurance. It's pretty odd to pay a monthly (yearly?) premium to protect your house from disaster, but not pay a (pretty cheap) yearly premium to protect your house from disaster. Still, it's entirely possible he said "Screw it, what are the chances I'll need the Fire Department?". Either way, I still maintain opt-out on these kinds of thing is dumb, for all concerned.
Well, if you RTFA, you'd hear that he didn't not pay his taxes, he forgot to pay an annual fee. He didn't say anything about not wanting "government interference". Granted, he might be lying, but either way this seems like a pretty stupid thing to let happen. Over $75 you let a house burn down that does how many tens (hundreds?) of thousands of dollars in damage? He's got insurance too, which kind of supports the idea that he wasn't trying to weasel out of paying for anything (if he's willing to pay insurance premiums, presumably he can afford an annual fee of $75) -- and the insurance is going to fork out a fair bit of money too. The net gain for everyone on this is probably minus$100k. Thank God they stuck it to him for the $75.
The bottom though is that this just demonstrates how stupid is it to have 'opt-out' on these kinds of things. What if his wife or son had been trapped inside? Would people still say the firefighters were right to stand around and watch them burn to death? The county has options on the table that include things like adding $3 a month to the electric bill (note that's less than $75 a year!) -- though I was unclear on whether it was on everyone in the county or just on the people outside the city limits (those are the only people required to pay this fee). At any rate, some things should just be part of your taxes and you should be able to expect them; having firefighters or cops or EMTs checking a list to decide who should get help is not only stupid & inhuman, and its downright counter-productive. I suspect most of the firefighters on the scene would agree with that (it sounds like several of them went home and were physically sick from having to refrain from helping).
Seriously, the exceptions are rare and notable - the horsecrap about "what journalists are supposed to do" is a fantasy right alongside Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. I can't understand how anyone over the mental age of twenty can continue to believe in any of the three.
Unless I'm misunderstanding you, I have to disagree. It absolutely is the job of a journalist to fact check. That's what's supposed to elevate them above a crazy person on a street corner screaming about stuff he overheard in a pub.
If a journalist ran into a guy selling TVs out of the back of a van, you think he'd be doing his profession credit if he wrote an article that proclaimed that Panasonic had cut TV prices by 80%? Or do you think that he should be professionally obligated to just maybe inquire about the legality of the transaction being proposed?
I'm not suggesting that it never happens that they fail to live up to this. It clearly does happen, and certain news agencies are speeding it along (and eroding their own profession at the same time). But that doesn't mean you shouldn't expect better. That would be like saying just because a particular city's police force has a corruption problem that anyone who thinks cops should be honest is an idiot. That's a pretty cynical viewpoint.
1. The 'Friend of a Friend' functionality is something I only recently discovered myself, since it’s a little bit buried. At first I was perplexed and a little annoyed, but then I realized it doesn't actually do anything more then let you know someone with that name is playing; e.g. while it does give the person's name, it actually doesn't indicate any of their characters. Once I realized that, I better understood it -- this is a 'Facebook'-like bit of functionality, in that I might look at a friend, see someone we both know and maybe try add them to my own list.
Now, that said, you're right, they could implement this in-game, but the only reason would be if they wanted to enforce a 'continuity of identity' -- a phrase I've encountered reading on this subject that is rather handy for putting a name to the idea I think I've been grasping for. In fact, I think that more than 'real identity' is what I'd like to see implemented. The main annoyance on the forums it that people can be asshats today, and easily shed that persona and post as someone else tomorrow. I guess I don't actually need to know that person's name, so much as I'd like them to not be able to switch to a different posting character when they want to be an asshole.
Now there's an argument to be made for making this change in-game as well -- e.g. someone might become well known as a prim donna tank or a ninja looter, etc. -- and want to shed that identity too (they can currently pay US$25 to change their name & race). So I suppose its possible they might someday make it clear which characters belong to a single account, but I suspect there'd be a similar uproar (probably not as vigorous, but still load).
I still think the chances of seeing your real name under your character's on the character sheet is extremely unlikely though.
3. Well, it’s harder to argue with you this point now that I know you have a communications degree ;) (usual caveats about how anyone could claim anything, blah blah blah).
I'm not sure if this came across in my original response, but while I'm not sure I buy the 'danger scenario', I do have a great deal of sympathy for concern a woman might have for remaining gender anonymous. I've been part of a guild for nearly four years now and we've had many women come through (mostly on our raid team) and to a one they all at one point or another remarked that the way they were treated with us was one of the main reasons they opted to stay. Some went so far as to say they only admitted to being women once they saw how well the other women in the guild were treated (or perhaps more accurately, not mistreated).
Amusing (hopefully) aside anecdote: I myself play a female character, and raided with this guild for a few months before I bought a mic so I could speak up in Ventrillo. I even avoided typing anything that would infer a gender (never actually misleading) -- it was sort of a meta-game I played since when I started raiding, I wasn't sure I'd actually stick with it. I later learned it was generally assumed that I was female, which explains some of the incredibly offensive (well, they would have had I been who they assumed I was; in this case, it amused me) whispers I got from a few players (they were eventually weeded out, even before I said anything). One of the worse was still around when I finally spoke up and I like to imagine him re-enacting the shower scene from the end of Ace Ventura, scrubbing himself madly. Frankly, it would serve him right.
Back on topic! Of course, you can still avoid this by simply not posting on the forums in a way that ties that back to your character, but it does lend itself to the idea that an obvious woman posting there might be treated more negatively (from her point of view; the offending parties probably don't actually see it that way). Though I still think its a little overstated (this is nitpicky, but meh) because I do think at least some of the mistreatment probably comes as a result that there is a perception o
I'm not quite sure why you posted this in response to my reply to a crackpot, but since its a thoughtful post I figure it deserves some thoughts back. I don't agree with some of what you're saying, but I think its a far more interesting discussion that most of what's being screamed at each other in this story's comments :P
Anyways, on to your points:
1. I disagree on this 100%. I don't see any reason why this would be migrated to the game itself -- they already have RealID there, they don't use it the way you're suggesting and the fact that they have made tying a forum post to a character optional suggests to me that they have no plans to make this change anywhere but the forums.
2. This is a fair point. But the signal to noise ratio on the forums is insanely bad. It'd be ludicrous to assume that if you chased off some of the noise you'd lose none of the signal, but it might actually be possible to have a real discussion about these issues in a way that's not really possible now. That said, you're right, there's going to be -- if not a decrease in eyes -- a decrease in feedback of some kind. How much remains to be seen.
3. This could be true, but I'm not sure I'm ready to subscribe to the idea that as soon as a name goes up, you're in danger. There are plenty of people posting on their real name in other avenues on the web, and while I'm sure there are cases that turn ugly I suspect if it was a major problem people wouldn't be posting under their real names on blogs, news articles or anything else. Still, I don't want to belittle the possibility, since maybe being male makes just make it seem less a concern.
Having an unusual name would be a concern to anyone posting on the forums -- male or female -- though there's a lot of thought on the subject that says we're not nearly as anonymous as we think we are already (which isn't to say that this RealID stuff doesn't make it a heck of a lot easier in this case).
Anonymity can be a powerful thing, and I'm not against it per se. But at the same time, I can also see the point of someone who says "If you're willing to say something, you should stand behind it." Sure, there are times when that's not a smart option (whistleblowing comes to mind) but this is a video game. And ultimately, its not a right to post on their forums, so if someone deems it an unacceptable risk, that's their choice.
Sorry, I didn't mean literally 'call support'. I know a large amount of their 'support time' is spent chasing down hacked accounts, restoring items, that kind of thing. I'm guessing that's a significant amount of money that could be saved by making the authenticators (I couldn't remember what the heck they were called!) mandatory, or at least making it super easy for people to get one.
Yes, there are digital copies, but even if you put one in every boxed copy, that's a lot of accounts you've 'upgraded' security-wise (assuming they get used). I'm sure there's someone at Blizzard who can put a finger on what hacked accounts is costing them every day, and break it down to a per-account cost. Whether that makes it worth doing something like this or not, who knows? As you say, time will tell.
That's a different issue than what the GP was talking about. He's raving about how this change someone gives Blizzard information they didn't have before (clearly, this is not the case).
The connection to a character on the support forums is a valid concern, though the line Blizzard seems to be taking is that there are two more avenues for getting technical support that don't involve posting on the forums, so making an exception for that case isn't necessary. Personally, I think the guild recruitment angle is more interesting.
As for trolls getting back at you, this has been raised before, and has potential for an interesting discussion. But surely this isn't the first forum to try something like this? Is this new territory, or is there previous case history we could look at to see how likely that kind of behaviour is?
Okay, I get you. A friend of mine has that concern because his email address (the one used for his login) actually includes most of his name. Though I'm not sure that particular vector is much use, since there are a lot of variations on the suffix (though I suppose you could just guess @hotmail.com, @gmail.com, etc.). A better one would be to look for that name and get used emails off other sites, though I don't actually know how easy that is myself. Still, all of that gets you the login, not the password, and if you have one of the $6 security thingies it makes it pretty hard to beat.
Frankly, I half wonder if Cataclysm will ship with a free security thing for everyone. I don't think they're selling those things to make money; in fact, I suspect for everyone one of those they sell for $6, they probably save $60 in support call time.
The first and most significant change is that in the near future, anyone posting or replying to a post on official Blizzard forums will be doing so using their Real ID -- that is, their real-life first and last name -- with the option to also display the name of their primary in-game character alongside it.
Your 'RealID' is your first & last names. And note the bolded part (emphasis mine). From amending posts later they make it clear that linking it to a character is off by default.
Well, that's true, but we can only discuss what's announced, right? We can yell when they say "We're going to implement X" if that's going to cause that kind of problems.
Though I'm curious: what kind of scam issues are you worried about? I'm assuming not in-game from friends, because presumably you'd only accept from people you trust. Are you talking about out-of-game?
Fair enough, though that's not what the GP was talking about. If you read his post, he's raving about linking between your name and chat logs of various channels, all of which they already have.
If things are linked on WoW to real names, it's a fucking goldmine to these services.
But linked to what? By default, its just your name. Granted, that's something of value, but the only thing they can use that to scrape for is what you say on the forums. So they could maybe figure out you play a priest or a warlock or what race you have or something, but how much of that is valuable? There are some threads of a more frivolous, personal nature ("What do you listen to while raiding?" was a recent thread) so those might provide some information to scraping, but they're by far the minority.
I understand the concern about scraping, but I'm having a hard time seeing what a scraping would come up with on those forums. Maybe I'm just missing something obvious though.
There's an interesting sub-thread on guild recruitment in the same vein. Realm forums are another problem area, that's true. It'll be interesting to see if they have any plans for those. Though with LFG and the Raid Browser, they're less critical for what you're talking about (though still useful, particularly when looking for a raid at a future date). Hopefully someone is asking these questions in the official thread on the subject, though it's probably be drowned out by the people screeching.
By forcing real names to be displayed, that makes it public info. They may already have swaths of logs on hand but with this, they could say the info was already out there and users have consented to spreading it around.
I'm not sure I agree with that. I'm assuming neither of us is a lawyer, but that's seems like a stretch to me. I posted in a forum that had my name but nothing else, so now the terrabytes of chat logs from the last three are fair game? And that's assuming they aren't already, which I bet they are.
Are you being deliberately obtuse while you whiteknight Blizzard in here?
I'm getting pretty tired of being accused of that. I'm mostly posting in here to correct the mis-perceptions of the topic. This is one of the more interesting sub-threads, because it does raise the point about how guild recruiting, but I'll get to that in a second. Half the people in here are looking at the current forums, imagining their real name plastered above their character and getting mad. 99% of my posts in this story are to say "No, it shows nothing by default". If Blizzard would put that in blinking, large red text or something, we could move on to more interesting things like recruitment.
Now as for recruitment, I was involved in it for three years. As I said in my original post here, I can see the problem for that. Though you should not assume that everyone does it the same way -- the only thing we ever used the recruitment thread for was to announce we were looking, and give our website. We never did any actual back & forth on the forums. This primarily was because it avoided the inevitable asshats who'd pollute such threads -- we can delete posts on our own forums, and you can still post links to the Armoury from there.
I don't think there will be a mass exodus from the WoW forums over this, but hell, maybe. It'll be interesting to see. Posting on their forums has never been a right though, and if people don't want to post there afterwards, that's certainly their prerogative.
That'd be hard, since in the new system it doesn't display a character unless you choose to associate one. If you choose to do so, then yes, it would probably link it.
It's all spelled out in the actual article, which you haven't read closely enough ;) (Though to be fair, there's a LOT of people who miss that point. They really should be bolding that or increasing its font size or something)
But we're discussing the forum change, not the Real ID change in-game. That's a separate discussion. I could see how one might think the linking between people could be used that way, but the forum announcement has nothing to do with that. The only connection is that they both use the RealID system, but they are two distinct discussions.
I'm still inclined to disagree about the 'facebook' argument people keep piping up with, but at least I can see how there's a case there w.r.t. to the in game friending (though I use it and love it). Unfortunately a lot of the concern about that feature spills over into the forum discussion and makes things very confused.
We can talk about displaying your real name on a forum, but that's really the whole ball of wax. And we can talk about the effect of linking accounts with distinct relationships. But they really don't have much to do with one another other than that they use the same underlying identification system.
It could mine names, but what else? There's nothing else there except the contents of the posts. If you're posting under your real name and giving out crazy amount of personal information, you're clearly not concerned. By default, it won't even display one of the servers you play on; just your name. The only thing you could datamine, really, is someone's opinion. Which is bound to be how much your warlock sucks or how overpowered Death Knights are. I can't imagine that's of much interest to anyone (even Blizzard).
The age-gate is typical of a lot of websites, so I assume there's some basis in law for it being there. And I think you can disable the ability to post in the forums at all using the Parental Controls.
That gateway question screams a lawyer was involved in some way, shape or form, so its probably got some validity there.
At any rate, if its a concern for a parent, I believe you can actually disabled an accounts ability to post on the forums at all in the Parental Controls.
Fair enough, it doesn't work for the Guild Recruitment forum, though technically the only person it reveals is the recruiting officer belongs to that guild. I suppose if that's a problem they could always rig something up to make that forum a special case if they really want it.
I don't agree that it's only a matter of time before this gets shifted to an Armory connection. The very fact that you have to opt-in to get a character to show on the forums indicates they're well aware of the concern.
You can't look at their server unless they choose a character to post with. And even then, you're assuming they rolled on a server in their timezone, which a fair number of people don't.
Names on the forum are not connected to a character unless they choose to. So, none of what you're talking about applies unless someone wants to make that possible.
Actually, its getting a moderation system as well, but everyone is focusing on the 'real name' part of the announcement.
There seems to be a lot of confusion about this feature. It doesn't change anything in-game. The RealID option in-game requires you to opt-in completely.
Similarly, on the forums, you are not associated with an in-game character unless you choose to. So if you don't use the forums at all, this doesn't affect you. If you do, it doesn't affect you in game unless you choose to display a character.