The Daily Grind: Real ID disaster averted... or is it?

It never bothered me. I hate the battlenet thing, but I liked this idea.

what's sad, is blizzard never apologized, and only said they weren't doing it "at this time". It's going to come back, they will just find a way to work it in better. They want wow to be a 3D facebook. My trust in blizzard has been lost and as long as realid is something i can't turn off, i won't be playing their games. Remember battle.net and realid were both optional to start. This isn't over.

People can't complain too much. Blizzard actually listened to what the players wanted. Isn't that what you want them to do?

So like am I the only one pissed they didn't implement. I don't usually hide behind a ridiculous screen name anyway. I stand behind everything I say, so I ask why should I hide myself behind ambiguity? I think adding real ids would add worth to comments. How many times have you said "Oh thats just some punk online. He doesn't exist." Now that would be Tim Johnson or whatever. He believes that you are a dumb poster or whatever.

To be honest, I feel like the whole thing was a huge publicity stunt.

First they say they're going to do something really bad and horrible.

Wait a week and let the internet boil up.

Retract origional statement.

Everyone thinks "wow, they really listen to their community!"

Fun Fact: Of WoW's 11 million subscribers, over 8 of them are in asia. NA makes up less than 2 million.

too little too late for me. I will no longer buy Blizzard games and I've deleted WoW, D2 and StarCraft from my computer. I don't care how they want to spin it, it's over for me and Blizzard.

Looking forward to SW:TOR and F2P LOTRO (though I'll probably end up subbing to that if I like it).

The whole Real_ID thing is horrendously flawed, the blurb says it's to participate with real life friends, but the blurb also points out that friends of friends can see you, so already you're losing control of your own visibility and who sees you, there's absolutely no need to have a real name tied to this, a single pseudonym would work just as well because if they're your real life friends, you'll tell them your pseudonym, as people do now when they tell their real life friends their character name.

Red flags galore about this whole concept and quite frankly, the whole anonymous argument on the WoW forums is ludicrous, there's a trail right back to the person paying for the account, stopping trolls by banning all characters linked to an account would be effective, then they can't create a level 1 alt to troll the forum because their level 80 character would also be banned. There is accountability, it just needs to be enforced.

They could even go down the City of Heroes route of only have one forum posting id.

The Empire will strike back on this issue, it's just a matter of when.

I kind of figured that once they reached over 9,000 messages on the subject, that they would probably reverse it. MMO(rpg) companies are becoming more responsive to what the users want. Even Blizzard.

It wouldn't surprise me if they did that just to wind people up for some sort of simple, tie your post to your account, and thus all your characters gambit. Which a lot of people would oppose, but nearly as much as they would oppose their names being posted on a public forum.

It will be most likly forgotten by the majority of WoW players in fact most of them proberbly are so young they did'nt really care or fully understand about what was happening . This is just the latest in a long history of bad decisions by Blizzard . The sooner theres some real competition for them the better . A case of too much power going to their heads .

You'll notice btw that the CEO wrote that letter - that means some serious crap hit the fan. I suspect it was the en-masse cancellations (I heard the server that handles that was overloaded). Losing trust in a product or a brand name is pretty much the worst thing any company can do to themselves - I've seen companies go out of business for lack of trust (Gateway as an example).

If Blizzard tries to pull something like this again - they will at least know that their customers aren't afraid to pull the trigger and leave.

The game is now more and more people's brains and admire.(9Dragons)

Avoid disaster??
There is identity? Hard to understand, but very interested.
www.9dragons4u.com