9th of July update: In the wake of some 12 million people complaining about the Real ID name change, Blizzard has reconsidered their wish to bring real names to the forums. Nethaera made a post on the US forums, saying that due to the community’s feedback, they have decided to scrap the idea.

I think it’s nice to see that Blizzard does in fact still have the players in mind, despite people’s claim that they are simply droning for Activisions moneyhogging. It would have suprised me if they had gone through with the idea with all the negative feedback they got on the forums. Blizzard still loves us, and we still love Blizzard. Now, lets go kill some dragons!

The other day, Blizzard released a press statement regarding some of their plans for Real ID in the future. If you have been living under a rock, the Real ID is the new system in World of Warcraft and in upcoming game releases, which allow you to “connect” with friends via e-mail, with no restrictions based on server, faction or even game.

With their press release, Blizzard shared with us their brand new idea: Lets have forum posts show peoples real names! If you have seen my previous post on Real ID, you will know that I think that there are some security and privacy risks with the Real ID system, although they are some that can be circumvented rather easely. These news, however, adds a whole new level of concern.

Blizzard states that their reason for wanting to show players real names on forum posts is to avoid the trolling and the not so serious posts. Their sentiment is that, if people can see your real name – and find out who you are – you won’t be quick to troll them. This makes my face spasm in ticks, because it could also be a way of saying “If someone IS trolling you, well, try and google their name”.

Obviously, there is a very easy way around all of this. Don’t use the official WoW forums. I don’t think it is Blizzard’s intention to alienate their playerbase with this change, though, and I am sure that they will want people to use the forums just as much as they are now. But does the player base actually gain anything from being able to see each others names? For all the John Doe’s with generic names, it wont really mean anything. They can hardly be identified.

In my own case, I can be identified rather easely, as my middle name is only used by some 20 people in the whole world, and searching for my middle name shows me 8 of these people, including my mother and some family members and, obviously, myself. Sure, you can see my middle name – Almhøj – if you look at my Twitter account, but I don’t really think that the readers of my blog is anyone to be worried about. But I may just get into a discussion on the original forums – not that I use them often, to be fair, because of the terrible forum structure they have – but when I do, I may just get into a discussion with another player. If he would ever feel that he needed to explain his point in person, he could rather easely find me.

So is it the aim to have Real ID to act as a counter trolling measure? I have a hard time believing that. Sure, it might deter me from trolling because I can be easely identified, but for all the Bob Benson’s who share a name with a few hundred thousand people, it will have little to no effect. And ofcourse, some trolls simply don’t care, because they aren’t really worried that people will get on a plane and kick their ass. The same would go for Blue Posters, their name would be visible to all who cares, and I am sure they are not too happy about that. Then again, it is rather easy to chance the names in the database.

I want to stress that I do not think Blizzard has any sinister motives with all of this. They have always cared about their customers, and I don’t think they are intentionally trying to put anyone in danger. But this system cannot really work as a troll deterrent. But what is the reason for this change, then? Well, one could make an educated guess – and having been working with online privacy and security on social networks for the past four years, I’d say I am in a position to make an educated guess.

First off, a little bit of knowledge sharing. There are two types of Social Networking Services, those based on content and those based on connections. For the ones based on connections, Myspace, Facebook, Youtube, the main focus is to get in touch with other people, often people you know. You will see this from Facebook, where the majority, if not all of your friends, are people you know from real life. The other kind, the content based social networking services, are the forums where people get together to talk about a specific topic and where they will inevitably get to socialize with each other. The main focus, however, remains on the content, and the socializing comes along with it. An example of this could be a forum about Japanese Anime; People gather to talk about anime, and in the process, they start talking to each other. MMO-champion is also an excellent example of this, where we talk about WoW, and begin to talk more to specific members of the community.

World of Warcraft is a content based social networking service. We get together to play a game, and while doing that, we establish connections to other people, while the main focus is to play the game. Lets face it, you probably didn’t sign up to World of Warcraft to make new friends, but they are a pleasant bi-product of using the service. On sites like Facebook, the general focus is on “me”. You want people to see you. You want your friends to find you. You want to empower them to be able to look you up and get back in touch with you. On a content based SNS, you are more often than not using a special username, rather than your real name. Just look at WoW or MMO-champion for example. How many usernames do you see showing peoples real names? It’s all ThunderLizard and HandyTroll, not RichardDawkins and TerryGoodkind.

But now, we have a content based SNS which is suddenly beginning to act as a connection based SNS. Why is that? Well, we are going to have a lot of Blizzard releases in the next few years; Starcraft 2 and Cataclysm within a few months, and Diablo 3 sometime next year. This probably means that a lot of peoeple will be playing different games, and you might want to be able to talk to your guildies while they are playing Diablo. Thats all fine and dandy. But to outright force people who wish to participate in the community, to do so as a connection based SNS, rather than a content based SNS, makes it all smell like this change is part of a bigger plan.

My final thoughts on this, is that all of this might be plans to make the whole Battle.net platform more connection orientated, where there is a lot more focus on networking rather than playing video games, in a sort of – dare I say it – Facebook for gamers. Not actually Facebook, but a service that works like it, but wich only really appeals to gamers. Don’t misunderstand, World of Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo will all still be content based SNS’s, but I think that we will see the Battle.net platform as a whole as a Social Networking Service.

This isn’t a bad thing. As I said above, I don’t think Blizzard has anything sinister in mind, and it is my firm belief that they are merely trying to provide another service for their users. It’s a novel idea, really, and one many could benefit from, but I am not convinced that this is the way to go about it. For the last few years, people have had the choice of what they wish to share with other players, and we can probably get some sort of statistic on how many people have their first and last name in their player name. Forcing them to accept this change “if they want to use the service”, has a high risk of alienating some of their customers – they probably wont leave, they just wont use the forums.

To round up the subject, I want to repeat the one major consideration on this subject:

Will showing peoples real names on forums deter trolls, all trolls and nothing but trolls? John “Troll” Doe might not care about it, because his name is shared by a lot of other people, but Dan Almhøj Poulsen, who is just a regular user, might be concerned about his own privacy. Who will really be affected by this change?

- QQ

PS. Obviously, as with the Real ID Facebook integration, there are ways around this as well. You could start using prepaid game cards, and simply change your name. You can set up a second e-mail for your battle.net account. You could simply not post on forums.

Again, let me just stress that I do not think that it is Blizzard’s intention to harm their customers. I just think they need to reconsider the way to lay the groundworks for their plans of the future.