To Longasc, above: Privacy and anonymity are not the same thing. What makes you think that Blizzard doesn’t know enough to personalize your ad already, or share your data with whoever they want? Or that they can’t do pretty much anything you might think their evil minds want to do already? What can Blizzard possibly gain from financially by making your forum posts use your name? Seriously, stop for a minute and think about that… What are they going to do, sell their customer DB list, or sell access to their forums and go “Here, go scrape for names!”?

On stalking/threatening: I’ve been a gamer my whole life. Long before the internet (although I was there for the very early stages of that). Guess what? I used my real name the entire time (even, believe it or not, on the early internet). Never got me fired (although people in my unit did get in trouble for spending all our time talking about EQ rather than working), never got me stalked, and despite much of my gaming requiring actual physical presence – slightly more revealing than knowing my name – never led to death, dismemberment, unemployment, or disaster.

For a “community” that spends a lot of time going on about how great a “community” it is despite bashing from outsiders, a lot of people seem to think it can’t function without anonymity. That raises some interesting questions about the “community.”

I would like to quote Stabs:

“The current advocacy of being open about your name by Blizzard staff is corporate think. The top management are enthused about it and trying to justify it on broader grounds than “we want extra money” and so it’s become a moral issue, an anti-troll issue. It really isn’t, it’s just a cash grab.”

It is a lot like the Facebook “LIKE” button. You liked that? Great, you get your personalized ad.

We become transparent personalities, the idea of privacy and why it is necessary really eludes Blizzard. Or as you said, they know about it and put their corporate interests above the interests of their players.

There is no benefit for us players in RealID. We get nothing, no advantage.
But we get all the mentioned drawbacks!

All for the sake of Blizzard’s and their networked partners business interests. They want the totally transparent customer. To make more profit. They will probably tell us it is in our best interest as well. :>

@Klepsacovic: If we stick to the battle.net forums, then both the threat and the potential gain of the change seem rather minimal to me. (And most of what I’m trying to argue is that the threat is rather minimal for most people.)
If we extend the argument to internet anonymity in general then I’m rather torn. There are corners of the net where all sorts of shady folks gather (with real life consequences) that can go about their business exactly because of the freedom of anonymity. On the other hand this exact same freedom allows oppressed minorities to express themselves. If the choice was whether to keep internet anonymity as a whole I really wouldn’t know how to answer that.
scrusi´s last [type] ..Pay For Your Trolling With Your Good Name

@longasc: No, TB doesn’t just hand his phone number to everyone but that’s not what we are talking about here, is it? He’s giving us his name and doesn’t seem to be stalked for it which is all my example meant to say.

I’m mostly questioning what harm will come from this. There is no connection between the name on the forums and your characters, so noone will find out who you are unless you tell them. This feature, as it was announced, allows no ingame stalking whatsoever. It does allow people to link your forum posts to your real name (which should lead to better behaviour) and it does allow people to find out that you are playing wow (but not where, when, or how). And if you really, really want to hide something you still have the option of not using the forums. (Not a big loss in their current state, surely.)

And now back to the internet and games: You reveal information about you to everyone. It is easy to google names and make connections and all that.

It is absolutely not necessary that people know too much about me that easily. This gives them opportunities to abuse. I am not a criminal, spy, whatever. People will have to be content with what I reveal about myself by my choice.

I know people who had to switch servers and names in UO and WoW because someone spoiled who they are ingame or to people who know them. They were neither celebrities nor criminals. Don’t make it even easier for them to get stalked.

Regarding one example, not even John Bain (The Cynical Brit) puts his email address on his blog. Nor his mobile phone. Heck, you can even decide if you want your name to be listed in the phone book.

Why does Blizzard have so much problems to allow people an internet persona. GamerTag works, @playername for Cryptic games works, but no, Blizzard strangely enough wants a real ID without any privacy options.

I also want to point out lots of people have to hide something without being criminals. We do not live in an enlightened world where everyone is a buddy. The internet is already a great source of information for recruiters and people digging for dirty details.

More responsibility on the internet can easily be achieved. No anonymous commenting, for example. You already get my email with every comment I make, and guess what, it contains my real name. That was my choice. But I would not post with my email address shown to everyone in a WoW forum for sure.