Month: July 2010

Since I got a fair bit of response to yesterday’s comments on Blizzard Entertainment’s proposed forum policies and the privacy implications of them, I wanted to make sure and take the time to note that they are responding to their customers in a postive manner. Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime made this post today on the game’s forums:

Hello everyone,

I’d like to take some time to speak with all of you regarding our desire to make the Blizzard forums a better place for players to discuss our games. We’ve been constantly monitoring the feedback you’ve given us, as well as internally discussing your concerns about the use of real names on our forums. As a result of those discussions, we’ve decided at this time that real names will not be required for posting on official Blizzard forums.

It’s important to note that we still remain committed to improving our forums. Our efforts are driven 100% by the desire to find ways to make our community areas more welcoming for players and encourage more constructive conversations about our games. We will still move forward with new forum features such as the ability to rate posts up or down, post highlighting based on rating, improved search functionality, and more. However, when we launch the new StarCraft II forums that include these new features, you will be posting by your StarCraft II Battle.net character name + character code, not your real name. The upgraded World of Warcraft forums with these new features will launch close to the release of Cataclysm, and also will not require your real name.

I want to make sure it’s clear that our plans for the forums are completely separate from our plans for the optional in-game Real ID system now live with World of Warcraft and launching soon with StarCraft II. We believe that the powerful communications functionality enabled by Real ID, such as cross-game and cross-realm chat, make Battle.net a great place for players to stay connected to real-life friends and family while playing Blizzard games. And of course, you’ll still be able to keep your relationships at the anonymous, character level if you so choose when you communicate with other players in game. Over time, we will continue to evolve Real ID on Battle.net to add new and exciting functionality within our games for players who decide to use the feature.

In closing, I want to point out that our connection with our community has always been and will always be extremely important to us. We strongly believe that Every Voice Matters, ( http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/about/mission.html ) and we feel fortunate to have a community that cares so passionately about our games. We will always appreciate the feedback and support of our players, which has been a key to Blizzard’s success from the beginning.

Mike Morhaime
CEO & Cofounder
Blizzard Entertainment

Just as they deserved the brickbat when they were proposing to do something stupid, they deserve praise for recognizing they’d mis-stepped (and in a rare move for most companies, recognizing it before they actually implemented it.

Good job, Blizzard. Very good job.

Blizzard Entertainment, makers of World of Warcraft and other games, unveils controversial new forum policies

I’m a person who has long argued that there is no privacy on the Internet,there never was any privacy on the Internet, and that pretending otherwise is a comfortable delusion people craft for themselves in order to not freak out thinking about how much of their personal information is floating around in the ether.

Having said that…Blizzard is seriously out of bounds on this one. The concern isn’t just the forums. If it was, we’d all just shrug and go on with our lives; I can’t remember the last time I read the official forums, much less posted to them. And as you can see, I post to Usenet with my real name and e-mail address, and have done so for 20 years, so I’m not overly concerned with people finding me .

But then, I’ve never had a stalker. I’ve never been sexually assaulted. I’ve never been the victim of identity theft. I’ve never been harassed because I’m female, or gay, or transgendered. But I know people who fall into every single one of those categories, some of them very close to me. Their concerns about protecting their identity from random strangers are real, substantial, and very much valid.

Right now, it’s just the forums, but what happens when they decide to reveal your real name to people using the Armoury? Or an in-game query against your character? As much as I generally regard slippery-slope arguments as a fallacy, it does seem very clear that Blizzard has a cavalier attitude towards its users’ identities, and that is troubling.

It’s one thing to soapbox about the illusion of privacy on the Internet, and another thing to simply blatantly ignore the importance of the illusion and flagrantly expose your users’ information. There may be only the thinnest line between you and the world, but that thin line matters; it’s part of the social contract that allows the Internet to function.

Bad move, Blizzard. Very, very bad move.

More reading on this that I liked:

• P.Z. Myers: The interesting experiment is already getting interesting
• Alisia @ Hellmode.com: Why Real ID is a Really Bad Idea