It’s not login information people are concerned about so much as the abuse of personal information in other ways not related to the game.
And you were doing so well actually making arguments instead of resorting to dismissive condescension.
It’s not login information people are concerned about so much as the abuse of personal information in other ways not related to the game.
And you were doing so well actually making arguments instead of resorting to dismissive condescension.
Hah not bright.
Are their any social sites you guys that are worried about your employment prospects use? Facebook for example has similar problems doesn’t it?
It does. That’s why I don’t have a Facebook account, and I’m annoyed as hell that Activision is making deals with Facebook.
You will be assimilated…
Have a good week all I’m off on holiday. No wow will be tough but I’ll cope I’m sure.
I’ll offer you the same challenge I’ve offered to others:
Start posting everywhere you currently post anonymously online with a signature that includes your real name (and, if you really want to get serious, your address and phone number). If this is no big deal, you should have no problem doing that.
The problem is not that I think that someone is going to use my real name to hack my account. It’s that I think they’re going to be able to use it to harass me.
Maybe you’d feel better if you could come up with an actual argument instead of a personal attack. I don’t seem to recall you ever bringing up any particularly stunning WoW accomplishments in this thread, by the way. So while I haven’t ever played The Sims, I’m reasonably sure I’m a much better raider than you.
I can restrict all of the information in my Facebook profile as I see fit. I can also sign up for an account as Batman if I want to.
I don’t use it either, or put my real name on any blogging that I do. If I did put my real name out there on that kind of thing these days, it would be carefully-considered posts and not “I play video games!” material.
Exactly. Bosstone plays video games and babbles about random shit on message boards. [NAME REDACTED] is a responsible adult.
Which is one reason I don’t use it. In fact, when I googled my name I found two hits that related to me, both concerned my masters thesis.
There’s plenty of legit ammo to fire off against RealID without resorting to fabrication
Let me give some real-world examples of gaming harassment and other concerns, for the naysayers, and these don’t even involve real names but could have gotten a whole lot worse if they did.
Back when EQ started (and thus was a relatively early example of a MMORPG for many of its players, and was therefore a new world), I knew of a female player on my server who was undergoing a campaign of harassment by male players. I don’t even recall what started it, but her opponents decided she needed to be taken down. They started spreading malicious gossip about her in-game behavior, her sexual habits, etc., and encouraged other people to send her private messages to tell her to stop doing such awful things in game. She was bombarded to the point where she almost quit, and the GMs quietly changed her character name. I don’t know what happened to the worst of her accusers, if anything.
Also in EQ, there was a guy who took grudges to an extreme. He hated anyone in my particular guild for some disagreement (probably over who had “rights” to a rare spawn) and would make up allegations on the boards years later over the indignities that he had suffered at the hands of my guildies or others who were targets of his ire. He was also good at causing problems like “trains” of monsters without any real way to prove he was doing it intentionally, and the kind of guy who considered theft of property in trading to be “roleplaying a rogue.” I have little doubt that if he had access to real-world info that he would have taken it out of the game.
In my EQ guild, there was a guy who fooled a lot of us into thinking he was just a big, sweet, kinda dumb but always there for guildies guy. Slowly and one by one, female players started leaving the guild. Turns out he was really good at being just skeevy enough to make women uncomfortable with his private “tells” to them but also with enough plausible deniability that he could fall back on the “hey, I’m just an affectionate guy, is there something wrong with that?” defense. Again, I wouldn’t want him knowing my RL info.
(He was slimy to the point that when a guildie in WoW started doing something vaguely similar, I didn’t respond favorably and got a sulking response. When I told him I simply didn’t want to hear flirty-type comments, even “hey sweetie” or whatever, and wanted him to stop, he said no. I told my husband that I was mad over this - the “sweetie” stuff got brushed off as “that’s just him”, but his refusal to stop when told made my husband blow up, and he laid into the guy. I got what I believe was a sincere and abject apology. My husband beat me to the blow up; we were playing in the same room and I vented my anger to him verbally.)
I was starting a new tauren druid (female toon, I always play females) and ran into a guy in the newbie area who really, really wanted to group with me, and tried to repeatedly. I wasn’t interested and said no. He sent me a profanity-laden rant in a whisper which included a bunch of female-specific profanities and vaguely violent overtones. Now just think how awesome it’d be if Blizzard gets their hypothetical Facebook-type system going that shows your real name and characters, and how I could log in to see that up on my WoWBook, or in my inbox at work. Can’t wait!
I reported him. The GM took my report and I got the standard “we did something but can’t tell you what” response in E-mail later. I deleted the druid and made a new one under another name.
There’s an ex-couple of ex-guildies in WoW, if that makes sense - they used to both be guildies and be a couple. They left the guild for another, then split up. She quit the game, but before doing that, revealed to my husband and I that her ex has bipolar disorder (no surprise) and that he abused her. If she wanted to return to the game for a stress release or to play with other friends, with new characters, she’d have to worry about when Blizzard might blow open the doors on everyone’s identities.
If I thought about this longer I’d come up with some more examples, but those are the ones that spring to mind. All of those are not good if someone has used the RealID-version of the forums without thinking of repercussions later when someone with a grudge searches, and get much worse if Blizzard goes to Facebook-wannabee plans.
I can’t control what of my info is already out there or what others might reveal, but I sure don’t want to open up more avenues for information release if I can help it.
That’s what I find horrible about the situation. Blizzard isn’t a part of a person’s personal troubles. Why should a harassed player have to lie to Blizzard in order to protect themselves from other vengeful parties and be able to enjoy the game normally like anyone else?
Right. Chill out. I never said that posting on the internet with your real name is a good idea. I said that this change isn’t a big deal because posting on the Blizzard forums isn’t a big deal. Oddly though, I do post on my main forum under an abbreviated form of the real name. I’m not sure how easy it is to determine my actual name from that though.
If you think the RealID additions to the WoW API are a massive security hole because a malicious addon could use it to farm your real name, I don’t know what to tell you really. That means a person who wants to learn your real name to harass you needs to trick you into downloading and using a malicious addon. Seems pretty improbable and certainly not a [caps]massive security hole[/caps]. I mean, that problem exists right now really with someone doing the same with like BO2K.
You should try The Sims. It’s pretty fun. My sim was doing her neighbour and the maid came in and caught them and got upset over the love triange and started breaking stuff. It was hilarious.
Except, as has been said many times, it is the only way to get reliable tech support. It’s also the best, maybe the only, way to find guilds who are recruiting off your server. It’s not just a place to troll and bullshit, they do actually have a use.
As I said in a previous post, I rely on other Linux users to find the problems with running WoW under Wine. The trouble with Linux users is they generally have strong ideas on privacy, and I can imagine that many of them would stop posting on the WoW forums altogether. Then, at best, I’ll have to dig through Google searches to find off-site message boards where people are still providing useful, current solutions, and at worst I just won’t be able to find any.
I don’t mean to say that this is a dire, all-important situation I’m in with Linux. But it’s just one example of how the forums are actually used for something besides trolling and mindless chatter.
It isn’t the only way to get reliable tech support. Email them or post on the dozens of other forums on the Internet with thousands of members who know how to fix every issue with every game. If you want to join a guild, go to WoWProgress and see who’s looking for what. It’s a better site. If you need help with WINE, add another thread to the dozens of WoW threads already on WineHQ. The only thing the Blizzard forums have going for them are blue posts, which are indexed on several other sites. And if somehow you absolutely must do something that thousands of people have managed to avoid for 15 years of Blizzard gaming, you can just throw an alias on your account.
The level of hysteria over a completely optional thing is insane. RealID is a minor inconvenience at worst.
There’s actually a known addon that includes debug code that’ll spew your RealID name back to you (but not to anyone else, fortunately).
The addon?
DBM.
Not that improbable now is it? All it would take is someone redistributing a known reputable addon with the code slid in. The DBM author is rather embarrassed about it as he’d been experimenting to see what the new b.net chat variables could do, and it’s been fixed. Link.
That said, there are also instances where teachers have said in The Thread of Doom that they absolutely do not want anyone knowing they play because students might seek them out, and by and large administrations and parents take a very dim view of that, accidental or not. Professionals in information sensitive professions like law, where perceptions can be very important. And then there’s people with non-whitebread names.
Trans people, women, people who have psychos in their lives – the list goes on.
ETA: Email isn’t ideal either because you often want a Super Speedy Reply, and the tech support/CS forums often have other users pass along an answer that worked for them faster than a blue can get to you. I’ve also been to a ton of WoW related forums, and I have yet to see one with the level of information or centrality that the official TS/CS forums offer. Blue posts also don’t get put out there without people to interact with. It’s not like blues hand down their posts from on high – they need a question or issue to answer.
You don’t think I haven’t tried? Every time I look for an answer when WoW breaks down, I search on Google first thing. Every time, I don’t get a conclusive answer until I get down into the WoW forum. By making it an unpleasant option to go to the forums, Blizzard is fragmenting the community which will make it that much harder to find anything.
And even if it is as you say, that it’s a minor inconvenience (which I refuse to grant; violations of privacy should always be taken seriously), what are we gaining for this inconvenience? Jack. Shit. The only people left on Blizzard’s forums will be the trolls, the liars, and the prey too stupid or innocent to stay away or hide themselves. It’s a disruption of the community for no clear purpose.
GamesRadar posts Cata Before and After Scenes.
so basically the game is getting higher res textures that are all reddish. oh great, i find it annoying enough to find a forest zone to rid me of the fiery red death deserts of hellfire peninsula and searing gorge.
I hope the graphical requirements aren’t too much - I really would prefer to not have to get a new laptop any time soon.
Just hit Exalted with the Wyrmrest Accord. Off to see if any nice kit i can buy from them
And you’ve been shown–repeatedly–that it *is *a big deal. Just because *you *apparently don’t care about guild recruitment, or getting technical support, or finding someone on your server who has the high-end combine you need doesn’t mean most of the rest of us don’t.
Conficker–pretty much the most devious worm in the world, in its various iterations–works by exploiting a security hole that was technically patched before it was ever released. The patch that fixed the hole may have even been the impetus for its development.
People do unsafe things online all the time, whether through ignorance, confusion, or laziness. Just because the hole is only a problem if the user does something unwise doesn’t mean the hole doesn’t exist and doesn’t mean it’s not a serious problem.
Then maybe you should stop using it in a clear attempt to disparage me, hrmmm?
As has been explained to you, those are not *reliable *alternatives. They are *inferior *alternatives–and, in some cases, nonexistant ones.
That’s great for someone who wants to join a top-whatever guild. It’s terrible for anything and anyone else, which is the vast majority of WoW users.
Even once you’ve found a guild to app to via WoWProgress, it’s entirely possible you’ll get kicked back to–wait for it–their recruitment thread(s) on the forums, either in the recruitment forum or their server forum.
Which presumably is a circumvention Blizzard does not approve of and will stop. Otherwise, why woudln’t they have allowed us to just create a non-legal-name alias right off the bat?
They periodically collect data on the types of machines people are playing on when they’re determining new hardware requirements. If you can play WoW now, you can probably continue to do so for a good long while.
They have a Superior-quality (blue) chest that’s probably the best Plate tanking chest before you can get an Epic-quality (purple) upgrade from a raid or badges.