Someone at Blizzard was really drunk when they decided this. Starting with July 27th, there will be a new incarnation of the WoW forums, where you will only be able to post with your real name (i.e. RealID, the name on your battle.net account).

A lot of people are missing exactly what’s going on, so in short:
* Starting with July 27th, you have a choice: post with your RealID or not post at all.

* You can choose between displaying your RealID alone or your RealID and character. I imagine this means I will be either “Ioana [Surname]” or “Ioana [Surname] – Jen, level 80 druid, Alonsus”. This allows you a certain level of anonymity… unless you want to recruit for your guild. Or are someone well-known on the forums, like Lissanna. Or if you want to post with your lvl 80 to show you know what you’re talking about regarding a class. In that case, oops, you’re fucked.

* Blue posters will also have their real names revealed.

* The change won’t be retroactive – your existing forum posts won’t automagically have your name on them. This only applies to the new forums being rolled out at the end of July.

* Blizzard plans to integrate Battle.net with Facebook – see the press release from May.

The supposed reason? Less trolling. Yes, somehow making you use your real name is more effective than, say, making you choose an unique handle or a main character to always post with.

Many, many people have already voiced their concern (at the moment of writing this, 963 pages on the US thread, 172 pages on the EU thread, 55 pages on the Spanish thread, 59 pages on the French thread, 190 pages in the German thread and 27 pages in the Russian thread). I won’t pretend I read all the posts in all the languages, but by skimming the US, EU, FR and ES threads the overwhelming opinion is FUCK NO.

I will say upfront that this doesn’t affect me that much. I never was a frequent poster, my name is pretty damn common as far as Romania goes, and I never had trouble for being a girl in WoW. However, not everyone is in the same situation, so just a short list of potential problems:

* You have an uncommon name. Anyone who disagrees that DKs are overpowered can now look you up online and call you at 3.33 AM every day, if not worse. (Yes, there are a lot of fucked up people online, do you want to risk it?) This probably doesn’t work for all countries, but for the US and UK there’s people finding services that, judging by what people are posting, are very good at uncovering things about your real life. Like, say, what people found out about CM Bashiok after he disclosed his real name to the forum…

* You have a name that identifies you as female/Arabic/Mexican/etc, a dick decides that females/Arabs/Mexicans stole our jerbs and randomly decides to make life difficult for you. If you read the threads, there are a lot of women who were harassed in WoW by people who got crushes on them or for simply being in top guilds.

* Your battle.net is registered under someone else’s name. Minor children playing on parents’ accounts, couples using the same name on both accounts. Who will suffer the consequences when little Timmy decides to spew some rage, under his father’s name, at the Warlock who disagreed with him?

* You apply for a job at a company and the boss finds you posting on the WoW forums and decides they’d better go with the non-WoW-playing candidate. “I wouldn’t want to work in a company like that anyway!!” Yes, I’m sure, unless you just got fired, rent is due and you’re kinda out of money.

* You just don’t want your fucking name all over the internet. Even with my common name and while actively trying to not associate my real world person with the online Jen, a while ago by googling “Ioana [Surname]” you would land straight on my personal blog. Yes, if it’s a public blog then I should expect to be found, but I still made a conscious effort to make that difficult. While I don’t have a problem with Jen the druid being connected to Ioana the tech writer, I’m sure there’s many other people who might object. Some professions simply require maintaining a certain image; a weird name and a Google search could ruin your credibility. (Of course, there’s nothing wrong with playing WoW, we know that; employers might not.)

* From a personal point of view, I don’t like people on my realm knowing my nationality. With due apologies to the decent Romanians I know, most of the Romanians on General and Trade are dumb offensive trolls. The latest incident that comes to mind was during a World Cup game, when my intellectually challenged countrymen decided swearing on ICC’s General was the new fun thing… so 5 minutes of Romanian language involving sexual organs, families and football followed. I can only imagine the fun time I’d have posting in a recruitment thread about my guild and getting a bunch of these people… (Yes, for some reason I do find swearing in my native language more offensive than in English.) Not to mention that Romanians are already discriminated more than enough – we’re all Gypsies or thieves, of course, so I’ll be more than glad to hear this in game.

I don’t have anything to hide, but I’ve always felt more secure when people didn’t know information about myself without my permission. I’ve already had several incidents with idiots who thought that because they knew who my employer was, they knew my job responsibilities. They were wrong, but this made the whole situation even more infuriating – reading lies about myself made me livid.

I’ll stop here, since I am at work and so many people wrote about this already… I haven’t found a pro-change blog so far, but please point me at them if they exist, I’m always curious about different views.

I won’t quit WoW or burn my DVDs in the central square over this. I still enjoy the game a lot. But I don’t have any intention of posting on the official forums anymore; I’ll stick to recruiting in Trade and I’ll just hope I won’t have a problem that can’t be solved without posting in the Tech Support forums. I will also be following this very closely, since I’m very curious what Blizzard will do… I’ve never seen so much rage over an announcement.

(In the 15 minutes I’ve spent writing this, the page count for the threads became: US 975, EU 183, FR 68, ES 60, DE 200, RU 30. That’s a LOT of pissed off players…)

Edit: Pure win. Guy posts real name on the forum and dares posters to call him at work… and 20 minutes later, someone does.