Stories of WoW

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.

I love failpug stories. I even love my own failpugs – raging is cathartic. Last night, when I zoned in Slave Pens and saw Weinodk the tank with Blood Presence, I groaned inwardly – and outwardly, to the guild. My first plea to please put Frost Presence was ignored as he ran ahead letting me remember (once again) that a shaman is not a druid, and even if it was, Rejuv at level 60 didn’t do squat.

Then he said this was the first “hard” dungeon he’d tanked. I told him about Frost Presence again, holding back the snark but fully expecting to be ignored and, lo and behold …“Oh, sorry, that must be why I’m losing aggro, I’ll put Frost”.

Yes, I managed to find the rare breed of new player who actually listens to advice.

The run continued in a just as amazing manner.
* The DK took care of my mana. More than me, to be honest.
* The other DK didn’t use D&D because he was higher level and didn’t want to grab aggro.
* The warlock always kept me soulstoned.
* The whole group was patient with the DK, gave advice, and didn’t utter a ‘wtf’ or a ‘noob’.
* The DK apologized when he ran too much ahead of me. He apologized even when I let him die because I was busy eating instead of healing.
* The DK tried to get us to queue for another dungeon (he wanted a harder one to practice his new found skills), but we declined politely and he understood. From his language, I’m pretty sure it was a kid, which makes this even more impressive. It wouldn’t have been the first time an over-eager 12-year old pissed me off.

In the end, we weren’t pr0, we got lost a bit on the way, we fucked up a few pulls and I did forget I have Earth Shield until halfway in… but it was one of the most pleasant runs I’ve had in a while outside the guild. I hope my DK doesn’t become one of those gogogogogo tanks in 20 levels…

Patch days are fun. They’re a time to bond with your guild and find new and creative ways to keep entertained.

Of course, after we got the patch later than the whole US (yes, even later than the whiners), the login servers were overloaded, and then my battlegroup’s instance server died a fiery death. In real life terms, that meant we found the chat feature of our guild site and used it. Someone remembered the scourge chat logs, so our new unofficial greeting is “spider pride!!! >8<".

The server was supposed to come back at 6 ST and we mananged to log in around 8... still hoping there might be a raid. With the instance server down, everyone spent their time flying around Wyrmrest temple. And I mean everybody. I’ve never seen so many flying mounts in the same spot. It was oddly fascinating, I watched it for an hour while playing with the new features.

(Click for big image)

(By the way, RealID is pretty cool, but I still haven’t added more than 10 people, 9 of which I know IRL.)

Yesterday the instance servers did work, and we kicked dragon ass.

(After wiping for almost 4 hours. Yeah, life without the ICC buff is hard.)

Also, kids, remember: jumping off Dalaran in a bike is fun and non-lethal if you pop in flight form before you hit the ground.

Jumping off Dalaran in a bike is lethal if you hit an unexpected ledge while taking screenshots.

So, the NDA was lifted. It’s time to rejoice. I’m just a bit… puzzled.

I was in the Alpha. I should have all this info stashed up to share with the world and bask in the pageviews. I should have tons of posts written about the changes. I don’t.

[Luckily for you, Lissanna was also in the Alpha and she's promised some yummy posts.]

I maybe played the Alpha for 10 hours in total, which were spent:
- leveling a worgen hunter to 11
- making a goblin mage, logging into her, looking around and logging out
- flying around on my druid in Elwynn forest to see the big hole in Stormwind
- doing one run of Blackrock whateveritscalled
- doing the first few quests of Vashj’ir.

So I don’t have anything much to say yet. I probably won’t spend much time now in the beta either, because, honestly, I have enough to do on live, and I don’t want to spoil my Cataclysm leveling. I’m curious about the changes, but I don’t want to get bored of the quests before the expansion even hits.

So, no major insights, just a few observations. Spoilers be here, so don’t carry on if you want to skip them.

Continue reading Missed opportunities?

I’m having a lot of fun reading the QQ. This time around we got 66 pages of fun on this thread alone, and it’s doing wonders to get rid of office boredom.

What’s the problem, you say? Oh, life and death, of course. Blizzard delayed Ruby Sanctum with a week on the US realms, to make it coincide with the European release. And then, shock horror!!, they launched it in the middle of 24h maintenance on a bunch of servers. The rage, the foaming at the mouth, the victimizing, the forum sigs… It’s not fair, they promised we’d all get the raid at the same time!

Did anyone stop and think that Europe has Wednesday maintenance, which means even with the 24h maintenance, ALL the US realms still got to see RS before us?

No?

Ok, keep saying how this is the death of WoW and how everyone will quit the game now.