Blizzard to require real names in Starcraft 2 forums

arstechnica.com

1 point·blickly··2 comments

I don't get the hubub about the RealID announcement. Yes, your real name is out in public on the forums, but so what?

I saw this same discussion on Reddit and loved one of the responses:

> "Thus it appears we are left with another case of I put something on the internet and someone I didn’t want to see it, saw it - this is everyone's fault but my own."

That quote doesn't seem to apply. They are making this an issue before anyone has put content on the web with their name on it. This seems more like a bait and switch than people who cry about posting embarrassing pictures on Facebook. Yes their old posts won't have their name so that isn't an issue but they joined a community with one expectation of privacy and now are about to have another. Before that's happening they are taking responsibility. Their customers are paying them not the other way around, so they are asking for their names not to be associated with the product. That seems reasonable to me.

Clearly gamertags or aliases have power for gamers. They are making it obvious that they don't want to put real names out there. Privacy when you want it is a valuable thing.

And as for your question on so what. Ask the PR rep that was in the thread.

They found where he lived. Sent stuff to his mother (or at least were trying to), and disrupted his Facebook and Fickr pages so badly that they had to be deleted.

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