As somebody that over the course of about four years played two years of World Of Warcraft nonconsecutively, I always ended up leaving because I felt something in the game was missing.
This wasn’t it. In fact, if I played now, this would make me find where the essence of World Of Warcraft is on the planet, and run as far away from it as humanly possible.
Blizzard announced on its WoW message boards recently its relationship with the RealID service, effectively forcing players to share personal information on the board that anybody with two brain cells to rub together wouldn’t want to.
The partnership with RealID, designed to let players interact across multiple servers and even games, is to be polite a very questionable decision. World Of Warcraft appears to not be satisfied with a mere account hacking problem, their goal is full blown identity theft.
Of course, that isn’t their intention, but this inclusion is begging for trouble. The online gaming community is well known for developing minds taking games too serious, crazed lunatics focusing their entire lives around said games, and videos on YouTube documenting players angrily screaming death threats at one another because something didn’t go their way. Even recently, a Team Fortress 2 player spent six months planning out and executing the murder of a rival player. This was done WITHOUT a service that makes players real names common knowledge.
What about freely sharing personal information to online gaming communities (or any online community, for that matter) sounds like a good idea to Blizzard? Even further, what about this sounds like anything beyond one of the most careless mistakes they have ever made?
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