ScorchedNX2K wrote:Be sure to don your tin foil cap while you're at it. I mean you have half the world's population on facebook and myspace detailing their lives. So we get this weird dichotomy of wanting to share every second of your life with the fear of people finding out...about every second of your life. I realize that one is voluntary and the other kinda isn't...
Don't group everyone together.
Yes, lots of people share every stupid detail of their lives on Facebook, twitter, etc.
Yes, lots people are complaining about privacy on B.net.
What makes you think they're the same people?
I don't have a Facebook account. Or a Myspace page. Or a Twitter account. Only a handful of people on NICO even know my real name. Those that do still call me "MoD" for the most part.
There are a lot of reasons not to FORCE people to use their real names (ESPECIALLY not first AND last names) on the internet. There's a reason I don't use my real name on NICO: I work in a security/confidentiality critical field and don't want my posts on NICO (which are unrelated to work, but obviously associated with ME) to be linked to it. It's not merely a matter of preference. There is a genuine NEED for a level of privacy on the internet.
Even beyond the real-world privacy issues, this move has in-game privacy problems as well.
I'll give a WoW example. One of my favorite things about WoW is that friends lists are per-character, not per-account. This REAL ID thing bothered be at first because it changes this. It bothers me more now. People in WoW are idiots. I can think of numerous reasons I might want to log off one character and play another for a while to escape from them. Now I can't. They can find all my characters through my real ID. Which is stupid. Why is that control being taken away from me? If I want them to know them all, I'll tell them who they all are. That should be MY choice.
And now with cross-game stuff going on, that stretches even further. Now they can bother me ANYWHERE. There's nowhere to hide. And in games like Diablo which are NOT MMOs, and designed to be enjoyable when played solo, that's a problem. I don't want the world to know where I am, what I'm doing, when I'm doing it, all the time.
One of the things that bothers me most about this whole mess is the people who act like only forum trolls and scammers have any cause for upset here. As if only THEY would have anything to fear. Clearly the people suggesting this don't live in the real world (and are likely a bunch of 12 year olds who have yet to discover the NEED for privacy out in the real world).
I'm not a troll. In fact I'm the anti-troll. I avoid multiplayer games like a plague because I can't stand the a$$ out there. And this just makes it worse. Now it makes it impossible for me to be anonymous, removing the last vestige of comfort I have out there. I'm a very private person and I see no reason to hand over control of that to Blizzard. There's NOTHING wrong with wanting personal privacy, but if you listen to the hordes of idiots on the Blizz forums, you'd think anyone wanting anonymity must be an escaped rape convict or something.
The fact that I have nothing BAD to hide doesn't mean I have nothing I WANT to hide.
