Well, it's been an amusing 2 days for us WoW players. I posted before about the utter stupidity that is the new announcement about the official forums requiring RealID, posting your real, full name on each thread that or post you make. Blizzard customers aren't happy.


The thread where Blizzard is carefully herding all complains has reached over 40,000 posts in just 2 days. This has to be the fastest growing thread in internet's history. With over 12,000 unique users, and with a disaproval rate of over 90%, it has to be the biggest display of universal discontent over a new policy for any company of this type.

The media is all over this as well, with reports even from prestigious sources outside the industry like (unbelievably) the Wall Street Journal and the BBC. The question in my mind right now is, will Blizzard change its mind now that it is undeniably evident that this is not what their customers want?

Well, there's a lot at stake. I'm pretty sure that, as players themselves, the creative team behind the game are against this, but the big heads over at activision and blizzard just recently signed a deal with facebook in order to connect their games to the social network, and in turn attract more people to WoW and Battle.net.

This is just the start. Players know it, they know it, and it's been made clear that this is just the beginning of more things to come. Facebook "Likes" inside the game? instant feed to facebook/twitter accounts on game accomplishments? yes, yes and more. All of this comes with the privacy issues that currently surround these social networks.

If there's a time to make a stand against this, it is now. If this goes through, I'm pretty sure there will be no end to the things Activision and Blizzard will make with their customers' personal information. As i said before, I don't really mind from having my personal info being made public (as it is right now). But purposefully making a profit out of it when I never joined the game for that purpose? that's something I won't be a part of.

I grabbed my popcorn and I am watching from the sidelines. It'll be interesting to see where this ends.

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