Friday, July 9, 2010

Blizzard backpedals

After the RealID story swapped over from gaming news to regular news like the BBC and the Washington Post, Blizzard decided that it was wiser to listen to their customers concerns. Thus they announced that real names will not be used on the Starcraft 2 and World of Warcraft forums. Instead "you will be posting by your StarCraft II Battle.net character name + character code", which assuming that the character code is unique, gives us all the advantages of being able to trace people's posts, without the disadvantages of revealing real names.

I do think that besides the bad PR, there was also a certain amount of account cancellations involved in that decision. I participated in that with a stupid trick, cancelling my now abandonded multiboxing account which would otherwise just have run out, citing RealID as reason for quitting. :) But by doing so I did notice that the EU account management site was sluggish and gave error messages, so that I only got the cancellation through on the third attempt. I don't assume the account site overload was caused by lots of people subscribing.

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