It’s been a while since I’ve written anything here. The reason is a little technical, but in short it comes down to website maintenance. All the technical tidbits should be sorted out now and I’ll try to be a little more active again.

A good start is to conclude the Real ID posts I’ve made. The last time I wrote about it, there was a huge uproar about Blizzard going to publish our first and last names on their official forums as they were planning to attach them to the posts we made in an attempt to improve the quality of discussions (read: get rid of all the forum trolls). However, I don’t think they had anticipated such an enormous amount of protest coming from the community. No doubt the very same forum trolls were very vocal, but as I stated, I felt that there certainly were valid grounds against such a policy.

Not too long after the shitstorm hit, there was an open letter from Mike Morhaime (CEO & Co-founder Blizzard Entertainment):

Hello everyone,

I’d like to take some time to speak with all of you regarding our desire to make the Blizzard forums a better place for players to discuss our games. We’ve been constantly monitoring the feedback you’ve given us, as well as internally discussing your concerns about the use of real names on our forums. As a result of those discussions, we’ve decided at this time that real names will not be required for posting on official Blizzard forums.

It’s important to note that we still remain committed to improving our forums. Our efforts are driven 100% by the desire to find ways to make our community areas more welcoming for players and encourage more constructive conversations about our games. We will still move forward with new forum features such as the ability to rate posts up or down, post highlighting based on rating, improved search functionality, and more. However, when we launch the new StarCraft II forums that include these new features, you will be posting by your StarCraft II Battle.net character name + character code, not your real name. The upgraded World of Warcraft forums with these new features will launch close to the release of Cataclysm, and also will not require your real name.

I want to make sure it’s clear that our plans for the forums are completely separate from our plans for the optional in-game Real ID system now live with World of Warcraft and launching soon with StarCraft II. We believe that the powerful communications functionality enabled by Real ID, such as cross-game and cross-realm chat, make Battle.net a great place for players to stay connected to real-life friends and family while playing Blizzard games. And of course, you’ll still be able to keep your relationships at the anonymous, character level if you so choose when you communicate with other players in game. Over time, we will continue to evolve Real ID on Battle.net to add new and exciting functionality within our games for players who decide to use the feature.

In closing, I want to point out that our connection with our community has always been and will always be extremely important to us. We strongly believe that Every Voice Matters (http://eu.blizzard.com/en-gb/company/about/mission.html), and we feel fortunate to have a community that cares so passionately about our games. We will always appreciate the feedback and support of our players, which has been a key to Blizzard’s success from the beginning.

Thankfully they’ve come to their senses about this! It gets even better though! As you might know I have been a little… sceptical about the “friends of friends” feature that was introduced with Real ID. From an interview with the developers on Twitter, it appears they’re going to introduce an option to disable this feature!

Q: Do you have any plans to allow players to not show their real name to friends of friends while using the Real ID system?
A: As with any new feature we add to our games, we’ve been evaluating how Real ID has been used since its release to identify new functionality that would help improve our players’ experience. The in-game Real ID “friends of friends” list is designed to give players a convenient way to populate their Real ID friends list with other players they know and trust in real life, allowing them to quickly and easily send Real ID friend requests to these people without having to enter their Battle.net® account names. However, we recognize that some players would prefer not to be displayed on friends lists in this fashion, so we plan to include an option that will allow players to opt out of appearing on their Real ID friends’ “friends of friends” lists. We’re anticipating this feature to be available for StarCraft II shortly after release of the game, and World of Warcraft at around the same time — we’ll have more information for you in the coming weeks.

So, good news! My concerns are laid to rest for now. I’d still prefer an alias to be shown, instead of my real name, but due to the removal of friends of friends, it’s not quite as big a deal any more.