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Blizzard's proposal is idiocy in spades. If they were honestly addressing the problems of spammers or jerks or whatever, they'd just have you assign a nickname to your battle.net ID and display that to post with. But they aren't doing that, are they: ergo, that 'explanation' is straw-man.
Solve problems with the most efficient, least negatively impactful solution. This 'cure' is so much worse than the extremely minor problem it's supposed to 'solve' that it requires scientific notation to express.
Using your real name...no company with the remotest grasp of gaming or the internet would take that step without a ulterior motive someplace.
Since I'll be forced to use the forum for support and such, for which they provide no alternative, and as the official forums are a primary vehicle to communicate with Blizzard, my options are: forgo the support and communication that I'm paying for or open myself up even wider.
See, the address I use for gaming is unique to each game -- my personal email is used with the company only -- so it's fun to see how compromised my email address is (e.g., the one I use for this site) as I get 5-8 emails a day ostensibly from Blizzard and, hey, since they're on that account I never worry about them being bogus or not.
Taking my real name and google -- not even any investigative sites, all FREE material on the net -- and I would have found me in 3 phone calls; found my wife in 1; found people in my guild who live within 100 miles of me in, respectively, 3, 1, 1, 2, 4 phone calls. Sad part of that is I found the SSN of one of my friends embedded in a URL -- go-go-online-privacy.
I had to work a little harder with the ones in Canada and Australia but not enough to deter me if I wanted to play the scam-game.
It is, of course, disgusting how much of our personal information is made available by companies without our honest consent (honest-consent being: I have a real choice that doesn't negatively impact me) but it is unconscionable to force us to expose ourselves to even more of it, to open ourselves up to a wider audience of scammers for the EXTREMELY MINOR benefit of zipping the mouth on trolls just to access the services we pay for.
To the folks saying "you won't really quit over this, will you?" to people...well, let's hear it: delineate our options here: how do we access what we paid for in terms of support without exposing what can only be considered "Private, Personal Data" (Private, Personal Data is data that can be used to find you in the real world)
I play games to relax and as an inexpensive hobby I can enjoy with friends, not to paint a target on my ass.
This is a breech of faith and likely a terminal one. This may be end of not just WoW but every Blizzard product from now on.
(P.S. Everyone's been looking for the WoW-Killer...good job, Blizzard, ya found it!)
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