I Challenge all Real ID Supporters

[Danur]

To tell me how they will feel about the matter when the first girl player who unwittingly posts on the official forums, and winds up on the news as a rape victim. Or has her personal pictures gleaned off of her social networking sites that weren't completely locked down and secure thrown all over the internet. Or when a child is kidnapped because a pedobear (you know, one of those friends you have "in-game relationships" with as Blizzard calls it) gets him to tell them what state they live in and they track down his parents home based on his last name.

There are innumerable downsides to using your name publicly on a forum, and for everyone to say "then don't use it" as a logical argument against it blows my mind. People WILL use it, and it's irresponsible of Blizzard to give the impression that it's not only OK but a good thing to do so. It's one thing to offer something that you must opt-into, but to make this the standard and force us to avoid their services, and encouraging us to reveal more and more personal info to strangers over the internet is just flat our reckless. ESPECIALLY for a game that is marketed to children as well as adults.

So when the first news story hits, what will all of the dead-beat losers who have so little of a family or business life, to care about their image on the internet have to say?


edit** Also the response to this has been pretty much "I don't care" to "what the **** this is ridiculously wrong!"

Why are they doing this? As for cleaning up the forums of trolls, they are cleaning up the forums of everyone. The only people who will still use them are those who are the very bottom of the community. Those who have no need to worry about their image online. The type of people who have nothing going for them in life, will likely still troll on their real name anyway.

[zeal]

In none of the cases you described was it Blizzard's fault.

Raped: Perpetrator commited the crime. Victim made personal information public.
Pictures: Victim made the pictures public/company failed at securing private pictures.
Kidnapped: Perpetrator commited the crime. Parents allowed child online without monitoring and probably made personal information public. Child made personal information public.

All of these could have happened anywhere, anytime, without Blizzard specifically, without even the internet.

[Imnick]

Make this topic when it happens, not before.
You may never end up making the topic.

[Danur]

edited first post::::

---------- Post added 2010-07-07 at 01:49 AM ----------

In none of the cases you described was it Blizzard's fault.

Raped: Perpetrator commited the crime. Victim made personal information public.
Pictures: Victim made the pictures public/company failed at securing private pictures.
Kidnapped: Perpetrator commited the crime. Parents allowed child online without monitoring and probably made personal information public. Child made personal information public.

All of these could have happened anywhere, anytime, without Blizzard specifically, without even the internet.

Are you dense? I didn't say Blizzard was legally liable. I am saying their encouragement of using these services is morally reprehensible, and forcing us to avoid them rather than opt-into them is a terrible business model in terms of privacy protection.

[Imnick]

Why didn't you just post the edit in a new post instead of editing it and then also making a new post

[Jaitee]

yes because all the wow players are secretly harboring rape fantasies but as soon as we all see a woman's name on the forums we are going to go on a huge rape spree across the whole planet

[Danur]

yes because all the wow players are secretly harboring rape fantasies but as soon as we all see a woman's name on the forums we are going to go on a huge rape spree across the whole planet

Welcome to the internet. You must be new here.

4 girls in just my guild have been cyber stalked, and the one that was foolish enough to friend someone on facebook found they had to get a restraining order placed against the WoW friend to stop the endless harassing phone calls, texts, emails and letters. Had the guy been a little on the crazier side, it could have led to something much worse. People have been stabbed and shot for far less than rejection from the opposite sex.

Blizzard is making the standard set where your real info is what you use to communicate, and you are being unreasonable if you don't want to use their free services to do so. This can go nowhere good.

[Jaitee]

Welcome to the internet. You must be new here.

4 girls in just my guild have been cyber stalked, and the one that was foolish enough to friend someone on facebook found they had to get a restraining order placed against the WoW friend to stop the endless harassing phone calls, texts, emails and letters. Had the guy been a little on the crazier side, it could have led to something much worse. People have been stabbed and shot for far less than rejection from the opposite sex.

Blizzard is making the standard set where your real info is what you use to communicate, and you are being unreasonable if you don't want to use their free services to do so. This can go nowhere good.

my point is that if a person is a rapist then they will already be out raping they arnt suddenly going to go on a raping spree just because they saw a girls name on the internet and they arnt going to look at the wow forums and see the name jane doe type it into google find her and rape and kill her

[Danur]

my point is that if a person is a rapist then they will already be out raping they arnt suddenly going to go on a raping spree just because they saw a girls name on the internet and they arnt going to look at the wow forums and see the name jane doe type it into google find her and rape and kill her

A rapist will see some girl that he feels he's close with in game, and find out her real name because Blizzard is now encouraging such activity (where in the past they vehemently were against it), and when she lets him know that "no, I don't want to meet you and live at your apartment while you finish up school" and he may not like it.

Keep being naive and act like crazy people aren't out in the world. It's a bigger place out there with crazier people out there than your bedroom at your parents house may seem. A lot of them just may be on your server.

[Memory]

Apparently people don't seem to care about privacy nowadays. I guess privacy is something for 'old' geeks that started using internet in '90, way before social networks boom. At the end of the day, there must be a reason if Blizzard implemented this, no? Most part of the community must enjoy and praise it, or they're just too lethargic, slothful and uninterested on anything beside epics.
All you can get on MMO is some trolls that will flame and ridiculize you altho they can't grasp the whole of related issues.
You're still in time to quit all together, instead of just dropping the forums and still supporting Blizzard: WoW was never that amazing game anyway, but it's surely getting too old. Altho few milions of people think otherwise and they even think their opinion matters anything since they're so many... not.

[Jaitee]

A rapist will see some girl that he feels he's close with in game, and find out her real name because Blizzard is now encouraging such activity (where in the past they vehemently were against it), and when she lets him know that "no, I don't want to meet you and live at your apartment while you finish up school" and he may not like it.

Keep being naive and act like crazy people aren't out in the world. It's a bigger place out there with crazier people out there than your bedroom at your parents house may seem. A lot of them just may be on your server.

i never said crazy people arnt out there i know there are alot of wackos out there infact 3 of my close female friends have been raped in the past
how will this system make guys more likely to go on rape sprees
if a girl decides to interact with a guy and hes the type to go nuts and rape and kill women then with or without real id hes still that type of person and if your worried about that then its easy dont give out where u live....or lie if u live in canada say you live in texas....or with the forum dont choose to put your characters name there or make an alt to use as the toon name and people u play with wont have the faintest idea thats your forum post with your name on it

[Fateq]

I agree with you, it really shouldn't be implemented. Geuss i'll never post on their forums again.

[Danur]

Siigh, starting to bring up rape is exagerating.
But you can be sure that a lot of girls will be bothered by perverts.

I live just outside of NYC. Rape happens so frequently that it's hardly newsworthy at this point. Usually it stems from either a drunken night, or punishment for rejection. The idiotic image of a rapist being some anonymous prowler like out of some bad TV movie plot is not accurate in the least.

[SilverLynx]

Okay - here's a case in point.

Back in Vanilla when it was very easy for most of the population on the server to know each other, there was a female alliance player who used to hang out on the forums and chat with people. Eventually she met a really nice guy Hordeside and she rerolled.

One of her former guildies took huge offense to this. Largely because he had a massive crush on her. Now while she had not given her name out, she had used her WoW alias in one other place - a BBforum. He tracked this down to a webpage she had made when she was much younger which had a domain attached to it - he requested her info, and got a maiden name and an old address. He used that address to track her down, despite the fact that she had moved several times to her ex-husband. He phoned and threatened said ex-husband until he coughed up her personal information. He them released that information not only on the WoW forums, put on "internet raid" boards, causing her phone to be ringing off the hook constantly, pizzas delivered at her house at all times of the day and night, and her children's school called and threatened with bomb threats against her kids.

While she was going through this Blizzard's response to him taunting her on the forums was "well, we banned his one account that leaked her address, it's not our fault if he's not really saying anything exactly threatening on the boards other than showing up in any thread she posted in and said things like "how's your kids?"

The woman eventually moved, but due to her creep of an ex-husband, was found twice more by this stalker, and both her parents and one of here close friends ended up on the "phonecalls all night, pizzas every hour" torture sessions.

She asked Blizzard to give her a free transfer. They told her it wasn't their problem - which it sort of wasn't, but it would have been humane of them to do so.

Eventually she transferred to another server and this guy had the audacity to take her name on a lvl 1 alt, run her naked into Org, and have Gamon kill her and leave her corpse in the middle of town for all to see how Blizzard didn't give a damn about what he did to this poor woman.

He also offered bounties of gold and RL money to get back on her trail.

If she hadn't used her WoW name on another forum, she would have been fine. But if this jackass had STARTED with her name, he would have been in her face even sooner.

She is someone who will not be using Real ID - and I really hope to God she hears about this changeover before this guy comes out of the woodwork to stalk her again.

[Danur]

i never said crazy people arnt out there i know there are alot of wackos out there infact 3 of my close female friends have been raped in the past
how will this system make guys more likely to go on rape sprees
if a girl decides to interact with a guy and hes the type to go nuts and rape and kill women then with or without real id hes still that type of person and if your worried about that then its easy dont give out where u live....or lie if u live in canada say you live in texas....or with the forum dont choose to put your characters name there or make an alt to use as the toon name and people u play with wont have the faintest idea thats your forum post with your name on it

Your logic is backwards at best, and intellectually dishonesty at worst. The system won't make crimes happen more often. It will help crimes made against WoW players that use it happen more often. And crimes dont have to be extremes like murder and rape. It can be harassing phone calls, unsolicited newspaper subscriptions, threatening letters among other mail-related harassment. There is nearly no positive aspect to using real names on forums, and a laundry list of dangers and downsides. But go on, I'm enjoying watching people try to make a molehill out of a mountain.

[ptolemy66t]

Do you really think your safe on the internet even w/o all those facebooks and myspaces? they don't even need your name to find out who you are, its just alot easier, ever heard of 4chan?

[Memory]

Ah, yeah, I can't miss to notice that talking about rape won't help your cause: people will laugh about it and about your excessive fears. But privacy doesn't only exist against such extreme hypotheses (which are far from being unreal and imaginative tho).

Ah well, I guess I'll go back to my antiquated world where people don't feel the need to be interconnected 24/7 with lot of strangers and where they don't want everybody to know their private stuff unless they say them intentionally and directly.

[Fateq]

Ah, yeah, I can't miss to notice that talking about rape won't help your cause: people will laugh about it and about your excessive fears. But privacy doesn't only exist against such extreme hypotheses (which are far from being unreal and imaginative tho).

Ah well, I guess I'll go back to my antiquated world where people don't feel the need to be interconnected 24/7 with lot of strangers and where they don't want everybody to know their private stuff unless they say them intentionally and directly.

Im the same, if i wouldnt tell you over the phone im not going to tell you over the net.

[SparkofImagination]

I support REALID only because it destroys the official wow forums. This is great news.

[sabredragon]

Okay - here's a case in point.

-snip-

THANK YOU. Now, shuffle off and go post that on the "picture says 1k words" thread to help prove a point, because there's a person on there being as stubborn as a mule.