Anonymity on the official forums is going away

[Thulcondar]

"reality often has little connection to either right or fair."nnThroughout history perception has ALWAYS been reality.

[Shimmerwind]

nnAnd I can't really grasp the rationale that one might be worried what a potential employer might think for a couple of reasons; the first is the ol' fashioned, if a potential employer would judge me for what I choose to do in my off hours, that isn't the sort of place I would care to work fall back. The second is wrapped up in discrimination laws. Any company found choosing not to hire someone because they found someone online who shares a name with applicant who plays World of Warcraft (and given enough time, corporate practices of those sort would come out) is going to be on the butt-end of a massive series of lawsuits and public ridicule. The third, we're slowly moving past a point where playing video games is a stigma; the further we go along, the more the 70's/80's Nintendo generation moves in to the corporate world, the less stigmatic it becomes. I have been hired three times because I played MMOs; twice by hospitals, once by the corporate offices of a national wireless carrier. Which I volunteered as a part of my resume.nn

nnYour thinking is a little Utopian, I fear. There are many white-collar fields in which employers may tacitly take an interest in what an employee does on their own time. I'm an attorney; suppose a client googles my name and finds that I've been posting on the WoW forums, and they conclude that I'm some nerd gamer and therefore couldn't possibly be serious about my profession, and so they lean on my boss to boot me off a case. That's not far-fetched, and while you may think "that's not right" or "that's not fair", reality often has little connection to either right or fair. To be honest, if I googled my doctor and found that he was the most active poster on the WoW forums, I'd probably wonder what in the world he does all day. For younger people, maybe it's a different world - it certainly is if you're in college or below, but those of us in certain professional fields have to deal with people's perceptions. For people "in my generation", there will always be something of a stigma attached to playing a game like this - that's just the way it is. Even if there's only a 1% chance that a prospective employer wouldn't hire me, that's too much for my taste, considering that there is really no need for Blizzard to even do this. nnAlso, no offense but you're wrong about the legal implications of denying employment based on someone's off-duty activities. Generally, hiring decisions are subject to legal scrutiny only where the decisions are based on race, sex, religion, or handicap. Also, at least for most of the United States, employment is a at the will of the employer, and you can be fired at whim so long as the decision had nothing to do with the aforementioned classifications (and assuming there's no contract of employment or collective bargaining agreement). You can even be denied HOUSING by a landlord if they don't like what you do. There's a case out there, I think it's like 4 or 5 years old. either in NY or Florida, where the landlord refused to rent to a woman because she was a lawyer - he figured she'd be a pain the rear as a tenant because she was a lawyer, and on appeal the landlord's right to do so was upheld. Like I said before, reality isn't often tethered to what's right or wrong, especially since fair and right are moving targets.nnAs for public outcry - really? People are still buying gas from BP. I doubt Johnny Gamer's employment woes are going to make much of a ripple.nnI don't know - I hope they change their minds.

nnI respect the legal background of your rebuttal, but having both worked with and for a human resources department for a very large Indiana hospital and again for a small drug/alcohol rehabilitation facility for the better part of twelve years, I know what kind of legal scrutiny our hiring process was under and what exactly we could and could not consider during the hiring and firing process, for fear of lawsuit. Part of why I stopped working for hospitals and decided to take up my writing professionally was due to the ever-present paranoia of the ACLU swinging at us because we had unwittingly marginalized some heretofore unrecognized minority group. One has to imagine that attitude is fairly pervasive among large business interests. nnAs for the outcry, no -- I never meant to insinuate that the general populations would rise up and metaphorically slay the discriminating infidels with words and protests, bolstered by the support of most every member of the nation united under the banner of a just cause. But that is exactly the sort of cause the ACLU would take up, and that organization does know how to make a news item out of something. And in the current environment of scarce employment, should an blurb show up on CNN about someone being denied employment because they play World of Warcraft or any similar video game, I imagine it wouldn't be taken well.nnComparing it to the issue in the gulf is, unfortunately so, faulty; the environment has always, always, always been a backseat issue to a niche group. Occasionally it rises up, but usually only briefly and then settles (some would argue, it's pushed) back down. Currently, the environment isn't near the top and while the current crisis could be used to nudge it up that way as well as energy independence/fossil fuel independence, nothing is really be done to make it so. Environmental and oil issues have always been on the administratively-political side of the divide, but for when the costs of those politics begin to watershed toward the populous. Employment on the other hand is a populous-political issue, which tends to affect the general population much more directly and raises ire.nnIt's the nature of the human condition to personalize events; it's more difficult to personalize oil befouling the gulf. It isn't terribly difficult to personalize Johnny Gamer being denied employment because he plays a harmless video game. Twenty-four hour news outlets function almost entirely on the basis of that personalization. Call me utopian but I retain belief that while law may very well be on the side of business in right to hire/right to fire states (of which Indiana is one), in the jury of public opinion, not so much.nnAnd that still presupposes that there is something more than a name on a forum connect back you as the business person or Johnny Gamer the perspective employee. I'll use the name of a fictional character from a book I'm writing as an example -- Phil Duval. Not particularly common, not particularly uncommon. Google it -- you come up with a Facebook, a Flickr page, a couple of other things. Nothing immediately connects that Flickr page and that first Facebook entry together. They may or may not be the same person. Unless they have posted things on each of those pages that give you concrete evidence that they are in fact the same individual, there is no way to prove that they are. A name by itself is a nebulous thing, it really doesn't mean much at all. Unless you volunteer the information somewhere, you retain relative anonymity. If they were providing other information the forums, such as the state we live in or what-have you, then I would agree more with reaction I've read here, but I have seen nothing from Blizzard saying that is to be the case.nnNevertheless, I'm clearly in the minority here; I've more or less shot my wad, so to speak, and beyond this post I really don't think it will behoove me to post much more on the issue. At this point, I'm more than willing to agree to disagree and to shut up before the instinct to debate something in to the ground that I constantly, internally wage war with begins turning allies in to enemies and buries me.

[Lokistrazsza]

nI'm honestly a few clicks away from setting up a new Battle.net ID email, using "Cake" as my first and last name. I don't want people knowing my real name unless I tell them.

nnHi Cake Cake, I'm Atasty Pie. This is a horrible idea, and inevitably someone is going to get murdered/raped/etc. because of this, just like has already happened in the past with myspace/facebook more than once. I really don't want the PuG I just outrolled on Battered Hilt having access to my real name. Also this is really going to screw things up for people that work in law enforcement, military, or any other job that requires a security clearance. I'm really surprised Blizzard's own lawyers haven't tried to talk them out of this yet.nnRealID doesn't bother me so much, because at least you can be semi-selective about who sees your name by being careful who you add, but the forums? Jesus wept.nnEdit: Bad news for us Cake. I just logged into Battle.net so I could try to change my real name and I noticed the field is grayed out so it cannot be changed. What a load of horse crap.. I'll call Blizzard later and see if I can get them to do it.. I'll report back with my findings.

[Aitana]

There is also the issue of mistaken identities. Here is one example. Let's say we have Mr. Nerdrage that wants to take out his rage on Mr. Ninja. He thinks he has the right person, and harasses him. But the Mr. Ninja he found isn't the one involved with the situation that upsets Mr. Nerdrage. In this scenario somebody who has nothing to do with the game gets harassed just because he happens to have the same real name as an asshat in WoW. This is just one example of how a mistaken identity could become a problem.

[Lokistrazsza]

There is also the issue of mistaken identities. Here is one example. Let's say we have Mr. Nerdrage that wants to take out his rage on Mr. Ninja. He thinks he has the right person, and harasses him. But the Mr. Ninja he found isn't the one involved with the situation that upsets Mr. Nerdrage. In this scenario somebody who has nothing to do with the game gets harassed just because he happens to have the same real name as an asshat in WoW. This is just one example of how a mistaken identity could become a problem.

nnI agree. There are a bazillion reasons this is a bad idea. Thank God the change isn't going to be retroactive(posts you've already made before the change will not show your real name), but suffice to say that as soon as this change goes into effect I won't be posting on the official forums anymore. I think we should start looking for a third party forum to be the unofficial Emerald Dream forum, the problem with that is going to be getting most of the guilds on both sides of the fence to agree on a particular forum. This change is really going to screw up the community. Kind of messed up they are going to screw up a good thing for thousands of forums users just to deal with a few trolls. Hell, I'm even a bit of a troll, but I at least have the stones to use "Lokimar" as my avatar when I do it, and not hide behind a level 1 alt.nnEdit: Also.. Blizzard/WoW are ESRB certified, so the more people that file complaints about this, the harder the ESRB will lean on them not to do this. https://www.esrb.org/privacy/contact.jsp.

[Cetan]

The issue has been reported on several major media outlets now (Wall Street Journal, USA Today, BBC America, and CDN (some canadian channel)).nnThere was also several posts in the forums, about several folks calling Blizzard's hotline, and asking if Blue posters will be sharing their names, and being told:nn"Due to security concerns... [blues] will not have their full name revealed on the forums."nnI don't know how sound that is anymore, but given the recent blue attack...

[Warburn]

http://www.coffeedrunk.com/2010/07/07/m ... opularity/

[Thulcondar]

It has hit MSNBCnnhttp://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38134494/ns/technology_and_science/

[Warburn]

Rumor: Blizzard as unhappy and powerless about it as we are.

[Aitana]

I agree. There are a bazillion reasons this is a bad idea. Thank God the change isn't going to be retroactive(posts you've already made before the change will not show your real name), but suffice to say that as soon as this change goes into effect I won't be posting on the official forums anymore. I think we should start looking for a third party forum to be the unofficial Emerald Dream forum, the problem with that is going to be getting most of the guilds on both sides of the fence to agree on a particular forum. This change is really going to screw up the community. Kind of messed up they are going to screw up a good thing for thousands of forums users just to deal with a few trolls. Hell, I'm even a bit of a troll, but I at least have the stones to use "Lokimar" as my avatar when I do it, and not hide behind a level 1 alt.nnEdit: Also.. Blizzard/WoW are ESRB certified, so the more people that file complaints about this, the harder the ESRB will lean on them not to do this. https://www.esrb.org/privacy/contact.jsp.

nThere is a move already to make 3rd party forums for Emerald Dream. It's been a hot topic for the Emerald Dream IRC channel. Bhootam is one of the driving forces behind organizing it. Last I heard, it's not clear if it will be an expanded version of the Emerald Dream Gazette or a whole new site. Based on the changes I see on the Emerald Dream Gazette, it looks like that's the route they might be headed.