Blizzard announced on Tuesday they wanted to use peoples real first and last names on the forums to cut down on trolling.  As a former WoW player, and huge Diablo and Warcraft fan, I was very disturbed.

I’ve had people stalk me in game.  If they had my real name, I would have people stalking me at the door.  The privacy implications are horrible.  Granted anyone can find out anyone’s real name with a little digging but blizzard wants to take the harder work out of the way.

They say it will increase accountability.

Yeah, it also increased cancellations of preorders and subscriptions.  I doubt many people cancelled their WoW subscription citing forum trolls as a reason.

But privacy concerns were number one on the list this week probably.

One of the forum blue posters (blizzard employees) gave the public his name, and got back his phones addresses family members and ages of him and his family likes dislikes photobucket twitter facebook…you get the picture.  They had this guys entire online life within 20 minutes.

A random supporter gave his name and a blogger called him at work a few minutes later to show him how even a common name can be found easily.

The backlash was immense.  More so than anything else they’ve ever done that I can recall actually.  So they scrapped the idea.  All I can think about is how you really can tarnish your name in DDO if you’re really really bad.  We have accountability.  Who needs real names?  Maybe blizzard should take  a page from us.