Penny Arcade addresses the entire ‘post under your own name’ controversy involving Blizzard right now. I think that it’s a fair take on both sides. Switching over to politics for a second: both MoeLane.com and RedState.com are pretty much against anonymous posters; you can post under a handle, but we require email addresses at both places for a reason, and that reason is mostly because it cuts down on the trolls. So there’s that. On the other hand, if I did my political blogging under a pseudonym I wouldn’t have sabotaged whatever hope I once had of getting work in the roleplaying game industry.
So there’s that.
Moe Lane
Well, I understand why they’re doing it, and I haven’t posted on the WoW forums for a number of years, so that won’t really affect me. But I’ve pretty much made the decision that if this goes forward, I’m either going to end up creating new accounts with a fake name, and transferring my characters to them, or stop playing entirely.
As a semi-humorous aside – one of the Blizzard employees preemptively disclosed his real name to show that it wasn’t a problem. The guys at Wow Riot promptly went and tracked down his address, phone number, photos, his facebook account, names of his family members, picture of his house, etc.
They’ve backed down.
They should have done it. It would have been a great precedent.
I saw one key argument against it was the plight of teenagers on the forums. Well, I don’t buy that because I don’t think teenagers should be on forums full of adults to begin wtih. THE INTERNET IS NOT FOR KIDS, PERIOD.