In the history of bad ideas (dotcom, letting Florida vote in presidential elections, filming Superman 4, development of cities before the development of sewer systems) this probably ranks in the top 5.

I’ll be posting about it in the forum to complain, but only because the change is claimed to NOT be retroactive (they won’t go back and add Real ID names to pre-existing posts.)

I was planning to buy a copy of WoW for my son… but if this is going through, I will have to get him something else…

So many thoughts ran through my head about how horrible the idea was, even for someone like me who doesn’t mind sharing a lot of information online. I thought I read a snippet about Real ID being required for Starcraft 2 multiplayer, but I’m not sure if that was the case or if it was just requiring a Battle.net account (either way, we’re moving in a direction where those will be one and the same the way things are going). Even though I have no plans to play Starcraft 2 that bothers me, and I can only imagine how Diablo 3 could be impacted in a similar way (hell, Ubisoft already set the precedent for requiring a single player game to contact company servers to be authorized to play, what’s to stop Blizzard from doing something similar with Battle.net and Diablo 3?).

I saw that link last night via a Twitter retweet. The scary thing is that’s not even an extreme case of what could happen, but more like what a normal encounter could easily become by any number of the millions of people who play a Blizzard game. To be fair, the same thing could happen, very easily, from any number of other sites/services, but those other sited at least allow each individual person to decide if they are going to share that information or not in the first place.

I hate ranting about something that isn’t even implemented yet, but this is one of those few times where I think it is such an abysmal and idiotic idea that I can’t “wait and see.”

sorry to double comment, but you may want to read that lol!

What a terrible idea, how could blizzard possibly think about doing this? Granted I have not posted on the wow forums before, although I have done considerable reading of them in my time, I still don’t like this idea. I’m terrified of the possibility you pointed out above converging the Real ID to more than the forums…

Such a sad loss.