As much as I think this idea of posting with real names is awful, I suspect a lot of the screaming on the WoW forums (not so much here) is from people that wouldn't be able to troll behind level 1 alts anymore.
As much as I think this idea of posting with real names is awful, I suspect a lot of the screaming on the WoW forums (not so much here) is from people that wouldn't be able to troll behind level 1 alts anymore.
maybe "a lot", but probably not the majority
more like, the people that don't want get harassed at home by those guys who make level 1 troll alts
Does the denial of using real names as troll reduction disprove John Gabriel's Greater Internet Dickwad theory, in which he states: A Person + Anonymity + An Audience = Total Dickwad? Taking anonymity away from the equation leaves only a person and an audience, and that usually doesn't create internet dickwads, especially if there are repercussions, such as your name being shown.
The problem is that an initial insult is not afforded anonymity ("Your tank ninjaed my DPS gear!") , but any reprisal could be ("Haha so I faxed your boss porn with your name on it from teh interwebs"). The balance is out of whack.
If in order to get any telecommunications access anywhere in the world you had to provide a unique identifier, and all service providers agreed to this, and all law enforcement agencies agreed to help enforce compliance, you could pull off using real identification on the internet. Until that happens anonymity as a whole is necessary because otherwise one party is very low risk and the other is very high risk.
Just Some Dude on
Cog in the machine Cog Herder
0
SmasherStarting to get dizzyRegistered Userregular
edited July 2010
There's over 40,000 posts in that thread. I don't know how many are unique posters, but there's no way there's anywhere near that many habitual trolls on the forums. I could buy a thousand maybe, but even that would be on the high end of the spectrum.
Does the denial of using real names as troll reduction disprove John Gabriel's Greater Internet Dickwad theory, in which he states: A Person + Anonymity + An Audience = Total Dickwad? Taking anonymity away from the equation leaves only a person and an audience, and that usually doesn't create internet dickwads, especially if there are repercussions, such as your name being shown.
The problem is that an initial insult is not afforded anonymity ("Your tank ninjaed my DPS gear!") , but any reprisal could be ("Haha so I faxed your boss porn with your name on it from teh interwebs"). The balance is out of whack.
If in order to get any telecommunications access anywhere in the world you had to provide a unique identifier, and all service providers agreed to this, and all law enforcement agencies agreed to help enforce compliance, you could pull off using real identification on the internet. Until that happens anonymity as a whole is necessary because otherwise one party is very low risk and the other is very high risk.
So true Random Dude, so true. How about the only time we see names is when people troll, and then their name appears so we can find them and beat them with ba-I mean, pat them on the head gently, and tell them not to do it again?
MTK1991 on
0
Dirty DrawersLord of the undie worldRegistered Userregular
So true Random Dude, so true. How about the only time we see names is when people troll, and then their name appears so we can find them and beat them with ba-I mean, pat them on the head gently, and tell them not to do it again?
If Blizzard was actually about cutting down trolling on the official WoW cesspool forums, they could do it easily. Hire a couple mods, start handing out reasonable bans left and right on trolls that also correspond to in-game bans. The trolling would mostly disappear in a couple months. This has little to do with actually cleaning up their forums even though they're spinning it that way, it's all about some executive's vision of "Facebook + WoW + Starcraft = omgbux".
I wish someone would have a pizza delivered under my name. I mean it's not like I paid for it and if you really ordered 200 pizzas you would have to pay for them up front so I would have to thank you for the free pizza!
Who says I would pay for the things I order? If a person is that motivated, I'm sure they can find cc frauds to order the pizzas.
Last time I checked, Dominos.com lets you specify "cash on delivery" as payment option.
When you tell the driver that you didn't order it, and it keeps happening:
- you can forget about actually ordering pizza when you do want it
- I hope your mailbox is made of stone
- I hope you like poop on fire in front of your door
And how, exactly, is making people post with their real names going to make money?
Facebook integration.
How will that make money? Who the fuck knows. But it probably sounds really good to the people upstairs at Activision because all the kids are using Facebook these days and it's a big thing and Facebook makes money somehow and so on and so forth.
Hell if I know, but they wouldn't be doing something this drastic and obviously alienating to a large segment of their user base if they didn't think they had a way to do it.
I suspect the thought process goes along these lines:
"Well Facebook has 300m users and we only have 12m - how do we get us some of that?"
Facebook makes money off the targeted ads they show.
I mean, like I said, I think forcing people to post with their real names is a horrible idea, but it's going to take a lot more than just "Facebook!" to convince me this is just some money-grab.
They are trying to bring social networking into Blizzard games.
It's not a bad idea actually. I'm playing SCII, my buddy is playing WoW, he says "Hey, wanna raid X. They need a healer." and I can be like "Sure.". Or something like that, you know. You create a Blizzard Community and all your games from Blizzard are there together and so on. Like Steam. Good stuff.
Of course, none of this requires your real name. Just an unchangeable user ID tied to your Bnet account.
Unless you wanna do Facebook integration. Facebook uses your real name. And I think that may be why they are doing this. Make the 2 systems more compatible or something. You can obviously work around this but maybe something they wanna do with Facebook in the future means it'd make it too complicated and they figured "Fuck it, just use real names" and whoever is making that decision doesn't really get why it's a bad idea.
It's a large company - every single thing they do is a money grab and thinking otherwise is asking to be let down.
Yes, businesses exist to make money. I'm aware of that. I don't have a problem with it.
But it is conceivable that a business would say, "These forums make our customer base look like a bunch of gibbering, sociopathic retards. We should do something about that."
Making money isn't always about "How can I make a direct profit off this?"
Even if they want to create an app that posts your latest Baron Rivendare kill (no mount drop) to your Facebook profile, that still wouldn't require using your full name to post on the forums.
I'm willing to take this at face value for now. Doesn't make it any less stupid. There doesn't need to be a conspiracy.
It's a large company - every single thing they do is a money grab and thinking otherwise is asking to be let down.
Noone's yet managed to come up with any method for making money from giving away information you already have, though.
Facebook pays Blizzard x% of money based on the amount of traffic Blizzard sends their way by intergrating/linking to Facebook. There's one way right there.
Sure it might be a drop in the bucket but so was the litebrite horse.
It's a large company - every single thing they do is a money grab and thinking otherwise is asking to be let down.
Noone's yet managed to come up with any method for making money from giving away information you already have, though.
Facebook pays Blizzard x% of money based on the amount of traffic Blizzard sends their way by intergrating/linking to Facebook. There's one way right there.
That could have already been happening with the SC2 Facebook integration, how does giving away the real name of forum users make them money?
It's a large company - every single thing they do is a money grab and thinking otherwise is asking to be let down.
Yes, businesses exist to make money. I'm aware of that. I don't have a problem with it.
But it is conceivable that a business would say, "These forums make our customer base look like a bunch of gibbering, sociopathic retards. We should do something about that."
Making money isn't always about "How can I make a direct profit off this?"
Even if they want to create an app that posts your latest Baron Rivendare kill (no mount drop) to your Facebook profile, that still wouldn't require using your full name to post on the forums.
I'm willing to take this at face value for now. Doesn't make it any less stupid. There doesn't need to be a conspiracy.
The people at the top of the company don't always understand how the company makes money. Really. They might have vague ideas. I'm sure Activision knows that people pay to play WoW.
But the people at the top do like to come up with crazy ways to make more money. Some of these crazy ways make it clear they don't understand their current customer base.
Want an example? I used to do customer service for a clothing store credit card. We were owned by that particular store at the time (not a third party). Someone got it into their head that we could make lots of money by selling travel... stuff. I don't even remember what it was, some sort of travel discount program. If they were interested, we transferred to another company and got a bit of money from it (csrs got a bit, company got more I'm sure).
So we had to offer that at the end of every call. Because "I need to pay my bill so I can buy more clothes!" naturally leads to "Oh, and can you save me some money on my next trip to Cancun?". *boggle*.
It's a large company - every single thing they do is a money grab and thinking otherwise is asking to be let down.
Yes, businesses exist to make money. I'm aware of that. I don't have a problem with it.
But it is conceivable that a business would say, "These forums make our customer base look like a bunch of gibbering, sociopathic retards. We should do something about that."
But that's what the customer base is, so I mean, what's to do about it?
It's a large company - every single thing they do is a money grab and thinking otherwise is asking to be let down.
Yes, businesses exist to make money. I'm aware of that. I don't have a problem with it.
But it is conceivable that a business would say, "These forums make our customer base look like a bunch of gibbering, sociopathic retards. We should do something about that."
But that's what the customer base is, so I mean, what's to do about it?
Cause everyone to hug it out, or quit it out, it seems.
1) Constant trolling of trade chat
2) Harassment (I'd kill people in inns, Booty Bay, etc and if they made an alt to message me or whatever I'd put them on a list and use an account on the other faction to see when they logged in and chase them down and kill them until they logged again.)
3) Stealing 3 different guild banks and disbanding the guilds
4) Calling a GM a naughty name when she convoed me about 1-3
The official reason was for RMT because supposedly I was using my gains from #3 to sell for cash, but I suspect #4 was the real culprit.
Some of those crazy nerds playing WoW, who will be able to see real names with this change, have privileged access to large corporate databases, and could hypothetically do truly evil things given only a full name if they so desired.
Let's say that the guy you ganked in STV and then trolled on the realm forums happens to 1. be crazy and 2. work IT for Visa, say, or Amazon, or UPS.....
1) Constant trolling of trade chat
2) Harassment (I'd kill people in inns, Booty Bay, etc and if they made an alt to message me or whatever I'd put them on a list and use an account on the other faction to see when they logged in and chase them down and kill them until they logged again.)
3) Stealing 3 different guild banks and disbanding the guilds
4) Calling a GM a naughty name when she convoed me about 1-3
Some of those crazy nerds playing WoW, who will be able to see real names with this change, have privileged access to large corporate databases, and could hypothetically do truly evil things given only a full name if they so desired.
Let's say that the guy you ganked in STV and then trolled on the realm forums happens to 1. be crazy and 2. work IT for Visa, say, or Amazon, or UPS.....
1) Constant trolling of trade chat
2) Harassment (I'd kill people in inns, Booty Bay, etc and if they made an alt to message me or whatever I'd put them on a list and use an account on the other faction to see when they logged in and chase them down and kill them until they logged again.)
3) Stealing 3 different guild banks and disbanding the guilds
4) Calling a GM a naughty name when she convoed me about 1-3
I have called the women in the game very naughty things but then they use the fact they make it known they are Female in order to get attention and items.
But then on Windrunner there is a few people that have trolled trade for years and they are still around
There is a certain guild on the horde that the gm has taking the guild bank and kicked everyone a few times now and yet people still join his guild
Got in touch with my ex-flatmate, whose sister works as a GM for Blizzard, to see what the internal buzz on this was. Apparently, at the moment the employees are largely as pissed as the players, and she stated that despite attempts to keep it hushed, it has become known that the big creative players within Blizzard are pretty much as unhappy about this as we are. Everybody has been told they are not free to comment on this situation outside of specially prepared statements.
It's still going ahead, however (and here's where in-house rumours and hearsay really start coming into play): from what they've picked up, the Blizzard leads have been told in no uncertain terms that the non-gameplay-related direction of the game is working to a different blueprint now. GC and company are free to play with shiny new talent trees all they like, for example, but for the first time the decisions regarding Battle.net implementation, Real ID, and plans for the general acquisition of new players for the business are no longer in Blizzard's own hands, and that's not going down too well.
korodullin on
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2017, colorized)
"Extremism is so easy. You've got your position, and that's it. It doesn't take much thought. And when you go far enough to the right, you meet the same idiots coming around from the left." -- Clint Eastwood ***
Posts
You just want the power to coin flip and change peoples real names.
maybe "a lot", but probably not the majority
more like, the people that don't want get harassed at home by those guys who make level 1 troll alts
Now that is scary.
The problem is that an initial insult is not afforded anonymity ("Your tank ninjaed my DPS gear!") , but any reprisal could be ("Haha so I faxed your boss porn with your name on it from teh interwebs"). The balance is out of whack.
If in order to get any telecommunications access anywhere in the world you had to provide a unique identifier, and all service providers agreed to this, and all law enforcement agencies agreed to help enforce compliance, you could pull off using real identification on the internet. Until that happens anonymity as a whole is necessary because otherwise one party is very low risk and the other is very high risk.
who wouldn't want to be anime babyfur wankings (jr)
So true Random Dude, so true. How about the only time we see names is when people troll, and then their name appears so we can find them and beat them with ba-I mean, pat them on the head gently, and tell them not to do it again?
I got dibs on the name Uzumaki Naruto.
If Blizzard was actually about cutting down trolling on the official WoW cesspool forums, they could do it easily. Hire a couple mods, start handing out reasonable bans left and right on trolls that also correspond to in-game bans. The trolling would mostly disappear in a couple months. This has little to do with actually cleaning up their forums even though they're spinning it that way, it's all about some executive's vision of "Facebook + WoW + Starcraft = omgbux".
Last time I checked, Dominos.com lets you specify "cash on delivery" as payment option.
When you tell the driver that you didn't order it, and it keeps happening:
- you can forget about actually ordering pizza when you do want it
- I hope your mailbox is made of stone
- I hope you like poop on fire in front of your door
Facebook integration.
How will that make money? Who the fuck knows. But it probably sounds really good to the people upstairs at Activision because all the kids are using Facebook these days and it's a big thing and Facebook makes money somehow and so on and so forth.
I suspect the thought process goes along these lines:
"Well Facebook has 300m users and we only have 12m - how do we get us some of that?"
I mean, like I said, I think forcing people to post with their real names is a horrible idea, but it's going to take a lot more than just "Facebook!" to convince me this is just some money-grab.
It's not a bad idea actually. I'm playing SCII, my buddy is playing WoW, he says "Hey, wanna raid X. They need a healer." and I can be like "Sure.". Or something like that, you know. You create a Blizzard Community and all your games from Blizzard are there together and so on. Like Steam. Good stuff.
Of course, none of this requires your real name. Just an unchangeable user ID tied to your Bnet account.
Unless you wanna do Facebook integration. Facebook uses your real name. And I think that may be why they are doing this. Make the 2 systems more compatible or something. You can obviously work around this but maybe something they wanna do with Facebook in the future means it'd make it too complicated and they figured "Fuck it, just use real names" and whoever is making that decision doesn't really get why it's a bad idea.
Just my thoughts anyway. It's still dumb.
Yes, businesses exist to make money. I'm aware of that. I don't have a problem with it.
But it is conceivable that a business would say, "These forums make our customer base look like a bunch of gibbering, sociopathic retards. We should do something about that."
Making money isn't always about "How can I make a direct profit off this?"
Even if they want to create an app that posts your latest Baron Rivendare kill (no mount drop) to your Facebook profile, that still wouldn't require using your full name to post on the forums.
I'm willing to take this at face value for now. Doesn't make it any less stupid. There doesn't need to be a conspiracy.
Facebook pays Blizzard x% of money based on the amount of traffic Blizzard sends their way by intergrating/linking to Facebook. There's one way right there.
Sure it might be a drop in the bucket but so was the litebrite horse.
The people at the top of the company don't always understand how the company makes money. Really. They might have vague ideas. I'm sure Activision knows that people pay to play WoW.
But the people at the top do like to come up with crazy ways to make more money. Some of these crazy ways make it clear they don't understand their current customer base.
Want an example? I used to do customer service for a clothing store credit card. We were owned by that particular store at the time (not a third party). Someone got it into their head that we could make lots of money by selling travel... stuff. I don't even remember what it was, some sort of travel discount program. If they were interested, we transferred to another company and got a bit of money from it (csrs got a bit, company got more I'm sure).
So we had to offer that at the end of every call. Because "I need to pay my bill so I can buy more clothes!" naturally leads to "Oh, and can you save me some money on my next trip to Cancun?". *boggle*.
Cause everyone to hug it out, or quit it out, it seems.
I blame my roommate's countless wow updates over the dinner table.
2) Harassment (I'd kill people in inns, Booty Bay, etc and if they made an alt to message me or whatever I'd put them on a list and use an account on the other faction to see when they logged in and chase them down and kill them until they logged again.)
3) Stealing 3 different guild banks and disbanding the guilds
4) Calling a GM a naughty name when she convoed me about 1-3
The official reason was for RMT because supposedly I was using my gains from #3 to sell for cash, but I suspect #4 was the real culprit.
Some of those crazy nerds playing WoW, who will be able to see real names with this change, have privileged access to large corporate databases, and could hypothetically do truly evil things given only a full name if they so desired.
Let's say that the guy you ganked in STV and then trolled on the realm forums happens to 1. be crazy and 2. work IT for Visa, say, or Amazon, or UPS.....
I love you.
Or DHS...
But then on Windrunner there is a few people that have trolled trade for years and they are still around
There is a certain guild on the horde that the gm has taking the guild bank and kicked everyone a few times now and yet people still join his guild
Fixed that for you.
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2017, colorized)