Disabling Real ID for great justice

While this post started as a philosophy post, the direction it took as I was writing it resulted in it being more of an advice post. Considering it is scheduled for Wednesday, I am quite content to leave it in that form and ruminate on the subject more on Friday. Also, because All Your Base Are Belong To Us is apparently an endangered meme, I would just like to add that the title of this post was indeed a reference to All Your Base.

I know I have discussed the Real ID issue already, and the entire blogosphere has discussed it ad nauseam, but with the dust finally starting to settle from this frenzy over the announcement that Real ID would be integrated with the forums, it's time we finally reach a middleground in our reaction. The past week has seen us, the WoW community, go from frenetic opposition and rage to jubilant elation and relief in the span of a few days. With those two extremes out of the way, it's time we look at this event critically and consider what it means for us and the future of WoW.

I was planning on writing this post by examining the various possibilities of whether Blizzard actually thought this through and really doesn't care about our privacy or whether this was just a one-time big mistake on their part. However, rumination may not be necessary, as a post on the official forums that was since deleted but reposted on Team Liquid may give us the answer to that question. Now, this is hardly direct information. This is a page on a community site linking to a supposedly since-deleted post on the official forums written by someone retelling something he supposedly heard from an ex-roommate who's sister supposedly works as a GM at Blizzard. That makes this fourth-hand information, so take it for what you will. Here's the post in question, in case you haven't read it yet:

Nachtjäger, Suramar, 59 Night Elf Death Knight (post 35821 in epic thread) wrote

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.

If this is true, then to all those who cried foul when Blizzard and Activision merged (assuming that, if the direction that Real ID is taking is out of Blizzard's hands, it must be in Activision's) who were subsequently dismissed by the larger community, we owe you a massive apology. To all those who cried foul when Real ID was first implemented in the game and were dismissed by people who said that it wasn't a mandatory feature, we also owe you a massive apology. It looks like we brought this on ourselves by not catching the warning signs earlier, and now the past nay-sayers can sit back and chuckle as they play the world's tiniest open-source violin as background to our complaints.

But how to put a stop to it? When it comes to big business, money is everything, so they only way to discourage Activision from forcing Blizzard to take the Real ID system in a direction Blizzard and the players don't like is for us players to hit Activision where it hurts (their wallets) without hitting Blizzard where it hurts (their wallets). How to do this? Well, if Real ID is out of Blizzard's hands, but the rest of WoW is still in their control, then the best way to target Activision is to stop supporting Real ID while still supporting WoW. I have already disabled Real ID on my account as a show of opposition against the direction the system seems to be taking, and I encourage you to do the same, unless you use it extensively in-game, and even if you do use it in game, you should consider the disabling it anyways for the sake of your privacy. (If you don't know how to disable Real ID, WoW.com has a good write-up about how to do so here.) As Greedy goblin says, whining is useless to make Activision change their minds; "If people turn Real ID off in masses, Blizzard will see it. If using RealID becomes "n00b" thing, if people with voice and with respect (like top players) refuse to use it, RealID will die."

Now, whether it should die is another matter, one I will consider in my next post. However, if you don't want Real ID to die, keep in mind that there is always the possibility that Activision will reconfigure it to not be such a threat to our privacy so that more players feel comfortable turning it back on.