There is a certain subject I have been following lately, and have been doing my best to ignore, despite my strong feelings about it. I think I have finally gotten to the point that I can’t really ignore it anymore since I got this over the weekend from Blizzard PR, it is regarding the former statement that users would need to post using their real names on the Blizzard forums–a decision which has now been overturned due to overwhelming bitching response.

The open letter is below:

Hello everyone,

I’d like to take some time to speak with all of you regarding our desire to make the Blizzard forums a better place for players to discuss our games. We’ve been constantly monitoring the feedback you’ve given us, as well as internally discussing your concerns about the use of real names on our forums. As a result of those discussions, we’ve decided at this time that real names will not be required for posting on official Blizzard forums.

It’s important to note that we still remain committed to improving our forums. Our efforts are driven 100% by the desire to find ways to make our community areas more welcoming for players and encourage more constructive conversations about our games. We will still move forward with new forum features such as the ability to rate posts up or down, post highlighting based on rating, improved search functionality, and more. However, when we launch the new StarCraft II forums that include these new features, you will be posting by your StarCraft II Battle.net character name + character code, not your real name. The upgraded World of Warcraft forums with these new features will launch close to the release of Cataclysm, and also will not require your real name.

I want to make sure it’s clear that our plans for the forums are completely separate from our plans for the optional in-game Real ID system now live with World of Warcraft and launching soon with StarCraft II. We believe that the powerful communications functionality enabled by Real ID, such as cross-game and cross-realm chat, make Battle.net a great place for players to stay connected to real-life friends and family while playing Blizzard games. And of course, you’ll still be able to keep your relationships at the anonymous, character level if you so choose when you communicate with other players in game. Over time, we will continue to evolve Real ID on Battle.net to add new and exciting functionality within our games for players who decide to use the feature.

In closing, I want to point out that our connection with our community has always been and will always be extremely important to us. We strongly believe that Every Voice Matters, and we feel fortunate to have a community that cares so passionately about our games. We will always appreciate the feedback and support of our players, which has been a key to Blizzard’s success from the beginning.

Mike Morhaime

CEO & Cofounder

Blizzard Entertainment

Now, I don’t know Mike Morhaime personally, but I did meet him at Blizzcon last year, and he seems like a pretty cool guy. He openly admits that even though he is a CEO, he still has a boss, and being that his boss is something to the tune of 15 million children and a vastly fewer sum of adults, I kind of feel bad for him. If you’ve ever been to any Blizzard game forum, you probably already know that 90% of the user-generated content contained there is, well, (pardon my vernacular) purely retarded. Your average poster on the Blizzard forums is largely ignorant, immature, angry, opinionated in subjects they know little about, loud, and anonymous.

It’s a garbage heap filled with people complaining about everything their beloved game company does, and whiners that believe whatever they think is more important than everyone else. Why on earth wouldn’t Blizzard want to attach some kind of accountability to what people say on their forums? Consider for a moment the plight of the Blizzard employee (blue poster) trying to get anything accomplished on their forums, or god forbid, making an announcement of a change or (gasp) a nerf in one of their games. Cue three hundred posts reading little more than “lol Bliz fucks us again” or “I see where my $15 is going every month lololololol”.

In my opinion, forcing people to use their real names was a bold proposition that would result in people having to take responsibility for what they were saying, and if someone had nothing better to do than trollpost, they would be inclined to do it somewhere else. I understand at the end of the day you don’t want to be you, you want to be an avatar– that’s why most people play these games in the first place, but the forum is not part of the game nor is it a game itself, and the problem is that too many people treat it like it is. The forums are for intelligent discussion, suggestions, bug reports, and a source of information from the developers. Not trolling, flaming, and general trashtalking behind a veil of anonymity and pre-adolescent rage over your specific class build getting downgraded because one jerkoff in Asia managed to break the game using an overlooked imbalance that they meticulously harnessed for their own personal gain and would obviously be taken away once it was discovered.

I think it’s obvious that I’m unhappy about this, but worse things could happen. I’m not particularly proud of Blizzard bending to the will of the angry cries of these…people. They know what they were trying to accomplish and I think it was the right thing to do to get a little bit of order or (heaven forbid) some peace and quiet for a change. But it was easy to predict that the loudest most obnoxious voices would get all the attention because let’s be honest, that is how the world works. At the end of the day though, the mob pays their bills, it was a judgment call to keep the perceived majority happy in the interest of their shareholders, and I understand that too.

It doesn’t make it right, or wrong I suppose. My hope for society just died a little, that’s all.