So the World of Warcraft forums have never exactly had a great reputation. They're populated largely by trolls ready and willing at moment's notice to insult, mislead, and confuse any hapless newbie (in between making racial slurs, raiding other forums, and posting threads about masturbation techniques.)
For many years, the community pleaded with Blizzard for better forum moderation. It came and went - a new moderator would appear, bans would get handed out liberally for a week, then it was back to business as usual. So someone at Blizzard had a brilliant idea: "Hey, instead of hiring more people to police our forums... people act like jerks because they're anonymous. Let's make them post with their real names in the future!"
Shit HIT THE FAN. By my math, there's a new post being made at least every three seconds in the main announcement thread. I haven't seen this many people post about anything WoW-related, at all, ever, much less agreeing with each other. (To include the MVPs, the people who get to post in green for being exceptionally helpful community members.)
All that remains to be seen is whether Blizzard will admit it was a terribad idea, or whether they'll wait and see how many people actually make good on their threats to cancel their accounts and SC2 pre-orders.
For many years, the community pleaded with Blizzard for better forum moderation. It came and went - a new moderator would appear, bans would get handed out liberally for a week, then it was back to business as usual. So someone at Blizzard had a brilliant idea: "Hey, instead of hiring more people to police our forums... people act like jerks because they're anonymous. Let's make them post with their real names in the future!"
Shit HIT THE FAN. By my math, there's a new post being made at least every three seconds in the main announcement thread. I haven't seen this many people post about anything WoW-related, at all, ever, much less agreeing with each other. (To include the MVPs, the people who get to post in green for being exceptionally helpful community members.)
All that remains to be seen is whether Blizzard will admit it was a terribad idea, or whether they'll wait and see how many people actually make good on their threats to cancel their accounts and SC2 pre-orders.