Blizzard backs down ;)

Mike Morhaime makes a statement that they are not going to impliment RealID features on the forums anytime soon. I wonder if this is because they decided like most of their players that it was a dumb idea, or the fact that a lot of people have canceled their subscriptions over this. I suspect the latter.

If anyone could kill World of Warcraft….

It would be Blizzard themselves. Lum at Broken Toys quotes several Blizzard employees and bloggers response to change the way the forums there work to basically make it so that instead of your characters name being displayed in a post or a question – the name on the billing statement is posted (may be your parents, or friend who pays for the account).

I think the immediate result will be that people will stop using the forums completely and revert back to 3rd party forums. Blizzard would then lose a lot of valuable feedback and in some cases have to use 3rd party forums to deal with a lot of the existing issues that are solved on Blizzard’s own forums (an issue Aion has). The other thing is I think people will lose trust in Blizzard themselves – which as I’ve said before is a far more serious issue.

Favorite quote from the link above:

Syncaine, blogger:

Can this thing launch already? This is like watching a car accident, only instead of seeing the flaming wreck after it happens, you’re like Nicolas Cage in that movie no one saw where he can predict the future, and you actually get to wait for the car wreck to happen right in front of you.

Train wreck indeed. Based on the backlash I’ve seen so far – it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if they delayed launching this.

And if you don’t think its so bad – someone has already tested the waters – with hilarious results.