With a lot of criticisms, Blizzards takes back their plan that requires players to use real names on its forums. Announced 3 days ago as part of the Real ID product.

Blizzard received more than 1,000 comments, mostly critical after announcing the plan within 24 hours. The firm said that the intention was to cool down on “flame wars” and heated online arguments started to cause trouble.

World of Warcraft

Mike Mourhaime, founder and chief executive of Blizzard, wrote in an open letter on the company’s forum page.

“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 needed for posting on official Blizzard forums.”

Meanwhile, REAL ID will still go ahead without the real names requirement and allow users to vote comments on the forum for World of Warcraft and Starcraft II up or down with low-rated posts slowly disappearing.

“Blizzard, like many firms, has been trying to figure out how to deal with the hateful flames that anonymous persons post by their thousands but getting gamers to use real identities wasn’t the solution,” said Dean Takahashi, lead writer with GamesBeat.com, an offshoot of the news website VentureBeat. [BBC's Interview]

Latest comments on the Blizzard’s forum page are ranged from “thanks for listening to us. We really appreciated the U-turn on Real ID forums” to simply “win”.

“Elitism is the fall of man, To proclaim that you are a scrub is the realisation of true skill, for forever you are improving”. Commented by a player with nick Zwip, Ragnaros.

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