Posts Tagged ‘Blizzard’

Triumph of the Horde! A huge turning point in the relationship between consumers and virtual worlds is occurring today, and it took thousands of pissed off orcs and elves to make it happen. Only 3 days after announcing a widely protested policy to require real names in its user forum, World of Warcraft developer Blizzard just announced that they’re cancelling those plans. “We will always appreciate the feedback and support of our players,” Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime wrote this morning, crediting the community for influencing this change. (That’s one way of putting it. The protest got so ugly, some Warcraft fans resorted to posting real life details of Blizzard employees and their familes; even info on Bobby Kotick, CEO of corporate owner Activision Blizzard, was put online.) And now that the West’s most successful MMO developer has backed away from connecting real names to online worlds, a line has been drawn:
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Uprising in Azeroth! When World of Warcraft developer Blizzard Entertainment announced this week that it would soon require its players to use Real ID log-ins to participate in its online community forum, the company probably wasn’t expecting the backlash that followed. Instead of buying Blizzard’s explanation that using real names to post forum comments would discourage “flame wars, trolling, and other unpleasantness run wild”, the Activision-owned studio is now under siege from its own outraged players, with its forum ironically buried under thousands of infuriated posts from folks who don’t want their real identity linked to their WoW activity. (Typical sample: “Blizzard, your stupidity knows no bounds.”) In an act of juvenile judo, some players even resorted to finding and publishing the home address of a Blizzard employee. Given the collective fury, Blizzard may reverse its policy. But whatever happens, the reaction exposes a major cultural rift in the Facebook era:
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Blizzard‘s World of Warcraft online game has legions of dedicated fans, many of whom would scoff at the idea of playing the MMORPG on a cell phone, no matter how great the graphics.

Having mobile access to all their character info, however, would probably make the lot of them quite happy.

For these WoW fanatics, Pocket Gamer reports on a free, third-party app for the iPhone. Called Warcraft Characters, the application, from a gentleman named Rudolf Psenicnik, lets players “view avatars, basic info, stats and combat data” for all of their WoW characters and caches the data on the phone itself, the article says.

As with all other iPhone applications, Warcraft Characters can be downloaded from Apple’s App Store.