Maybe you haven’t been paying attention, but World or Warcraft represents the first video game in history to make billions of dollars. BILLIONS! Do you know what happens when something makes billions of dollars? It’s owners become billionaires, that’s what.

If you read between the lines on all the announcements related to RealID, you can detect the very familiar stink of CEO-Spinsters at work. The whole thing comes off so duplicitous that this reaction isn’t surprising anyone. When an engineer or an artist (you know, people who work for a living) in this industry announces something like this there’s always a disarming amount of candor. Read anything Valve says to the games media and it’s like they’re in the same room with you. It’s what makes this industry so likable despite all the blood and violence.

But a board of directors is only interesting in keeping their eyes focused on the little red and green lines on their stock tickers. They don’t have time to be human beings, so they come up with “brilliant ideas” like this one instead.

Here’s an unhappy fact of life: Anonymity is expensive. Millions, maybe billions of dollars are spent every single day(!) on SPAM filters, moderators, server monitors, those weird little graphics with the two random words you need to sign up for something, whatever.

The people who made this decision were doing so because they realized that they could fire a ton of people who are paid to play video games, BS and get yelled at if they just force the users to play by tighter rules. Since the customers are already rumored to starve their children and lose their jobs just to play their games, I’d think they gauged your tolerance for this bullshit better than anyone would like to admit.

This is where the question of human ethics gets its disappointing answer. Crack dealing, after all, is just another form of capitalism.

You’ve missed two things.

First they added RealID functionality to the addon language meaning people can write addons that extract your RealID and possibly your friends’ RealIDs too.

Second is more subtle: there’s a corporate shift towards a belief that keeping your secrets is dishonest and wrong.

What’s worrying is like spinks said, the Chicken. What else will it tie into, and if Blizzard is so cavalier about privacy concerns on a forum, what else will happen?

So any addon could do anything the scripting language allows. It could certainly export your details to an outside database while pretending to be benign. Possibly it could extract your friends list that I’m less sure of.

I have no idea what people have actually written, just pointing out something that could be done now this function is part of .lua functionality.