Blizzard Makes a Good Decision

So, for those of you not in the know, Blizzard recently decided that gamers would have to use their real names - yes, real, first and last - in order to participate in their online forums. For those gamers who are at all concerned with privacy, who maybe have jobs or girlfriends or are in the market for jobs or girlfriends, or who just love being anonymous jerks, this was a pretty big misstep on Blizzard's part. The interwebs were in an uproar. In a shockingly rational and well thought-out move, Blizzard has decided not to enforce the Real ID idea. This is a great marketing ploy - get everyone upset and talking about a potentially bad move and then you look like a hero just by not following your plan. Nice work.

Less Scary Blizzard News

In non-cataclysmic Blizzard news - no wait I suppose this does by definition count as cataclysmic - closed beta testing has begun for World of Warcraft: Cataclysm. This is the third expansion for the insanely popular game and is expected to break more PC sales records upon its release as did the first and second expansions. Now might be a good time to work on account security before the new release swells the ranks of active users once more.

Breaking: Blizzard's Account Database Breached

If there were ever a case to be made for avoiding putting all gaming out in the cloud, this would be it. Thousands of users' Blizzard accounts have been stolen. Support lines are overloaded and they are telling users to call back at a later time while the issue is being investigated. It looks like one group of hackers is logging into multiple accounts to sell off items, delete accounts and cause other general mayhem. This could be the End of the World... of Warcraft.

Okay probably not, but it does yet again raise the question of internet security (or the seeming lack thereof). Without the use of an authenticator, even the most careful users are at risk of having their accounts hacked. We either need to develop better security measures or come up with something more interesting for hackers to do.

Censorship Alert: StarCraft 2 Edited for South Korea

In case anyone is not yet aware, South Korea is easily the biggest individual market for the original StarCraft, with about half of the roughly 10 million copies sold in the Korean market. Gamers have continued to play and join competitions to this day despite the game having been released in 1998. The obsession with this game was so all-encompassing that the government had to step in and implement forced gaming curfews in order to get residents to sleep instead of staying up all night playing StarCraft. All that said, it is easy to imagine the level of insane drooling excitement going on in South Korea right now in regards to the impending release of StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty on July 27. In that light, it was perhaps a smart move by Blizzard to remove some adult themes from the Korean version of the game, such as references to smoking and vulgar language, in order to release the game with an Age 12 rating. This will enable the game to reach a far larger audience than if the aforementioned parts were left in, and therefore pretty much the whole country can take part in the second installment of their national pastime. I am generally against any form of censorship, but in this case, the edits are small, they don't appear to affect the overall theme of the game, and if they didn't happen, the combined screams of thousands of teenage Koreans would haunt our dreams forever. Good thinking, Blizzard.