Blizzard announced earlier today that they plan to require all forum users to display their real name beginning very soon with the launch of the StarCraft II Community Site prior to its release. The World of WarCraft forums will follow suit around the time the Cataclysm expansion launches later this year. The rest of the Battle.Net forums (incl. Diablo II) will adopt the RealID model at the same time as the StarCraft II launch as they will be shifted into a legacy section.
The move is intended to combat the flame wars and trolling that’s commonly found there as well as help push the forums into a more social-networking direction.
It will be interesting to see how the fans respond to this as Blizzard is basically trading in some measure of it’s participants privacy to help police its forums. How do you guys feel about it?