Blizzard listens to its users

Fortunately, Blizzard backed down from the idea due to the users’ reactions. However, the goal behind Blizzard’s move was to make users accountable for their comments, hoping that it would reduce spam and trolling, a worthy goal. Currently, any player can just create a new account or character on WoW and post anything they want with it, no one will ever know who they really are. This goal can still be achieved without compromising the users’ privacy.

The solution

The solution is to limit access to the main forums only to users that have played a certain number of hours with the account (lets say 5 hours). That way, only serious players will be able to talk in the forums and they won’t be affected by the throwaway accounts used for spam. They could still be affected by trolls (regular players posting crap), but Blizzard is also introducing a voting system so those posts will be weeded out in time. Also, if a player goes too far, Blizzard can just ban the account and the player will need to restart from scratch.

Of course, you want to let newcomers discuss in the forums, so Blizzard would need to provide a beginner’s forums that any user could use. I guess this would be mostly used by people having issues with the game because most of the interesting discussions would be located in the main restricted forums.

Users would keep their anonymity and the spam and trolling in the forums would be reduced, the best of both worlds.