Son of Godzilla said:
This Real ID thing is utterly moronic. You know why? Because it completely exposes Blizzard. Children play their games. Teenagers do. Aka, Utter Morons. People A) Too stupid to realize What they are giving up through losing anon and B) Unreliable to behave in a responsible manner with any sort of indentifiable information. This is going to have such epic blowback it's absurd anyone paid was involved in making the decision.
It's such unbelievable poor planning. The thing is being designed by the Xbox LIVE guy, but it's actually taking steps to ease social engineering? Are you kidding?
I'd rather not get into a flame war, so I'll just mention that I strongly disagree with this sentiment.
It would appear to me that the whole real ID system is in place to allow those who have close friends/real life acquaintances who also play WoW or diablo 3 to see each other as their real names in-game and also see current status across games. I don't see how this is moronic or a functionality worth raging about. For example, if my real life friend was playing diablo 3 at some indeterminate time, I could make a conscious decision whether or not to continue in my previous decision to play starcraft 2 or join him in diablo 3. All by looking at a status. In addition, if I played WoW (anymore) maybe I would notice he/she was in an LFG queue for a raid and I could quickly switch over and join him.
Am I missing something? Did Blizzard recently say they were doing away completely with the old, pre-patch-13 system where you could just arbitrarily add someone's SC2 name instead of their real ID and get basic acquaintance functionality out of it?
Really the only things I disagree with the real ID system as I've seen it is that there's so much more status information with real ID for no real reason and shy people being forced to allow others to see their real name if they share their real ID. All they need to do to fix that is allow you to choose whether or not you want SC2 "normal ID" people to see your status and give an option whether or not to show your real name when you give someone your real ID.
Methinks this is all just a misunderstanding and that your only exposure to SC2 was after real IDs were forced and you missed the blue posts mentioning they would add the SC2 names back again at retail (or sooner). I never saw it as a problem because I believe the patch that forced real IDs was expected to only last a week anyway (then got extended by a week or so).