For the broad appeal bit, I was thinking tragedy of the commons. A critical mass of actors (good and bad alike) has got to be one of the main drivers behind such a decision. So I'm thinking the more popular a game gets, the higher the likelihood that drastic actions like this are taken, ostensibly to defend against some boogeyman or other.
But it's pretty clear what Blizzard is going for here, since we know their platform is competitive and thus harsher on individuals viewed as bad actors. Blizzard knows full well that most people signing up to play only have one phone number, which is most certainly a real-life identifier for those players.
My point is that if players feel compelled to self-censor their interactions online for fear of repercussions[0], then they are not playing a game. They are instead representing themselves as individuals on a social network with competitive/gamified attributes. Requiring phone numbers to play is just a method to gently reinforce this.
To each their own - this might be exactly the type of game you like to play. But it departs pretty strongly from the classical definition of "video game" that I grew up with.
[0] For example, your primary phone number being disallowed access to all Blizzard services. Maybe they go even further and request that 3rd party services ban you for off-platform violations. Moved this down to a footnote so as not to spread FUD, I'm sure they don't currently do this, nor do I expect them to. But cross-referencing phone numbers would make it very easy to start.
If this helps censor the people who are interrupting the game to shout racist insults or read their manifestos, that seems like a win for gaming to me.
Putting something in a footnote doesn’t make it it FUD, for what it’s worth.
Well, it isn't. What people are saying in chat has no bearing on the quality of the game. I'm not even playing devil's advocate like you are doing in this sub thread either, I literally could not care what people say in game chats. I take more issue to this obnoxious, cancerous, USA opinion that someone saying the N-word is the end of the world and requires me as an innocent bystander to bear the costs (such as having to use phone identification to play a game). You see the problem is not being racist itself, but the "solutions" you people propose.
Saying that you find the game less enjoyable when people say racist shit just makes you sound like an annoying person.
The fact that you brought up racism and then used this strawman of "game being disrupted" is actually hilarious and shows what a thin spine you have.
No straw men here, and racism is only in the thread because it’s a common example of people being disruptive in chat.
All that matters for casual games is that the company actively does something to minimize cheating. Identity verification is not a way to do this as it is not an active measure. It just puts one hoop for people to jump through. More useful is to do typical statistical analysis as that will catch 99% of actual impactful cheating (subtle cheating doesn't matter much since the average player won't be able to tell the difference anyway) and rinse and repeat.
Nice job using in-kernel a/c to claim how advanced the problem is. When those came out 20 years ago, it was just a few small patches to bypass them. Even some of them were still only signature based so you could just change the signature of your cheat and bypass it. But I'll stop here since you don't seem to comprehend the concept of cat-and-mouse nor the fact that pursuing it to the end just makes the game unplayable for innocent players.
Yes, I know some games requires phone verification to play at all, and I'm against that. My initial reaction to this thread was "um we are just now caring about this? they're moving onto photo ID now, which creates real life fraud problems". Gee I can't wait until game devs start stealing my ID and the subsequent "fix" of using a trusted third party that's also abusive and blocks me from multiple games because they have monopoly, and has integration bugs causing the game not to work at all if I press the wrong button on their web page embedded into the game.
We've already established that it's not really a game (seems more like a sport), so whether it's a win for video gaming or not is irrelevant to my thinking, though I do tend to agree with regards to the actual in-game communication mechanics.
Footnotes are used to call attention to idiosyncrasies in written communication so I used one here, similar to how I described another sentence of mine as sarcastic in an earlier comment - just trying to be fair :)
Why not let stupid people shout stupid things ...
In-game chat isn’t bound by any requirement to support everything that stupid people can do in real life.
Do you seriously claim that "not preventing" already means "supporting"?!
I’m curious what your definition of a game is?
It is certainly not a FUN game (cough Apex) when beset by cheaters constantly. I’ll gladly give up anonymity to make the game fun again.
All that is to say, additional identifiers might be against the hacker ethos, but hopefully not the gamer ethos.
I feel there should be a new term to describe this type of game. Up until now "eSports" has been used but that seems passe. Metagame perhaps? Might have sounded dumb a few years ago, but there's strong precedent now :P
Yes. I've never played one, but from what I can tell it's like a forum where you go on with an identity and form clubs with people and chat about stuff, then you play some wonky subgame for 1 minute in that 3 hour session, then you go press a bunch of buttons to gamble for virtual prizes, etc.
I've played lots of MMOs when I was younger and it's always the same: the "game" doesnt really start until you hit the "endgame" (usually near max level with decent gear).
Until that point, you are often grinding and doing daily events, like a job.
And we often joke that once we get there: "Finally, I get to play the game".
Then there's fear of missing out with seasonal or other limited-time awards etc. which " forces" you to play when you don't want to.
Jonathan Blow has written about why this isn't fun game design.
And those are some reasons why despite having played a lot of these, I agree with the pithy comment that they aren't games.
Some hints: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massively_multiplayer_online...
But thanks for the downvote, you really got me there.
The comment about broad appeal is also a bit confusing to me. Why do things stop being games because they're designed to be accessible to many people?