Decision Making Process by Blizzard Entertainment Inc. on Real Id Implementation

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Decision Making Process by Blizzard Entertainment Inc. on Real ID implementation

Decision Making Process by Blizzard Entertainment Inc. on Real ID implementation

Blizzard Entertainment is a company owned by Activision any that deals in game development. The company began as Silicon & Synapse by Michael Morhaime, Allen Adham and Frank Pearce on February 8, 1991, a year after getting their bachelor’s degrees from UCLA. Blizzard became known for their game, Warcraft: Orcs & Humans.

In July 2010, Activision Blizzard stated that the Real ID system would be implemented on all official World of Warcraft forums, which meant that players would have to identify themselves with their real names and not just by their handles for them to be able to post on the forums. Plans for the implementation were retracted a few days after, due to the large number of negative response from players. This article analyzes the decision making process that brought about the retraction of this project.

In Implementing the Real ID system to the forums, which involves the compulsory use of real–life names, the articulated hope was eradicating the veil of facelessness and therefore anonymity that is characteristic to online dialogue in order to aid in creating a better forum environment, encourage more productive discussions, and connect the Blizzard community in new ways. In the shortest of words, the foremost purpose of the Real ID system was to;

1.  Eradicate trolling and general misconduct in the forum discussions; and,
2. Encouraging players to explore their interactions outside the game and into other domains of the Internet and also off–line.

However, this announcement created a strong current of negative feedback to which Mike Morhaime, President of Blizzard and initial developer of World of Warcraft stated that they had been monitoring the feedback and also discussed it internally to which they concluded not to make it compulsory for a person to use their real name.

Looking closely at the decision process stated above, we can see that the decision process is compromise, since the final decision is made through negotiation. Also, given that this is a rather large organization, and also given that at the issuance of the statement above, we can clearly see that this decision was not made by the president of Blizzard himself but instead, he consulted from other stakeholders which then makes this a group decision.

The company was getting feedback from players of World of Warcraft, and while some did not mind the use of their Real names for identification, many others turned this down and preferred the older ways where Real ID would not be necessary. But then, people who wanted privacy were the majority and in this industry, if the players of a specific game feel like their priorities are being violated, they just stop playing the company’s games and look for other alternatives.

This would net to huge losses for Blizzard and given that it has been around for quite a while means they have big economies of scale and they would all be for nothing if the company were to face closure or receivership. There is also the case of lost reputation, which is next to impossible to comeback from, and even if the company would most likely be acquired it would be at a huge loss. With these facts, one would consider their decision rational, as it tries to maximize or reach the best outcome and also the final decision is based on the computational model of decision making.

Another element of a rational decision is that they considered the numbers, the people who were against this were actually the majority and were clearly the main reason that made Blizzard come to this conclusion.

The objective of the decision were dynamic, because the decision was based on the thoughts of very many gamers, as well as the developers of World of Warcraft. Like the developers, there were likeminded people who thought that there was good I creating a more human interaction oriented forum for all gamers, but for many other this seemed as a big breach in privacy. Therefore, they had to come up with a decision that would satisfy everyone, which was to not launch the implementation, or do nothing as a person with the decision making skills would say. Also, it could be that the developers hoped that the gamer would cave in to allow change and maybe let through the implementation of Real ID in order to match the thoughts of the developers. We can see that there was little information to the developers as to which would be the best decision for this very delicate situation. Therefore, the decision made had to be objective oriented, to fix the current problem and then to wait and see how the situation would play out and look out for opportunities for sequential decision making that would create a suitable situation for the implementation of their objective in the near future.

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