Guild Wars 2

I have MMO’d for about12 years. I have always had these options: (1) to play on multiple servers so that if I needed some me-tiime away from guild and groups, I could have it. To you people who will say “well, log off, then”…No. Sorry, but not. Sometimes I want me-time to grind or bash things. (2) to play on the same server, but have a private alt that no one knows about.

Both those options are unavailable to me in GW2. As a female, in the 12 years I’ve MMO’d, and, well, lived in the world, I can tell you from a female perspective that the transparency in GW2 is uncomfortable. I’m very careful with my online personas. I don’t think that I should be forced by a game to be so transparent that every single character I play is tied to one account that every single person who decides, unbeknownst to me, to add to a friends list, should be able to see.

I’ve also been hacked in MMOs. I don’t need hackers to friend me and see that I have four level 80 characters so my account must be “worth hacking”…or whatever. (I don’t have four level 80s, btw…I’ve only been playing for a week)

To the people who have said the only reason to want to be anonymous sometimes is to be a raging b*tch on one char and nice on another, or because I must have some nefarious griefing reason to want to hide…I say no. I’m just an intelligent, cautious individual who knows that TMI on an MMO is a safety issue. To the devs, might I suggest you investigate a police-taught course in online safety, and you might end up agreeing. There are, unfortunately, severely disturbed people in the world and yes, some of them do MMO. I can’t stress enough that the reason for this post has to do with the fact that I /deserve/ the right to be able to guard, monitor and protect my own online safety. You have removed part of my ability to do that with the level of transparency in this game. For those of you who say, “well, don’t play then”? I just might not, wabbit, I just might not. But my not playing won’t potentially stop someone else from having a bad experience.

In the end, grief players can still be identified at a business level by ID. Every player on the server doesn’t need to know all my alts.