Identity WTF
I’ve been on the internet a damm long time, so I can remember the hoary days when GameSpy was a trusted name and brand. Stop screaming and drinking bleach, it was a LONG time ago. They got bought by IGN, and then a lot of other things happened in the meantime… I should research that history, it’s a tangled web of crap and lies, I assume. Not too important, though.
What IS important is that when companies merge, get bought out, et cetera, they have consumer bases, and in the case of GameSpy and IGN, paying consumers. This means that account databases have to be merged and cross-referenced, billing information has to be correlated and checked for duplicates, and all that silly accounting crap.
What it, though, in a moment of (dare I say it) BRILLIANCE, someone decided that maybe they didn’t have to do all that. Maybe they could just tie all the OLD logins and accounts into ANOTHER database, cross-reference everything, and never have to touch the old stuff? NOTHING COULD BE WRONG WITH THIS PLAN, CLEARLY.
Well, IGN/GameSpy/horribleshitnetworksinc decided to do that. In addition to IGN and fileplanet, they also inherited ubisoft’s online gaming infrastructure, gamespy arcade’s logins, direct2drive, gamespy 3d (different from arcade!), and fifteen other sites I never heard of.
Now, unfortunately, I happen to have accounts on a lot of these stupid online services so I can run around playing tacticlol soldiers on the internet, shooting brain-damaged 12-year-olds in their ugly hydrocephalic skulls and complaining bitterly about the state of modern gaming. I decided to enumerate my accounts today, and nearly choked on my coffee (black as night and sweet as a stolen kiss, why thank you my filthy assistants you’re too kind). Under two different email addresses I have EIGHT separate ‘identities’, some of which appear to be (drumroll please) CAPITALIZATION-BASED VARIATIONS of each other! That’s right, CoolName and coolname are actually DIFFERENT, UNIQUE LOGINS according to IGN/Gamespy. This DOES happen to explain all the horrible trouble I used to have logging in to fileplanet and all those other sites. Now I’d love to merge all this, but I shudder to think of the problems that would cause for the poor DBAs at IGN HQ. I’d be making them trawl through sixteen different DBs, reconciling twenty different fields in each, copying them (probably by hand, knowing how DBAs work) into the master, and then deleting them… all without one mistake. Not happening. So what do I do? Write it all down, lock it up, and tell people to NEVER get an IGN account… or failing that, don’t forget the bloody password and create sixteen more.
