I have two phones. I have email. I have Facebook because it is the only way for me to effectively stay in touch with all the people I know around the world. I have call waiting. I have skype. I live a 1 minute drive from my bar and the rafting base. I have 2 old sisters as neighbors who ask me to help them cut their huge lawn, (but they give me awesome sun ripened tomatoes).
And then I have WoW. And more to the point I have WoW in a guild where I can come and go as I want with no guilt trips or forced friendships. So I can escape, because that is what WoW is for me, an escape. I don’t pretend that I am actually Elizzà the hottie night elf who seduces hordies to their death. But the fact is that in game people call me Elizzà. I am Elizzà. They don’t call me Adam, and that is fine by me. Because WoW is an escape from reality and such a good one that I’m still playing it after all these years. Some of my friends play golf. When they play golf they leave their phones in the car. They walk around outside and hit a ball and concentrate on that and immerse themselves in their golfy world. That is their escape.
Real ID is the antithesis of this. It is now another way for people to contact me in real life. They want to bring real life into my game which is my escape from real life. So I will just not turn it on, right? It’s entirely optional for us to use. Well, the battlenet account was optional too at one point if I remember correctly. The first micro-transaction pet was a one-off as well. The Real ID is in the game now, they have spent a lot of money to set it up so they are going to want us to use it. They did not put this in out of the love of their hearts so teenagers can communicate more. They did it for purely finacial reasons, some of which perhaps are not that clear. Right now it is optional. We’ll see about the future.
So for all those people like The Stoppable Force telling us that we are just little cry babies for not liking this, you can go and sit on my fat finger.
Oh, and they may as well drop the bullshit and do away with not being able to communicate with the other faction in game, seeing as you can do it anyway with the Real ID network.
June 24, 2010 at 8:38 am
Completely agree and I don’t turn this feature on ever. If it becomes mandatory, I’ll get an addon to block realID spam.
I have no facebook, no MSN, no Skype and often turn my phone off. RealID is just one of the attacks – not on my “privacy” – but on my sanity. It want me to chat about meaningless nothing with random “friends”. I won’t!
June 24, 2010 at 10:33 am
Just figured out why it will never be mandatory: because of child protection laws. WoW is 12+ and giving out the name of a child over the net is illegal. So they either change WoW to 18+ or they must leave a parental control option to block RealID.
June 24, 2010 at 11:27 am
That’s a very good point. I still hate it though.
June 24, 2010 at 9:28 pm
Anyone under 18 is supposed to have their account in their parents name, so it would just be giving out the parent’s name not the childs.I’m not sure how this would work legally with the laws about giving out childrens names though. My childrens accounts are in my name till they are 18.
June 24, 2010 at 12:14 pm
They spent a lot of time and money on the in-game voice chat.
June 24, 2010 at 12:28 pm
You captured exactly how I feel on this subject Adam and for entirely the same reasons. I have enough means of communication thank you (too many), I want to escape into my hobby that is WoW.
The reasons behind Blizzard heading in this direction is almost certainly because of the massive up take in social networking these days. I can imagine that they want to get into that market and so why not use a ready made target audience ?
I don’t need to turn it on and I won’t but despite Gevlon’s logic around the child protection law, I would assert that they’ll get around that, how many kids below 18 have facebook ? They don’t have to uphold the law they only have to be seen to be making every effort to uphold the law.
If they made this feature mandatory, they’d only need children to say “Yes, I’m over 18, honest” and that would do. Then they’ve made sure that they’re not “knowingly” allowing minors to participate. Business tend to follow legal obligations rather than moral ones.
After all, since the game is marked on the box as 12+ no one under 12 can possibly be playing it, can they ?
June 24, 2010 at 2:44 pm
“Oh, and they may as well drop the bullshit and do away with not being able to communicate with the other faction in game, seeing as you can do it anyway with the Real ID network”
The reason they added the inability to chat is because people would just use it to harass the other team. it’s different when youre friends are the ones youre talking to and you’re not just spamming them with how much they suck.
Take the example I had yesterday of some “gentleman”:
I recently completed a BG on my level 28 druid and spawned backinto Crossroads when completed. I saw it was under attack so I hightailed it out of town as soon as possible. but the DK spotted me and gave chase as quickly as possible and two shotted me.
I of course log into my DK tank and procede to crossroads and jump him as soon as I could. He was at 90% health an I won with the help of a priest nearby. Then I corpse camped him when he tried to run away. Finally he took a spirit rez just to get away from me.
He then proceded to log into a new horde character to call me a pussy and say if he was at full health he would win blah blah blah. I told him to fuck off. Next time dont attack somebody who cant defend himself then I ignored him and went on my way. He proceded to makea SECOND character to harass me.
THIS is why we aren’t allowed to talk to eachother. There is always that small group of people who just can’t handle it and get “butthurt” over the whole ordeal.
As for the friends list. I’m rather enjoying it. it saves me the trouble of adding a whole ton of my friends characters to my friends list and i can talk to my opposite faction friends. just be happy it’s optional to be able to not participate in it. Anything optional shouldn’t be complained about since it doesn’t effect you.
June 25, 2010 at 9:24 am
It would get a bit ridiculous if you could talk to the enemy.
I used to play the Matrix Online before WoW (they recently closed the remaining servers) and there were 3 factions in that game. The trouble was that everyone started off Zion and by doing missions became Machinist or Merovingian. Because of the lore everyone obviously spoke the same language. In addition due to the way the game worked you could still chat in the equivelant of /say whilst dead.
This meant you’d gank someone (was on the pvp server ofc) and you’d get 5mins of shit talk from their corpse. Was both hilarious and frustrating at the same time. One of a number of problems with that game not including the servers all being in the US, 0 content and terribly imbalanced PvP system.
June 24, 2010 at 6:40 pm
My hunch is that the real payoff of the system is the potential for tying together the player bases from multiple games. This is a way to reduce the social cost of switching to a different (Blizzard) game. If you can still talk to your WoW friends while trying out Starcraft or whatever other game they cook up, you might be more inclined to play something new. The same goes for playing on the opposite faction; lessen the social cost of rolling a horde toon or a toon on a different server and more people will do both, expanding a player’s in-game experience without making them start over knowing nobody.
This is ridiculous for those of us who want to be able to get away from our social ties, but I can see how others might like it. I might use it if they put in privacy controls and more fine-grained access filters. As it is now, it’s not a compelling service.
June 24, 2010 at 7:23 pm
I really have a hard time understanding the reluctance to use this. You don’t share your email after the first setup. Don’t share it with anyone who doesn’t already have your contact info.
Would I setup a RealID with someone in a random PUG? No. Would I set it up with my best friend I’ve known for 10 years, who has my phone number, was at my wedding, etc? Sure. It’s not like he can’t call me instead of chatting while I’m playing SC2 and he’s in WoW.
If you don’t want to use it because you don’t want to be bothered by every person you happen to ‘know’ in WoW – then I think you’re missing the intended point of it.
June 24, 2010 at 8:44 pm
I see what you’re saying but for every person who hates it there’s someone who likes it. And unlike a lot of the game this really is something that you don’t have to use if you don’t want to.
However…
It’s for this exact reason that when I ask people if they want to be Real ID friends, and they say “no thank you”, I completely understand. It’s not something everyone wants to use and because of that I don’t think ANYONE should pressure others into using it, either. I’ve been seeing this already and it bothers me. It’s just plain stupid. If someone doesn’t want to use that, respect it. It’s not a personal affront against you, the friend. Sometimes they just like to be left alone or escape from things in-game.
I mean hell, I -like- to use the service already but SORRY RANDOM PEOPLE I DON’T WANT TO ADD YOU! I like to use this service with my RL friends and family members… not really anyone else than that..
June 25, 2010 at 8:21 am
my old guild talked about realID a few months back. a few days ago they said that you have to give your realID to them or you will be downgraded in your guildrank. no raids for you if there are enough realID-raiders. “we” had much drama with people saying that they dont have time to raid but were online with some “secret” alts.
if im not in the mood to raid tomorrow… well… im not in the mood so i dont sign up for tomorrows raid. its not your buisnes why… those drama was not about me but i was seeing much more drama coming so i left them. wasnt raiding with them for 2 month now… so no big deal.
realID is for friends… and sry… im raiding with you… doing my best… but im not your friend. if we were friends you wouldnt need my realID cause you would know how to reach me.
June 29, 2010 at 4:30 pm
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