@SupremacyCool story bro!You know that RealID is optional, right?
Of course everyone knows that it's optional. At least, that it's optional so far...1. Facebook has a long history of making things non-optional, or just opting people in without asking.2. Blizzard is doing this in conjunction with facebook.3. Many of these features would be SUPER AWESOME... If they didn't come with all the other features.Is friendship and trust 100% transitive? If I trust Jim, and Jim trusts Mary, is it necessarily the case that I trust Mary? No, no it is not.But if I trust Jim enough that I'd be willing to share my real name with him, and Jim trusts mary enough that he'd be willing to share his real name with her, and we use RealID... I am giving my real name and identification of my toons to Mary. Even though I don't know Mary, or maybe I do know her and we have a long-standing feud. Whoops.The reason people are complaining is mostly not that they don't realize that it's optional; it's that they would really love part of it, but other parts of it seem horribly intrusive.Imagine a restaurant which serves your favorite food, great prices, but they handle payments by shouting your credit card information across the restaurant. Sure, you don't have to go there -- but you might complain because you'd love to go there if they stopped being so stupid.About half of RealID is stuff I"d love to be able to use... But I won't be able to use it, because the only people I could safely use it with are people I wouldn't need it for. I do not need RealID to talk to my spouse. I do not need RealID to talk to my roommate. And there's no one else playing WoW that I would give my battle.net login to. (And remember, you MUST use the battle.net email to send the friend request, and your login name MUST be that same email address.)But there's people I've been playing WoW with for four years, and I would love to be able to friend their accounts so that I could talk to them even when they're playing Horde and I'm playing Alliance, or so that I'd know a new level 1 toon was a friend of mine without us having to do the "Hi, I'm ...'s alt" dance every time we roll a new toon or log someone else in. I'd love that... But I can't have it, because I don't feel like giving these people my battle.net login information and real life full name.That's pretty stupid.
Oh, I've had an authenticator for ages.The fact remains, it is absolutely stupid for Blizzard to have a feature which you cannot use without giving out your login name. That's the first line of defense on your account. Worse, it's also the first line of defense many people have against phishing; they know that only Blizzard has access to that email address...
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Just thought about this some more.. How soon do you think guilds will start requiring people to identify with RealID? It's a perfect tool for a guild to keep track of people and alts, so I imagine many guilds will make it mandatory. This means that loads of people will get to know your real name and not all of them may be nice guys..Make it work with a self chosen handle instead of our email and real name and it makes much more sense.. I have no problem with people knowing my Strandvaskeren handle and what chars are associated with that, but I see no reason to volunteer my real name and email to guildies.Would be nice with a char based anonymity option too. I'm an officer of a big guild and once in a while I just like to goof around in solitude on an alt no one knows..
Wow. This current plan is all kinds of short sighted.I have faith that the final realized version of this will allow for an account alias that will be used in lieu of any truly identifying data (name, e-mail, etc).With the blizzard (pun intentional) of account hacking in their precious revenue stream, they will do the right thing and create an anonymous access style for this.Real names or e-mail addresses are bad, kay?
My understanding is that it requires your email address to make the friend request, but the email address isn't displayed thereafter.Still, "you cannot use this feature without giving your battle.net login name to someone" and "your login name is private and should never be shared" are basically incompatible.
They could easily solve the glaring issues with this by simply allowing us to create our own RealID account name, making the "friends of friends" feature optional, and by giving a show/hide option for each character. There's no reason they could give me that would convince me there's any reason for sharing personal information or email addresses with other users. There's many people in WoW that I would consider friends, but very very few I would trust with personal information, and even my closest internet friends only get my "spam" yahoo mail address. My "real" email address only goes to family and businesses that don't share it with other companies. Heck, there's even family that only gets the spam address because they can't keep themselves from using those "share this video/site/etc." or "send an e-card" links that stick your address into a database that ends up shared with the world.
I agree with most of these wall posts, which all is summed up in: