Real ID Ain’t For Me

At least, not yet anyway. I just like being able to unplug and do my own thing on WoW without being disturbed. Besides, I’m always idling my guild’s vent server anyway (idling is a term from IRC which means just hanging out). You know how often I get followed around by naked Night Elf Priests who do nothing more than Mana Bonking me?

Anyway, go see Stop‘s post to get the real story on it. But I’m going to swipe his bulleted TLDR version (you’re the best Stop)!

  • People you are Real ID friends with do see your first and last name (the ones set up as your primary contact in battle.net).
  • People you are Real ID friends with do see your character, realm, and zone.
  • People you are Real ID friends with do see what game you are playing – WoW and Starcraft II support Real ID right now. You can safely assume Diablo III will as well.
  • People who you would like to be Real ID friends do need your email address once, or you will need theirs once.
  • People you are Real ID friends with do not see your email address in their friends list, nor do you see theirs.
  • Friends of people you are Real ID friends with do not see your email address in their friends-of-friends list, nor do you see theirs.
  • Read the FAQ before you start freaking out next time, internet.

Anna’s written some of her cautionary thoughts on it as well. Check out Spinks’ post on the subject while you’re at it.

Funny though, my email’s right there on my blog. Twitter’s available. People can find me on Facebook (with minimal effort, but at least include a message or something saying why you’re adding me such as “I read your blog” or “Met you at BlizzCon” otherwise I’m just going to ignore it).

I’m going to let Real ID sit for now as more features and stuff get developed for it. I’ll end up adopting it eventually, I think. Just not right away.

29 thoughts on “Real ID Ain’t For Me”

  1. My hubby and I are going to try it out by friending each other – it’s not like we don’t know each other’s every toon as is… and such [not that we chat in game just about at all – we play side by side]. We’ll see how it goes from there.
    .-= Askevar´s last blog ..Real ID =-.

    Reply
  2. Thing that makes me not want to use is the friend of friend thing. I don’t mind so much, if people know that Frodo is friends with Sam, but I don’t want Sauron knowing Frodo *Baggins* is friends with his friend Sam Sooky. More, I don’t want them to know his characters, his server, etc. I have no problem if Sauron can send Frodo a request with a small message like “Hey, it’s Sam’s BF ;)” or whatever, but social engineering is far to easy, the wow player base far to immature and the internet to enabling to let this security flaw happen.

    Note that I may or may not be familiar with the LotR story.

    What gets me most, is these aren’t easily over looked, non-mentioned, or hard to remedy issues.

    Reply
  3. I haven’t rad all the comments, but the one aspect I think a lot of other writers are glossing over when discussing the RealID system is the friends-of-friends system. This single feature is what puts me off using RealID entirely. I may like someone enough to share my RealID info with them, and trust that they won’t do anything with my personal details, but I cannot trust every single other friend they might add and that I have no control over.

    ANd who doesn’t want an alt to “escape” to every now and then that you don’t want everyone knowing about?

    Reply
  4. You guys are wrong about the friend of friends ability. You cannot see their email, you can invite them without knowing their email, which I find nice. Therefore, you can have many RealID friends while only sharing your email once and with someone you trust.

    Reply
  5. I just want to add – and if you happen to disagree with Blizzard, they now have the arrogance and utter audacity to insult you.

    http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/items/tinfoilhat.xml

    Not to mention the fact that very long wow forum posts about real ID concerns were ignored, and then deleted. Note what happens when you try to read the full/original thread on the wow forums from this:

    http://www.threadmeters.com/rOwso7/Real_IDs_Real_flaw/

    Evil is when they use humor to cover up and then twist things to their advantage. This is about social engineering and using peer pressure and our needs to be social, against us, and to take advantage. Please spread the word.

    Reply
    • @MadAsHell: Yeah, that Tinfoil hat was a hilarious april fools joke back when that came out years ago. As for long forum threads about real ID, I suspect that was probably because since there were so many threads about it, they wanted to condense it into one thread and locked the other ones. They lock threads all the time especially when people ignore the stickied posts at the top which are basically addressing the same things.

Leave a Comment