Patch 3.3.5 comes to the US this week, and with it comes Blizzard’s new Real ID system. To sum it up quickly, Real ID lets you add friends to your battle.net account, rather than your friends list ingame. This lets you see if they are logged on, what game they are playing, what character and what server they are on – that’s right, Big Brother is watching, and you’re it!
I totally “get” the idea. It would be strange if Blizzard runs three major games and don’t offer some way to communicate between them. I can chat with my friend while he flies around in Starcraft 2, and my guild master can see if I’m skipping a raid to play Diablo 3.
Of course, people can’t see you like this unless they know your Battle.net e-mail. You have to share that e-mail with your friends before they can add you, and you have to approve new friends as they send a request – online the current friend system ingame that just lets people add you without your knowledge. They get more information on you, after all, so that is fitting.
Incidently, my Battle.net e-mail is also my personal e-mail. An e-mail that many people have, that many people can find via Facebook and forums, so I worry just how many requests I might get. Unwanted requests, that is. The Facebook tool is slightly annoying – only slightly. A quick way to avoid this whole Facebook thing would be to hide your e-mail from friends, making the tool unable to see your e-mail and unable to check if it is tied to a Battle.net account. Or, you could simply change the e-mail on your Bnet account – although that seems like a bit of a hassle.
I guess it would be a bit too paranoid to think that random business contacts were to look me up just to see if I was a gamer, and even if they did, they would be marked as nerdy little gamers too. However, it is free to create a Battle.net account, so the question really is if its possible to create a Bnet account with no games at all, and add people to it.
So is it actually useful? Yes, I suppose it is for some people. Personally, there are very few people I would add, if any. I have a very good friend who is likely to play a lot of Starcraft 2 – but we can chat over MSN or the like anyways. Then there are some old friends from previous guilds that would be fun to talk to – but I have those on MSN as well, and with the luxury of no less than three monitors, I don’t think I’m going to miss room for an MSN chat box. It would be cool to talk to alliance players on my server, but I don’t know any, but I suppose it could be fun to add other druids who are active in the community, and have a chat with them once in a while.
To be fair, I don’t have that many friends… who plays Blizzard games. I mean, real life friends… who plays Blizzard games. I can count them on one hand. Oh sure, there are probably more, but we don’t really talk WoW or anything. I consider many of my guild mates my friends as well, but there is no need for them to have my Real ID when all of my alts are on the same server and in the same guild. And if I’m not ingame, I am usually on Ventrilo.
But I may just be a special case. It might just be me, so saturated with other programs and so snoppy about this new initiative that I won’t really find a use for it. It is a good idea, and I’m sure that there are tons of people who will benefit a lot from it. I just don’t think I would use it for more than just a few people, if any.
How about you? Will you be a Real ID fanatic?
