Patch 3.5 is just about ready to hit the PTRs and one of the biggest new features it will introduce is Blizzard’s RealID system. You can think of this as an advanced version of the humble friends-list. It comes with a number of significantly attractive benefits… but it also comes with some very, very unpleasant realities. We examine both here in order to warn you of the bad that will come with the good.
So, what is RealID?
At the moment, each individual current Blizzard game offers basic “friends-list” functionality. For example, within WoW each character has its own friends-list to which a player may add the name of another character of the same faction (Alliance or Horde) that exists on the same realm server.
Whenever this character then logs on or off, a chat-window notification is provided to the player and at any time, the player may access their character’s friends-list to see if any of their friends are currently online.
The basic WoW friends-list functionality is therefore character centered. If a player’s friend is playing a WoW character of a different faction or realm, there is no mechanism for them to see them or contact them provided within the game. The same is true if a player’s friend is playing another game entirely, be that another Blizzard game such as Starcraft or a game from another publisher.
Most WoW players will probably be aware of the existence of the Battle.net platform even if they don’t know exactly what it is. Some months ago, all WoW players were forced to create a Battle.net user account and to switch to using the credentials for this account (an email address and password) to login to WoW in place of the WoW specific login credentials they had been using up until that point.
Battle.net is simply the name Blizzard has given to its ‘online gaming platform’ and for most intents and purposes, one might say that Battle.net is to Blizzard’s games what Xbox Live is to Xbox 360 games. It is a platform of ‘online services’ that support the various needs of Blizzard’s games and its players.
In the same way that an Xbox 360 owner playing an online game can see if any of their Xbox Live friends are online and if they are, what games they are playing (or what movies they are watching, etc), Blizzard wishes to be able to offer that same level of functionality to its customers via the Battle.net platform. So far, all very sensible and all very pleasant sounding in principle.
RealID is therefore in some ways a little bit like the ‘Friends-List’ functionality of a platform like Xbox Live. To begin with, you add friends to your RealID friends-list by adding their ‘Battle.net’ user ID. Your friend is then sent a ‘friend request’ message and they have to accept and agree to be a RealID friend with you. Xbox Live requires the same mutual agreement between friends.
Once a friend request has been accepted, both players will appear on each others RealID friends-lists whenever they are playing any Blizzard game that supports the RealID system. To begin with, this means WoW and Starcraft 2.
It does not matter what each player is doing – one could be playing WoW whilst the other is playing Starcraft 2. The RealID friends-list shows each player is online and reveals both what game each is playing and what activity within that game the player is currently involved in. (Within certain limits: After all, it would be easy enough for Blizzard to spot when a WoW player was running a dungeon or a raid instance and report that but less clear if a player was simply exploring the world map, looking for herbs and mining nodes.)
Thus, no matter what each player wishes to do, so long as they are logged in, they can be seen by their friends and contacted making it trivially easy to keep in touch with your friends and exchange messages with them. This is exactly the sort of good idea that has made Xbox Live such a pleasure to use. I’m playing Gears of War, you’re playing Trials HD and you’ve just beaten my time. You send me a quick message to crow and within a few moments I’m loading up the same game to steal back my honour with a better time. Forget the specific games mentioned in the example above, the ease with which friends can interact is the key point of focus here.
Thus, the basic premise of what Blizzard is aiming to provide to players with the RealID system is generally sound; a cross-game communications service to allow players that have agreed to be friends to keep in touch with each other. It will now be possible as a WoW player to keep in contact with friends playing on other factions or realms as well as in other Blizzard ‘Battle.net aware’ games such as Starcraft 2. So far, so ‘awesome’.
However… there are some very important points to be aware of with the manner in which Blizzard have announced that they plan to implement the RealID system that have some significant and, in some edge cases, possibly dangerous potential consequences. We will examine these issues further in the following paragraphs.
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