Broliant Writes…

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.

The RealID system WILL reveal your full real name to your RealID friends.

Blizzard have stated very clearly and adamantly, if you accept or issue a RealID friends request with someone else and become RealID friends with them, whenever they see you on their friends-list they will see your full real name. That is, your first and last name as stored on your Battle.net account. Typically this WILL be your real world name (eg: Peter Smith, Jane Brown, whatever.) because you will have needed to give your real name for the purposes of billing since WoW and Starcraft 2 have recurring fees to play.

Thus, if my name were Peter Smith and I was logged into WoW playing my rogue Broliant, then my friend Jane Brown who was playing Starcraft 2 would see me on her friends-list as “Peter Smith (WoW: Silvermoon-EU: Broliant) or something along those lines.

Blizzard have been very explicitly clear. It WILL NOT be possible to withold your real name from the people you agree to be RealID friends with.

So, why might this be important?

There are a handful of well known and generally accepted reasons that range from being able to protect children from unwanted attention to mitigating the risks of possible identity theft why any individual may wish, need or require to withold personal details such as their full-name.

Most other platforms respect this and permit the player to create a ‘virtual ID’ such as Xbox Live’s GamerTags under which they can conduct their gaming relationships. If two friends wish to accept each other as Xbox Live friends, they simply exchange GamerTags and nothing more is required. Should either of them wish to share more personal information with the other, the decision remains theirs to make.

This forced ‘exposure’ of a player’s full real name in order to take advantage of the RealID system’s ability to enable cross-game communication has been widely criticised for the obvious reasons described above. What has not been seen so far in other coverage is a compelling argument that clearly explains why Blizzard have chosen to implement their RealID platform in this manner.

Since it is clearly not necessary to force players to reveal their full real name for such platform services as cross-game communications to function, the question is why Blizzard wants to push such an agenda. It is clearly a decision that is hostile to the individual and the preference they may have for remaining anonymous and it is highly unlikely that Blizzard is not aware that this is so.

The most likely driver for choosing this course is that genuine personal information is an incredibly valuable resource. Blizzard have already announced their plans to integrate Facebook support into the Battle.net system so that your Facebook friends can also be your Battle.net RealID friends where you are both players of Blizzard games that support RealID. Facebook is designed around the principle that a person is identified by their real name rather than by the assumed identity of a fictional avatar ID. In this way, Facebook is able to exploit its user data via various means, advertising being the most prevalent means currently employed to monetise user data.

By ensuring that the advantages of the RealID system are only available to those who implicitly choose to reveal their personal data, Blizzard is indicating that such attractive features as cross-game communications are only for those willing to relinquish full control and protection of their personal information.

Blizzard have stated that the simple answer for those concerned about revealing their personal information is to NOT use the RealID system but to stick to using the default friends-list functionality of the individual games.

Their official stance appears to be that the RealID system is only for use by people that either know each other already or that do not mind to reveal their personal information (even if it is only their full real name) to another player.

Let’s imagine for a moment that you’re a WoW player in a WoW guild and you have a guildie who plays a hunter called Bandycat. You have no idea who this person really is. Male, female, eunuch, it doesn’t matter. All you know is, you enjoy playing with this person in WoW and would like to be able to keep in touch when you are playing on an alt-character that might be on the other faction or on another realm. Or perhaps you also like playing Starcraft 2 and want to remain reachable by Bandycat in case he (or she, or it!) arranges one of the weekly retro-fun raids to BWL that you love so much.

Would it not be more friendly to allow these players to become something like ‘BattleNetFriends’ where they could still keep in touch across the Battle.net platform without having to reveal their personal information? If Blizzard were genuine in their position that RealID were only for friends who actually know each other or were fully happy to exchange full real name information with each other, it is unlikely that they would be able to justify developing the RealID platform software. After all, how many of the people on your friends-lists are actual genuine real-life friends, the kind you’d fully trust with your personal identity information?

(Pure speculation: Considering the number of ‘real-life friends’ playing WoW. Do you think it’s less than 10%/20%/30% of all WoW players? Do you think Blizzard would develop a costly feature that would only appeal to less than such a small percentage of its player-base?)

The much stronger liklihood therefore is that Blizzard is either seeking to tempt players to open up and reveal their personal information more freely or to ‘trick’ them into doing so on the promise of the communication advantages the RealID system provides. The longer one examines the matter, the more likely seems the possibility that longer-term financial ambitions are the cause of the chosen design for the RealID system.

According to Blizzard, there are NO plans to offer players the chance to either withold their full real name or to use an alternative ‘avatar’ name as their RealID name. In other words, do not expect Blizzard to adjust their stance on this matter.

The RealID system will ALWAYS show your RealID friends where you are and what you are doing.

At the moment, if I have three characters on the same faction/realm and want all of them to be friends with your character, I have to add the name of your character to the friends-list of each. I can either do this manually or, in WoW for example, I can use a game addon to synchronise my friends-list between characters.

With RealID, two friends must only perform the single act of becoming RealID friends with each other and from that point onwards, they will be able to see their RealID friend no matter what character, faction or realm (in the case of WoW) they are playing on or whether they are instead playing a different game that supports RealID such as Starcraft 2.

On the one hand, it’s nice to be easy to find in those moments when you don’t mind people contacting you. However, there are plenty of occasions that most players find themselves in where they appreciate being able to ‘drop off the radar’ whilst still being able to play.

Although you might be happy to be ‘visibly online’ whenever you are on your main character, perhaps a character that belongs to a guild for example and the alts you have within that guild are you happy to be ‘visibly online’ no matter what character you login to? What about if you are on a minor alt, one used as a bank or auction house ‘mule’ for example. Or perhaps you split your time between different groups of friends, playing on one realm with one group and on another realm with the other group.

Do you really want to be visible to every RealID friend 100% of the time you are logged into a Battle.net game? I can state from personal experience that as much as I generally love playing among the regular faces of my guild and the friends on my standard WoW friends-lists, there are times when I simply want to be free to put on some music or a podcast or two, get my head down and immerse myself in some questing or levelling fun without having to keep one eye on guild chat or be ready to make polite excuses for why I’d rather not join a dungeon run at the moment.

Right now, I can achieve this by jumping onto a ‘private’ character, be it one outside my guild or not known to my friends. It’s not ‘wrong’ or ‘seedy’ to want this option, it’s just for those times when you want the game by itself without the ‘massively multiplayer’ type baggage.

For me personally, both of the above issues are deal-breakers that will ensure I do not use the RealID friend system. It’s a shame, because the cross-realm/faction/game communications would be a nice thing to have but if I have to surrender my personal identity information and my online privacy, they are “nice to have” things that are not worth the cost of admittance.

Blizzard have again stated categorically that there will be NO opportunity for players to set their online presence to an ‘invisible’ or ‘offline’ status should they choose to use the RealID system. They are introducing several ‘status’ flags for RealID though along the lines of “Available”, “Busy” and “Don’t disturb” but whichever you choose, other RealID friends will ALWAYS be able to see you are online and what you are doing and be able to contact you if they wish.

Conclusions:

The RealID system offers a range of features that any user of other modern ‘social’ gaming or network platforms will be mostly familiar with. It makes perfect sense that players of Blizzard games, actively using the Battle.net platform, would appreciate having the ability to communicate with each other across game and faction/server/realm divides. For wanting to offer such features to players, Blizzard can be commended.

It is abundantly clear however that the design of the RealID system is incredibly hostile toward concerns of user privacy and security when it has no need to be in order to provide the features on offer.

The only credible explanation for choosing such a design appears to be that new streams of revenue generation will be created along similar lines to those used by other social gaming platforms and the new communications features provided by the RealID system are being used as the “enticement crowbar” to compel you to surrender your valuable information. In this regard, Facebook offers an informative preview of the templates that are likely to be introduced to Battle.net in the coming months and years.

Blizzard do not have a reputation for selling their customers down the proverbial river in order to make a ‘quick buck’ and therefore the announcements being made here regarding the ‘costs’ of the RealID system are in many respects surprising. Their parent company Activision however are gaining a firm reputation for ‘over-mining’ their franchises as the handling of the “Guitar Hero” and “Modern Warfare” products have shown over the past year.

Whether or not Blizzard’s choices and motivations in this matter are fully their own or are shaped by ‘guidance’ from Activision is a matter for rampant speculation.

What is clear however is that the RealID system is simply a small collection of additional new communication features that most users would find convenient and useful but that come at a cost that most users would find unreasonable when the implications are made clear to them.

-B-