Never mind gold spammers and hackers. I’m just talking about basic privacy. Especially in the world of online games where there are a whole lot of idiots with no social skills online. Consider this scenario: Suppose you’re a female gamer and you ReadlID-friend a RL friend of yours, not realizing that she’s got a lot of horny young teen/twentysomething guys on her friends list–who can now all see your name. Sure, they can’t friend you or chat with you without your permission, but do you really want to deal with annoying friend requests from people you don’t even know, just because “OMG RL GIRL!” I think not.
Blizz needs to allow you to choose who sees your name and who doesn’t. That’s just basic privacy. I’m not a teenager who wants to see how many friends I can rack up. I’m an adult who would like to chat with a very small number of real-life friends cross-server, and who wants even these friends to only know when I’m online when I’m on toons I designate as “public.”
Meh. Blizzard can go pound sand if this does turn out to be their answer. I have an ex-guildie who turned out to have uncontrolled bipolar disorder and was physically abusive towards his girlfriend. Back in EQ, one of my guildies was this big friendly guy who was soooo nice and sweet and did lots of great helping stuff, to the point where no one wanted to say a bad thing about him. And very quietly he was carefully pushing boundaries with various female guildmates, using guilt and the “oh hey, I’m just a nice guy, you’re misinterpreting what I meant” excuse to get away with a lot of it. That “friend of a friend” stuff just opens up a huge can of worms for abuses other than game hacking.
No freaking way do I want people like that to have my RL name and be able to see whenever I’m online playing any Blizzard game, thank you.
I suggest reading thesetwo articles for a bit more in-depth explanation of Real ID than I can provide while I’m at work, because it sounds like you’re misunderstanding the nature of the system. This isn’t for guildies, this is for people you know personally.
I suspect very few people will actually want to use this feature. I really don’t know why Blizzard put so much work and hype into it.
Yes, exactly. And I have no issue with this. But it says right there in the file you linked that your real name, first and last, will be visible not only to your designated RealID friends, but also to their friends. This is the part I object to. I’m not friends with everybody my friends are friends with. I know all it’s revealing is my name (not my online status or anything else) but even this is too much if I don’t choose to make it available.
I do know some of my guildies personally. (For instance, my guild leader has crashed at my place once and stayed over for a weekend another time, I had dinner with her and her parents, and my husband and I traveled cross-country to visit her for a week.) I’m not sure if I trust all of their friends, though - and not over account hacking, I mean over not becoming a lovestruck stalker douche. Full of hate over the FOAF real name handing-out. It should default to never handing out real names to friends-of-friends unless you specifically approve each one.
And yeah, if it’s supposed to be a “oh hey, this way my brother/cousin/best bud can find me online if I’m playing Diablo 2 and tell me to come hook up with him in Starcraft 2”… that’s an awful lot of effort for something that should be of relatively minor use.
I think all it’s revealing is your name, quite literally. If Joe looks at his friend Jack’s list and sees the name Jill, he has no way of telling who that is, no link to characters, accounts, locations, nothing.
I’m not really attempting to counter your concerns. I fully understand where you’re coming from, and I share your concerns. I refuse to get on Facebook for that very reason. But so long as you limit your list to people you personally know and trust, the risk should be minimal, probably less than the risk you assume each time you enter a credit card number or create an account on a website.
Or some people are just playing the game in a different way from you. This isn’t an RP server–names don’t need to reflect anything at all other than creator preference. (Although I’ll agree that copying names from WoW NPCs, other games, or popular fantasy fiction is annoying as hell.) I’d never say that *you *“just don’t get it” because you don’t like raiding at all, let along the hardcore endgame kind that I prefer. I might not *understand *why you wouldn’t want to do the same things I enjoy, that I personally see as the be-all and end-all of playing this game, but I recognize that people have different interests and goals and you’re not stupid or a bad player just 'cause we don’t have that in common.
coughArthasMenethilcough
But with the level of “security” they currently have designed, it renders the tool pretty well useless. If all you’re able to use it for is people you completely, 100% trust, then hardly anyone will use it, and the feature might as well not exist.
No argument there. Blizzard generally doesn’t do things without a good reason, although Bobby Kotick is working his devil’s claws into their sensibilities slowly but surely. I imagine there’s a substantial enough desire out there that we don’t see that they think it’s worth it to implement this. Sure doesn’t seem like it to me, though.
Not just you, but I think we’re a minority. Hell, I even name bank alts with something more creative than “BankAlt” or “Mule1”…I had bank alts named “Greenspan”, “Bernanke” and “Summers” on various servers.
I always try to fit the sound of the names to the race, too. A lot of my tauren have “Low” or “Mow” sounds in the names. My orcs have a lot of “kh” and “gh” in them. I wish to Og that Blizzard would let us put apostrophes in character names so my trolls would actually fit into their culture. Forsaken get Victorian/Edwardian names (Violetta, Humphrey, etc). I try to deduce the naming conventions for the race I’m making from the NPC names.
I try not to judge based on names, but it does tell you something about their character, most specifically how they approach the game. I know I’m probably not going to have a fun time playing with someone named Heelzforu or Pallytankftw, for instance. Most of the people I know use plausible names for their characters, and I get along with them pretty well.
That said, it’s not a hard and fast rule. In last night’s ICC run, we had a Priest, Shadow spec only, named Hammerhealz. It entertains him to have a non-healing char with the word healz in the name. And hey, we still had a fun and productive run, so I’m not going to hold it against him.
ETA: Also, someone who’d name their BElf Lock “Hexpot” ought not to throw stones, eh? :dubious:
It’s pretty obvious how I name characters. So I created an alt on a RP server to see what it was like to RP in WoW. I was a little upset when I saw the names of characters on that RP server were like the ones above. And it got worse when I figured out that no one RPs on RP servers. At least not until 80 and even then not that much. (Or maybe I’m on the wrong RP server, or wrong guild)
I figure if Blizzard makes punny NPC names, I can too, or at least appreciate it when others do. That being said, I hate seeing the Nth version of Leggolass/Legöläs for a NElf hunter or Ipwnzulolz for a pvp’ing rogue or whatever, just because it gets on my nerves after a while.
One guy I know uses puns a lot in character names. One that stuck with me is his Tauren druid, who had a brown skin tone. Named Haunau.
How now, brown cow.
I use the RNG a lot, though sometimes I shave down the number of syllables it gives me or otherwise neaten up the spelling.
I remember reading about “RP servers” (on one of the old threads? elsewhere?) that there is basically one server where all of the people who actually want to RP have migrated to (Farstriders maybe?). I started on Argent Dawn, supposedly an RP server, and there’s really no difference between there and Cairne as far as I can tell.
I come from an RP server originally (Blackwater Raiders) but aside from a small number of RP guilds (some of which subsequently left server and moved to Moon Guard), there really wasn’t that much RPing going on.
I don’t like stupid names either–I’m a roleplayer in spirit if not in actual practice, and names like “Ipwnzu” and “Iheartanal” (yes, this one was actually in my guild for awhile–it’s a GLBT guild and he was gay, but still…) just kick me out of the immersion I like to experience in the game. I don’t report them, though. I think in all my time playing I’ve only reported one name–I don’t even remember what it was anymore, but it was pretty offensive. But the server I’m on now isn’t RP, so people aren’t required to adhere to RP naming conventions, just Blizzard rules.
I do reserve the right to think a little less of you for my initial impression, though, if you have a stupid teenage-boy-shocking kind of name, just as I reserve the right to think less of folks who can’t communicate without a sentence full of “u” and “ur” and “4 this” and “2 that.”
