Apologies to anyone whos comment was blocked or unpublished. A significant amount of comment spam was bypassing the CAPTCHA module so I swapped over to Mollom, an anti-spam service similar to Akismet. It works like a champ but unfortunately, it seems to be blocking a few legitimate comments as well. Which, kind of sucks because it is not as if a whole lot of people bother visiting or commenting on this site >_<.
Anyway, Real IDs: I was kind of hoping for something similar to Steam’s community chat system. Or rather, I was kind of hoping for a chat system promoting a global Battle.net avatar linking social communities across games. For security reasons, I’m not comfortable with just doling out my battle.net login email, which is unfortunately needed in order to add Real ID friends. I don’t like the fact that my real name is shown in game and on friends list, I don’t like how people not on my friends list are able to view my name on friends lists and I really don’t like how there is no way to control friends list visibility.
Being able to link your game identity with your real identity within the game isn’t a very good idea. It’s mildly creepy and breaks immersion. I know that it is not that big of a deal (hint: if you don’t like it don’t use it), but it makes me very reluctant to add anyone to my Real ID list who I am not directly associated with outside of the game. I assume that was Blizzard’s original intention, but as mentioned above, I was really hoping for more of a community system.
But all of that aside, I have quite a few co-workers and real life friends scattered across servers. It’s nice being able to contact them in game without having to roll a social alt on another server (talking out of my ass since I don’t think I have ever RL whispered anyone off server yet :P). On the other hand, it is not that hard just to uuuh send someone a text message or IM outside of the game…
Oh, people who are purchasing the new iPhone upgrade: Make sure that you unbind your authenticator so that you don’t get locked out of your account. The authenticator app is tied to the phone’s serial number.