Flyv's Warcraft Blog

Real ID: the good side

Blizzard's debacle with Real ID has mostly faded to memory. I'm hoping they can recover from their disastrous launch and some folks can enjoy the good part of Real ID.

Today I raided ICC with some of my guild friends. It was a lot of fun, a particularly epic Lady Deathwhisper fight where we pulled out a win using 3 battle rezzes and every mana and tank cooldown available. And a casual social time, cracking jokes about the Smurfs and drinking beers. At the same time I was raiding an old high school buddy was playing one of his first WoW toons, a level 20 Paladin. It's been... 21 years since high school, we haven't talked much in the intervening years, but we're RealID buddies. And there we were chatting via whispers, joking about Warcraft.

Suddenly a memory flash: I distinctly remember spending the night at his house, about age 12, and typing in the source code for Hunt the Wumpus. You youngsters should know, back in the day a floppy disk cost $10. There was no Internet and barely any modems. So you got printed books of computer games and typed them in. We must have stayed up until midnight typing that damn program in and trying to fix typos. I got tired and went to sleep and he kept up with it, got the game running to show me in the morning.

And what a game! You can try it here in original text form. It's one of the original dungeon crawlers, in interactive fiction form. It's not even a game by modern standards but it's a very important step in the development of Warcraft along with 500 point Adventure, Rogue, and DikuMUD.

I really like that Real ID enabled me to renew a years-old friendship, casually enjoyed in the medium of Warcraft. I'm hoping that Real ID will let me maintain that kind of social relationship with my new friends, my Warcraft guild friends. When I quit serious raiding a year ago I was really disturbed by what a waste of time Warcraft felt like, the impermanence of my relationships from the game. Coming back has let me rekindle some of those friendships, for which I'm thankful. Real ID may let the fire keep burning for the next 10+ years in new games yet to come.

Real ID, Warcraft, Blizzard

The new Internet shitstorm is Blizzard's launching of Real ID, linking your real life identity (as determined by your credit card and email) to your gaming identity, particularly your Warcraft characters. They're trying to walk a fine line: you don't have to share your Real ID in the game of Warcraft, so in theory you can keep your identity private. But Blizzard's making a few missteps in launching it.

1. There's a terrible bug (or design choice?) where Real ID data is available to WoW addons. In general WoW addons are safe for a user to install, they can't do much harm. Users install lots of them without fear of danger. But right now, any addon can share your real name and the names of your friends in the game: spam trade chat, etc. In fact DBM had a bug that it was dumping that data in to your own chat window. Harmless, but a startling demonstration of what could go wrong.
2. The current Real ID policy is that if someone's a Real ID friend, then they automatically share your Real ID name with their friends, too. Ie, your friends get to share your personal data with anyone they want. It's a mistake to put that control in other people's hands.
   
3. Blizzard is making Real ID mandatory for forum posts. The WoW forums are mostly a sideshow and I understand why they're trying to clean up the cesspool. But their ham-handed announcement and messaging has really pissed a lot of people off. And I've already heard from two women who say they will no longer be posting to the forums because they don't want to be harassed. That makes me sad.

Of course what's really going on is Blizzard / Activision is trying to figure out how to leverage the 12 million World of Warcraft subscribers into a valuable social network for their other games, particularly Starcraft 2, Diablo 3, and the upcoming unnamed Blizzard MMO. Every game company right now has Facebook envy, and Blizzard is making a go at social networking. Despite the nerd rage about Real ID right now I don't think they'll lose customers over abusing their expectations of privacy. But it sure is a lousy launch.

BTW, personally I have no trouble with anyone knowing my Real ID, in fact I appreciate the basic feature of making my in-game friendships transcend whatever alt and server I'm currently playing. My Real ID is [email protected], and any friends reading this are encouraged to add me. But I'm unusual; Blizzard needs to be very careful about denying its customers the choice to remain pseudonymous.

Steam grumble

Steam is a marvel, a working, user-friendly game download store. I love how it handles copy protection without being a big nuisance. I also appreciate (and am victim to) their sales. This past week has been crazy sale time and I ended up buying Fuel for $5 just to see the procedural generation and Borderlands for $10. Second copy of Borderlands, I have it on the Xbox, but it's so cheap and I wanted to try it on the PC.

But as great as Steam is, their download system is awful. New games seem to download fast, 1.5 megabytes / second or so. But patches and DLC take forever. I'm getting only 300 kilobytes/second and that's a total botch of spikey delivery, like their bandwidth is severely limited. And the Steam client gives me four indicators of progress, all saying different things. Two different speed gauges (470KB/s and 870KB/s), and two different completion estimates (24 minutes, 42 minutes). All on the same screen!