I get parts of the RealID panic. But the “OMG EVERYONE I FRIEND EVER WILL BE ABLE TO KNOW MY PERSONAL DEETS AND HARASS ME OUT OF GAME!!!ONE!11!” stuff? …Those people just don’t get it (obviously not playing SC2 beta) or are Doing It Wrong (and adding EVERYONE as RealID friend instead of filtering).
My biggest issues with the current setup for RealID is that it’s an “All or Nothing” situation. There are people I’d like to be able to contact me in Battle.Net but that I don’t want to know EVERY character EVERYWHERE, whose rID friends I have zero interest in knowing by first/last name (and vice versa), etc. I think there needs to be ae essentially tri-level system for this to reach maximum effectiveness and keep it safe. We don’t want a fiasco on the scale of Google Buzz, after all.
This is what I’ve come up with–let me know what you think and offer suggestions! I know a lot of people are really worried about this system, but I’ve been using rID in SC2, and as long as you’re SAFE with it then it isn’t that bad.
Level 1—Game-specific friends: Maybe that random PuG you grouped with that was an awesome tank, but not necessarily someone you want to see ALL of your characters and whatnot. Works just like in-game friends now.
Level 2—Game friends + chat: Maybe guildmates or officers you’d like to be able to get in touch with you via chat when you’re not on your guilded characters (or when you’re playing a different BN game), but not someone you want to have ALL of your character, game, or IRL information. It’d basically be a Battle.Net IM client, and responses would appear to them as being from [Character name + game identifier--in my example I used server]
Example:
From: Mallet.NerZhul
To: Ashtoret.Netzhul
Hey, ToC-25 forming, want in?
Level 3—RealID friends of my RealID friends: Would work basically like Level 2. Perhaps the appearance on your list would be something like YourFirstName.FirstNameOfMutualFriend.
Example: I’m RealID friends with Michael, who is rID friends with Chris, but Chris and I aren’t rID friends.
From: Amber.Michael
To: Chris.Michael
Hey, can you pick up the pizza on your way to the gaming session Saturday night? 
So you can see your rID connection, but not anything more personal about the other person than a first name. You won’t know what game the person is in, just that they’re logged into Battle.Net.
Level 4—RealID friends: Works exactly the way it works now. People that you add (and that add you back) can see your first and last name. In theory, you’re only going to be adding people you already know in reality, or people that you’re comfortable giving personal contact information to. Parental controls are in the works for this to make it more kid-safe. I’m hoping they do something similar to the pre-programmed cellphones for munchkins that are already on the market.
Actually, I don’t understand why they can’t just show people by first names or a public “display name”. FirstName.PersonalIdentifer, perhaps. (I really love the Starcraft name.name thing, it’s AWESOME.)
I think the entire chat system needs a way to mark yourself as Available/AFK/Busy/Invisible so that if the only thing you want to do is log in and say, check bank alts, then you won’t potentially be inundated with IMs. (**Yes, I know you can set yourself as afk/busy now, I just think Invisible needs to be part of the package.)
7 May 2010 at 1:00 pm |
“I just think Invisible needs to be part of the package.”
This, in a nutshell, is why I have an issue with RealID: it’s just not that robust, from what I can tell. I feel like they’re taking Battle.Net and smacking a basic IM app on top and calling it AWESOME, when in fact it’s just A Decent Start.
At a minimum, the features I expect from RealID before it goes live:
* Display names. Forcing us to use real names is unacceptable (especially for those – and I know several – whose legal name is not the name they go by in everyday life). As you rightly point out, this is also a major security issue for minors.
* Per-character visibility settings. I want to take certain characters off the radar entirely. I use those characters to get away from everybody else.
* Robust status options (as, again, you’ve noted). Available, Busy, AFK, Invisible, and Custom. I should be able to distinguish between “afk, more coffee” and “afk, dog on fire”.
* An easy way to distinguish between friends who are playing on my server, friends who are playing on other servers, and friends who are playing other games. This may be difficult; Cryptic uses CharacterName@AccountName, which is great for a single game but doesn’t differentiate well between STO players and Champions Online players. Blizzard might use DisplayName for friends on your server, DisplayName.Server for friends in the same game and on another server, and DisplayName.Server[Game] for friends in another game. (For example, if you were playing SCII, I’d show up as Theande.Drenden[WOW], and you as Ndiayne.Kerrigan[SCII]. (I don’t know what the SCII server names are, I just made one up.) Ideally, they’d color-code the server name or game abbreviation by faction, so if you wanted to join your friend you wouldn’t accidentally end up on the other side of the faction wall.
I hope they do even better than that. But that’s the minimum that I expect to see from what’s essentially an IM client being released in 2010.
7 May 2010 at 1:44 pm |
The reason I’m freaking out about this a little is that I don’t think that people will read all the details, and may unknowingly or ignorantly expose information that they don’t want to expose, such as exposing their real name to friends-of-friends.
9 May 2010 at 4:38 am |
Totally understandable–I’ve been thinking of getting an account for one of my nephews, and the RealID concept as-is does have me hesitant to do so, even with parental controls firmly in place.
I don’t mind people seeing my first name, but I’d prefer having a public “Display Name” to show anyone that isn’t actually a RealID friend. (including friends-of-friends).
As it stands, I’ll be extremely cautious about who I actually add to RealID.
19 May 2010 at 12:40 am |
I think you’re right. Although I’ll probably end up using RealID (hell, my Real Name is already out there on the internets), I think it needs a lot more fine control before it becomes a tool that many people will use.
23 June 2010 at 4:52 pm |
[...] top of things by writing a Real ID-related post. But you know what? Ndiayne over at Heals in Heels did it better than I’d planned on, and way before anyone was on Real ID’s side – when she wrote that post, the [...]