And they all lived happily ever after…

And so, the whole RealID privacy issue ends after a few days of waiting (and gamers generating literally tons of feedback – the original thread on the US forums is just shy of a fifty thousand posts, that’s something I believe never happened before) with another announcement. I was hoping Blizzard would back off from their crazy plans (or at least alter them somewhat), and they indeed did so.

For SC2, the names are to be replaced by character name and character code, which I think is unique, but I’m not really sure. I’d try it out in the beta, but the EU servers are still not working, so it’ll have to wait until tomorrow. For WoW, they haven’t really said anything other than not using our real names, but I believe they’ll do something similar to SC2 part – probably depending on how that will work in practice.

Some of the bloggers are still not completely convinced of being safe though, mostly because of some strange wording in part of Mike Morhaime’s letter – “we’ve decided at this time that real names will not be required”. I don’t think this is a sign of it being only a temporary thing, as the “at this time” part is in a wrong part of the sentence for that – at least that’s what my fairly limited knowledge of English tells me anyway. And I simply refuse to be completely paranoid and make some sort of a conspiracy out of it.

While on this topic, I’d like to point out an awesome comment of Pangoria Fallstar on Larisa’s blog. This comment really deserves reading, so go and read it.

The other upgrades to the forums are still to be implemented. Highlighting, ratings, improved search, possibly the blue tracker that the EU forums are missing. This is all good and needed, however I don’t really believe in the ratings – I’ve seen them in action on wow.com and while usually the downrated comments are indeed the trollish ones, it also happens that people will downrate something valuable, just because they don’t like it. It’s a system that’s supposed to average itself up, but sometimes it doesn’t.

Then there’s a part about evolving the ingame RealID system, and I’m not really sure what they mean by that. Obviously, there have been reports of incoming Facebook integration, and theoretically, inviting all my friends from Facebook that might be playing SC2/WoW/D3 with one click might be indeed called “exciting” – if I had any friends on Facebook, that is. Or at least an account there, which I don’t.

I like the cross-server and cross-game (will be testing that part when the EU SC2 beta servers will go up) feature, but it could really use some improvements – like an invisible status for example, or more privacy options to decide if I want my name showing up on friends of friends lists. I hope these will be a part of the new and exciting stuff.

Oh, and you know what would be really, really awesome? An external application to talk to my Battle.net friends while out of game (possibly not only an iphone version, win/mac also). Yeah, I know, they’re my friends and I can phone them or send them a message on other IM systems, but sometimes they play on fullscreen and logging onto WoW is the only way to reach them. Blame my friends for this idea. ;)