Wednesday, June 23, 2010

My Thoughts on Real ID

With the recent patch coming down on Tuesday not only are we set for Ruby Sanctum when they decide to release it but we were also finally givin the new Real ID Battle.net chat system.
There has been alot of talk and QQ about this since it was anounced but for this post I will ignore all of it and give you my thoughts as of last night.

My first impression was that it looked amasing dispite breaking my chat window. The changes to the social pane and the new popups are all really polished and have a great feel to them.
I love the idea that I can keep in touch with my friends who I have left behind in the transfer and also those who long ago moved on. I have had many close friends in WoW who have long ago left my old server and since then have talked to them very rarely this new chat will help bring them back in touch with me.

However as everyone already knows it does have its flaws. It dispite how the system may look its feels almost unfinished, there are alot of simple features that many have asked for before that really should have been included at launch. The obvious and most asked for is a "show offline" mode, some way to make ether you whole account or just one character not show up on your friends lists. Everyone has those times when your not in the mood to talk to friends be it your not in the mood, trying to grind something out or just have a alt that you want kept secret.
The other feature I feel the system needs is the ability to set nicknames. While its great to know your online friends real names I don't need to the both first and last names up in my chat window. This would also help for those friends that are important enough to talk to across servers but you can not yet match the real name to the toon name.

Over all im really liking the system for the ability to enlarge my number of activly spoken to friends, but the system still needs tweeks which will no dout come as it gets its first weeks of live testing.

1 comment:

Anolaana said...

I too feel hidden Nicks and Status would be preferable to rID as a Cross-Realm function- Battlegroups make friends but "all or nothing" rID doesn't solve the problem when the group dissolves. I don't paticularly want everyone and Tom, Dick and Harry knowing my name. I just want to stay in touch. I would like to see a WoWstyle+inter realm as a median between WoWFr and rID-Fr lists, if not a more configurable rID. People prefer choice and flexibility, not "My way or the highway" options like rID, which serve a few but not the majority.

Also, you might want edit for spelling. ;)