PW:Bubble

Oh hai!

So per usual, posting is sporadic at best around here. I wasn’t too sure anyone would be all THAT interested in “yeah. I chained some instances and quested in the down time on my shaman” posts, so I’ve been pretty quiet. Though baby!shaman is decidedly not so baby any more. She did hit 72 the other night, but that is another story for another time. As you can tell this post is brought to you by my glee for Real ID.

See, I have a problem with Alts. I have far too many of them. And as most can probably attest, if you are a social person (even if only on the interwebs *cough*Mork*cough* <3 ) and you spend any time poking about the WoW Blogs, you will quickly realize that there are some very, very cool people in the community. Yes, like anywhere in Real Life there are idiots too, but at least it’s easier to ignore them! This fact led to my having alts all over the place. Oooh I wanna try my hand at teh RPz? Oh hai Feathermoon Alliance alts. Oh look, there’s some people on Durotan! And RL friends on Lightning’s Blade! And Dunemaul! And Earthen Ring! And … well you get the point. It gets hard to juggle all the alts and wanting to talk to people in the game environment when you are working and raiding and playing other games (gasp!). I was already running WoW through Steam most of the time so that I could poke at Various People while I was playing, not to mention the tabbing out to GTalk and Twitter.

But now I can have all of that in my game? Without tabbing? /swoon.

Now I’m not going to go on about the security and ZOMG THEY HAS MAH EMAILZ!?! aspect. It’s been done, and Anna covered some other aspects of it very nicely, so I point you there for those. I’m talking strictly from a convenience point. It’s DAMN convenient. You mean I can cheer StoppableForce on while he gets his Ugly Drake (congrats again!) while making snarky comments to PixelatedExecutioner and discussing War for Cybertron and attempting to distract Lodur from his SC2 match and still keeping up with guild happenings all without being on the same server as anyone else or running a separate program? YES PLEASE. The giving out of my email doesn’t bother me so much. Chances are the people that I’m Real ID-ing aren’t going to be flooding me with Viagra ads (and if they do I don’t really check the address I use for b.net much, it’s strictly an account address so more power to them) so what do I care? I don’t see it as any different than me giving out my gmail address to people so they can add me on gtalk. And guess what? My real name shows up on there. Though some people would be saddened to see that my super cool last name isn’t on my b.net account because I’ve not sent Blizzard my paperwork to have my name corrected.

Aside from what I think could make managing a guild a lot easier with GMs being able to reach officers even if they are on a bank alt or alting on a friend/SO’s server to ask a quick question or let them know about a raid change, there’s also the added benefit of making impromptu raids (hi there OMG WE HAVE WINTERGRASP WHO WANTS TO DO VOA runs!). Think of the benefit to having what could be a multi-server healing channel! Not to mention the shenanigans to be had with the broadcast announcements (BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ!) and the hilarious conversations that I’m sure will occur in the chats during raids. Not that I’d ever do anything like that of course. >.>

Now it’s not to say that Real ID is perfect. It’s not. It’s a great start, but I’d still really like to see a nickname function (because holy hell do I know a lot of Steves, and Jeremys, and Nikkis, and Chris’s so it would be awesome to have it display what I call you too) and Blizzard’s chat interface is a little bulky and wonky at best, though that’s nothing new. All around the awesomeness of not having to be logged into a billion things at once far out weighs the giving people of my email address.

TL;DR? Good add Blizzard, I know I’ll use the hell out of it. If anyone wants to add me (or wants me to add them, either way!) just comment/email/twitter/gtalk me and let me know. I just don’t want to post the email address for the spambots. Though if you think about it, I use Tart for everything and it’s my WoW email and I almost always use gmail for things…. ;)

<3

Tart.