Facebook, WoW, and RealID

"Facebook is the only (big) place where people interact, play games and spend time by their real name, not behind some avatar..." - Okrane S. commenter on Spink's Blog

Except for many of those 'games', Zynga's games in particular, you need at least 501 friends WHO ALSO PLAY if you want to be 'successful' in them.

In Mafia Wars, if you don't have 501+ people in your Gang, you're guaranteed to get attacked by other players. Having 501 (or more) doesn't mean you won't be attacked either, but having less than 501 means you certainly will.

So you have two choices:
You can spam the message boards asking hundreds of people to add you as a Friend while you also add as many new 'Friends' as you can;
Or you create a second Games-only account where you don't use your real name or picture;

I did the first but slowly grew frustrated at having my wall filled with countless messages from all the games all these Friends-I-hadn't-met were playing. The final straw came when my brother-in-law posted a status update commenting on his broken foot, I asked what had happened, he said he'd crashed his car a week ago...and hadn't I seen his status update?

No. I hadn't. Because my FB Wall had been filled with the random crap of countless strangers. (In my defense I do live in another country, 8,000 miles away.)

So I pruned my Friends List and went the second route, creating a Games-only FB account using a fake name and picture, and started over.

With the speed at which you can level to Cap in WoW these days then Epic-out your character via the LFD Tool, starting over is not the set back many might think. Sure, there's the $100+ to purchase WoW, BC, & LK all over again, but by starting over and using prepaid Game Cards you can give yourself a brand new name, which seems to be the concern of many. So that's one way to bypass RealID.

While creating a fake FB account (and likewise a fake WoW account) may be against their Terms of Use (if they even have one, and I can't be stuffed looking), there are thousands, maybe even tens of thousands of people with Game-only accounts, accounts created by people who didn't use their real name and/or picture. For the most part it's easy to tell if it's a Games-only account, especially if their profile pic is a centerfold, or a graphic from Mafia Wars, Farmville, etc. In my case, I trawled a random guy's pic off the 'net, gave him a name, and even created a fake profile/history for him. What's really funny (not 'Ha Ha' funny) is he gets well wishers posting on his Wall on his 'birthday'. But he doesn't exist. He's just an avatar. My avatar. My avatar which I use to play Facebook games.

That's what Facebook and Blizzard need to understand: Many, many, MANY people do NOT want to use their real name when playing computer games, and their reasons for doing so are numerous, varied, and quite often valid.

RealID has set the 'net ablaze. Many are angry about it, some blasé, and some creative types have produced humorous responses (dryly ironic, but amusing nonetheless).

I liken this to those who say, "If you have nothing to hide, why can't the police come in and search your house? I'd let them search my house if they wanted to."

Fine. Let them search your house then, because even though I have nothing to hide, that doesn't mean I'm prepared to let the police poke around in my private belongings. I value my privacy, thank you very much, so I'll share what I choose to share and when given the choice, I'll keep private what I'd prefer remain private.

This is why I enabled Parental Controls on my account last night and deactivated RealID, or I would have, if it wasn't already unchecked once I got in.

By coincidence my 6-month sub expired yesterday and my Mum is coming to visit for several weeks next month so when I renewed WoW last night, rather than buying another 6-month block at $12.99/month, I just bought 1 month at $14.99. I don't intend to play during August so why pay for it? Sure, July cost me $2 more but I'll save $13 in August so by that reasoning I'm $11 ahead. I need to cancel that 1-month recurring Sub before August because I don't want to continue paying $15/month so when I cancel it, in protest against RealID, I intend to state it as the reason why I'm doing so. Who knows, with LOTRO apparently going free-to-play in a couple of months, maybe I won't even renew WoW after Mum leaves.

And in the meantime? I still have both Mario Galaxy games to complete, along with Zelda: Twilight Princess, Muramasa, Sky Crawlers, Zack & Wiki...the list goes on. So many unbeaten Nintendo games. I'm getting slack in my old age ;)