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The first patch I've missed... it's weird.
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Post by
Umega
And it's weird to notice how much I care anyway. I guess four or five years of a hobby gives you a sort of emotional bond with it, even when you don't have the time or inclination to pursue it.
To be honest, I was like that with Runescape when I left it for WoW to. I spent like 3 years playing Runescape, I still have a decent character there and I have achieved many things on it that I'm still happy about and I still have a very small nagging feeling to play it again. (See? I'm addicted to the game I'm still talking about after 4 years I left :O ) I only played like 3 days of it 2 months ago, until I died and lost all my expensive items that I shouldn't of been wearing (death penalties are much harsher in RS than WoW and I casualy waded into a boss with a WoW mindset).
That death has pretty much drained my need to play it now, RS has changed so much anyway. I think of it as a bit of waste to let a decent RS character and leave it in the dark forever. But as I said, I had my fun and I'm happy of what I achieved in Runescape and now I'm moving on...
Post by
seebs
If you really didn't care about beating the RealID deadhorse, you wouldn't even have mentioned it. Instead, you've spent 5 pages whining about it and arguing with every single person who has responded.
Oh, I care about it, it just wasn't the primary thing that got me to post a thread. It's topical to WoW forums, so I won't refuse to discuss it here, but it wasn't the thing I was originally talking about.
Now you decide you don't want to argue any more, and the thread is suddenly all about your nostalgia for the game, and nothing else, honest!
Oh, I'd love to argue. I just object to being told falsely that the sole purpose of the thread was to argue about Real ID. I was more interested in the other topic, but since other people didn't care about that, and wanted to instead argue about how I was wrong to have different preferences from them, I was willing to discuss that too.
But the actual topic was the nostalgia and the weirdness of seeing patches through a different filter. That people wanted to digress is fine by me, it's not as if the topic was of grave and serious importance.
Post by
seebs
And it's weird to notice how much I care anyway. I guess four or five years of a hobby gives you a sort of emotional bond with it, even when you don't have the time or inclination to pursue it.
To be honest, I was like that with Runescape when I left it for WoW to. I spent like 3 years playing Runescape, I still have a decent character there and I have achieved many things on it that I'm still happy about and I still have a very small nagging feeling to play it again. (See? I'm addicted to the game I'm still talking about after 4 years I left :O )
Heh. I still occasionally find myself thinking about what I was going to do next in a mud that I used to play on, even though it hasn't even existed in years. (I actually hosted it, so I still have the source somewhere.)
That death has pretty much drained my need to play it now, RS has changed so much anyway. I think of it as a bit of waste to let a decent RS character and leave it in the dark forever. But as I said, I had my fun and I'm happy of what I achieved in Runescape and now I'm moving on...
Yeah. I'm a bit sad 'cuz there was a ton of stuff I wanted to get around to but never did, but at least I got to tank and heal some actual at-level raiding content before I left, that was the one thing I'd been curious about but not gotten to try. Only other obvious gap is I never got leatherworking past the late 200s, or skinning past the mid 300s. I think I got every other profession to 450. :) Only had 5 or 6 80s, but I think I got every class but warrior past 55 at least once.
I dunno. When I started I thought WoW would be, well, a lot more of a roleplaying game. Actually tried to do RP stuff occasionally, but it was pretty much a lost cause due to griefers. (I was genuinely amazed at how much time and effort people were willing to put into trying to disrupt RP on an RP server.) CoH has been a real eye-opener in that regard -- most groups I'm in, at least one or two people are staying in character, and other people tend to go along with them on that.
The Cataclysm changes mostly look pretty cool to me. Playing CoH has really changed my view of combat, though -- I'd probably find healing really tedious now after having played buff/debuff support classes that weren't built around healing. I dunno, maybe it'd still be fun sometimes.
Post by
Ahmi
My issue is that I would love to be able to use the feature, and so would several of my friends -- but some of them can't because of the "legal name" thing. That, and I really don't like it when people blatantly lie to me.
Basically, a highly-desirable feature has been added to the game, but implemented in a way that denies many people access to it. Other games and gaming network things let you use a nick name. If Real ID used a nickname, I'd still be playing WoW. But instead, it's implemented so that people who have reason not to use their legal name are denied access to the feature. That's a sucky thing to do.
I can't see the problem. They aren't denied access to it. They can use it if they want. If they don't - it's their problem.
Post by
seebs
I can't see the problem. They aren't denied access to it. They can use it if they want. If they don't - it's their problem.
Perhaps it's their problem, but it's a problem that only exists because the feature makes an unjustified assumption.
Here's the thing. "You have access to this" is not the same as "you have access to this that doesn't require you to be made uncomfortable." If you don't like using your legal name, a system which pushes your legal name as your identifier for all contact with other people has a barrier to use -- it is much easier for it not to be rewarding to use it, because of the unfun part.
Imagine a system just like Real ID, but instead of using real names, it uses randomly selected derogatory terms from a dictionary. You can use it, but you get randomly assigned a handle like "stupid idiot jerk". You have to use that name when talking to people. Every message you send to your friends comes from "stupid idiot jerk", and their responses come from "ugly moron fool" and "loser baby jerkwad".
You can use it. You're not denied access to it. If you don't want to, it's your problem, right?
But you can see how you might feel that you were being discouraged from it. Meanwhile, having basically no empathy and crappy social instincts, I'd just think it was funny, and use it without qualms.
The difference is, I wouldn't go around smugly telling people they were whiners if they didn't like it. I'd accept that they found it upsetting even though I couldn't see why. (Actually, I can sort of see why, it just doesn't make any sense to me. Humans are weeeeeird.)
Post by
xaratherus
The difference is, I wouldn't go around smugly telling people they were whiners if they didn't like it. I'd accept that they found it upsetting even though I couldn't see why. (Actually, I can sort of see why, it just doesn't make any sense to me. Humans are weeeeeird.)
I'm not saying you're a whiner for not liking it. I'm not saying you're a whiner at all. My difficulty is that based on my own experiences and mindset, I can't comprehend it* being a severe enough infraction to quit playing a game that you apparently greatly enjoyed. And yes, I've read your reasons, and I tend to be a pretty empathic person, but it still seems like an overreaction to me for a system that, while a great benefit, still remains wholly optional.
I would say this: It seems to me like on some level you may have wanted to further discuss the RealID issue, because you could have just as easily posted your main topic - how weird it seems to miss a patch on a game that you used to play - without mentioning the reasons
why
you aren't playing. Especially since I know from experience that you should know** that the Wowhead forums have a tendency to go off on tangents and for posters to fixate on non-central issues to discussions. ;)
*'It' being a combination of privacy concerns and the misinformation and bait-and-switch tactics regarding the entire issue.
**As I was around here when you were posting about the RealID issue to begin with.
Post by
seebs
I guess it's just... When desireable, but optional, things are structured so that they're easy and pleasant for some people to use, and hard or unpleasant for other people to use, but there's no intrinsic reason for the latter category, that offends me. For instance, some games for things like the iPhone have color selections chosen so that colorblind people can still tell the colors apart; others don't. Unless there's some really compelling reason for the choice of colors, I find the latter category vaguely offensive, and the former more appealing. I think that, in general, there is an obligation to make at least
minimal
efforts not to gratuitously exclude people.
Blizzard has plenty of information to know that the real names exclude some people, or at least make things harder or less pleasant for them. There's no one out there who would be unable to use the system if it didn't use real names, or even who would be substantially inconvenienced -- the people who really want that could easily ask their friends to pick their real name as their handle, or get an addon to translate the handles into real names.
But if you
don't
want real names, there's nothing you can do about it.
So it seems like very basic common sense that the right design would be nicknames, even if we imagine ourselves to be in the strange alternate dimension where this feature is only interesting for talking with people you already know. And Blizzard's never given us a straight answer on why they won't do that. None of their arguments even hint at a reason for which people who prefer a nickname shouldn't be able to use it. I mean, fine, ignore all the cases where it's traumatic or a big deal or whatever... Just think about plain old
preference
, and it's obvious that the vast majority of the player base would get more use out of Real ID, and like it better, if it let them use nicknames.
And I guess you're right, I could have just not mentioned it; some combination of still thinking about the topic, and providing an approximate time for when I quit.
Post by
seebs
Okay, I heard back from billing.
Absolutely, positively, no way we can change the account name unless it matches current government-issued ID. So all the posts saying to just change the name on the account? Wrong, pure and simple.
Post by
xaratherus
And Blizzard's never given us a straight answer on why they won't do that. None of their arguments even hint at a reason for which people who prefer a nickname shouldn't be able to use it. I mean, fine, ignore all the cases where it's traumatic or a big deal or whatever... Just think about plain old preference, and it's obvious that the vast majority of the player base would get more use out of Real ID, and like it better, if it let them use nicknames.
No, they haven't. But you and I can extrapolate what that reason is: They want to make BlizzBook - and they can't really do that without using real names.
Post by
seebs
No, they haven't. But you and I can extrapolate what that reason is: They want to make BlizzBook - and they can't really do that without using real names.
I think you're right.
I think that may be the Big Offense -- they sold us out. Why should I pay them $15/month in order to make them money by being part of BlizzBook? If I want an ad-supported social network, I know where to find one.
Post by
292516
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
seebs
.... YOU DON'T HAVE TO USE REAL-ID.
END OF STORY.
Only at Wowhead can you find people who whine and cry over a 100% completely optional feature.
Actually, anywhere you find WoW players, you can find people who have no reading comprehension skills. My complaint isn't that it's not optional. It's that it's structured so as to be useless to me, when I really want the underlying functionality. (Well, that, and that Blizzard repeatedly tells us lies about it.) So now I'm playing a game where I can friend players rather than toons whether or not I know them very well, with no safety concerns, no worries about whether they like being called the name they're using, or anything like that.
I am still fascinated by some of the game mechanics of WoW, but it's become increasingly clear that, while I like the RPG, I don't like the MMO -- the combination of bigots and people who have no goal beyond making fun of other people is simply not a desireable community, and the company running the service is clearly more interested in creating BlizzBook than it is in providing the best possible multiplayer RPG.
Post by
Slimda
Somebody mentioned it earlier, but I haven't seen any responses to it.
Steam
offers a chat system. Connect WoW to Steam, start WoW through the Steam Client, and you can chat with all your friends who don't want to use RealID, regardless of what alts they use. Got some guildies who use Steam to start WoW already, but not for the RealID-reason.
Post by
seebs
Somebody mentioned it earlier, but I haven't seen any responses to it.
Steam
offers a chat system. Connect WoW to Steam, start WoW through the Steam Client, and you can chat with all your friends who don't want to use RealID, regardless of what alts they use. Got some guildies who use Steam to start WoW already, but not for the RealID-reason.
I already have good external ways to chat with them -- in at least one case, we use voice over nitrogen. What I like about the friend-of-player thing (which I've gotten quite used to in CoH) is just having it be nicely integrated -- I don't have to ask which toon they're on, or whether they're playing, because it's fully integrated with the existing /who type stuff.
The problem isn't that I can't chat with my RL friends who play WoW, two of whom live in my house. The problem is that Blizzard has gratuitously tied a useful tool to an unwanted intrusion, and I want the useful tool without the intrusion. I guess it's rubbing me the wrong way the same way it would if there were an optional faster travel system that was ad-supported; you can take the gryphon and it'll take 5 minutes, or you can get there in 1 minute while watching ads for Nike? Yeah, no thanks. The real name thing seems to be more tied to what Facebook and advertisers want than to anything players want.
Post by
Discolando
.... YOU DON'T HAVE TO USE REAL-ID.
END OF STORY.
Only at Wowhead can you find people who whine and cry over a 100% completely optional feature.
Actually, anywhere you find WoW players, you can find people who have no reading comprehension skills. My complaint isn't that it's not optional. It's that it's structured so as to be useless to me, when I really want the underlying functionality. (Well, that, and that Blizzard repeatedly tells us lies about it.) So now I'm playing a game where I can friend players rather than toons whether or not I know them very well, with no safety concerns, no worries about whether they like being called the name they're using, or anything like that.
I am still fascinated by some of the game mechanics of WoW, but it's become increasingly clear that, while I like the RPG, I don't like the MMO -- the combination of bigots and people who have no goal beyond making fun of other people is simply not a desireable community, and the company running the service is clearly more interested in creating BlizzBook than it is in providing the best possible multiplayer RPG.
Fantastic troll, my friend. 9/10
I mean, nobody in their right mind would take four days to complain on a WoW forum and talk about quitting said game over the hypothetical usage of an optional feature. I mean that would be... stupid.
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