Battlenet's realID

[Testercules]

Do you like that and think Rift should have the ability to communicate with friends across shards?

Pic related

[Slipmat]

To play Devils Advocate....

If they were your friends, surely with free Shard transfers everyone can pick the one shard to all be friends forever on?

[the_real_seebs]

Long story short:

Cross-shard/faction friends: Yes, absolutely. Best feature of CoH. If I could add any one feature from any MMO ever to Rift, that would be the one.

Real names, under any circumstances, EVER, outside of billing: No.

The latter is why I had Blizzard's privacy@ people permanently delete all personally-identifying information about me. It is a dismally stupid idea. Even if we ignore the fact that they are absolutely lying about claiming it's for "real life" friends only -- even though they have marketing material talking about using it to make new friends -- it's still bad.

One of my best friends, with whom I play MMOs, is a guy whose driver's license still says "Jessica". I have no interest, at all, ever, in a feature which mandates "legal" names as social handles. I certainly don't go by my legal name, and a lot of my friends don't either. (Trivia point: Actually, my government ID doesn't say "seebs" on it. However, that's all anyone calls me. Coworkers, lawyer, spouse, you name it; everyone calls me "seebs".)

[Testercules]

I agree. The real name and email is a stupid idea. I think that would cause even more problems with people getting hacked. I didn't add a lot of people because of that when I played WoW (I added 2 people). I used to use a fake last name in WoW, but then one day when I had to resolve a problem and contact their phone support, I had to switch it back to my real name.

There's people you meet on forum, on PTS, etc., that don't necessarily play on the same shard. Then there's people that their guild transfers, but yours doesn't.

I honestly don't care if they put it in, but I'm sure others would love it.

[the_real_seebs]

To play Devils Advocate....

If they were your friends, surely with free Shard transfers everyone can pick the one shard to all be friends forever on?

Doesn't work, for much the same reason that "mandatory display of real names to all friends-of-friends" was a really bad idea: Friendship is not transitive. If I am friends with Adam and Adam is friends with Bob, that doesn't guarantee that I am friends with Bob.

Basically, if anyone has more than a couple of friends, either everyone playing the game is on the same server, or some pairs of friends are split across servers.

[Laughter]

I would love to be able to use a "Real ID" feature in Rift. Would make playing with friends a lot easier.

[Annalea]

The way Cryptic handles the global IDs, in my opinion, is the perfect way of doing anything like this. You have one account for all their games (City of Heroes, Champions, Star Trek Online) and anyone from any of these games can talk to you across the 'borders' of these games (and instances) via this account (i.e. /w @Annalea). You could even join chat channels with people from other games. While recently playing Champions Online, I was talking to old friends in the STO-RP channel!

There are some problems to be had, of course. One, I'm paranoid and don't like people knowing my account name! To me, that's 50% of the information required to access my account given away for free. Secondly, to implement this in a game like Rift is a massive undertaking. As one of the devs said, (BrianMorin, I believe?) any time you introduce something to identify people with other than character name... there's an explosion of scope that needs to be dealt with.

As awesome as this sort've thing is, I ultimately just don't see much use for it anymore. When we had multiple RP servers, that's certainly a good use for the functionality - many roleplayers don't want to leave their established communities and roleplay base. As far as PvP/PvE servers go, with free transfers, I think that further eliminates alot (not all) of the barriers of playing/chatting with friends.

However, with Defiance coming along... maybe it's worth reconsidering the idea.

On a more humorous note regarding real life names, I find that I actually respond IRL to 'Anna' now. Which isn't my real name and confuses me greatly!

[the_real_seebs]

... City of Heroes is not included in that list, so far as I know; they have a global system, but it doesn't extend to other games. (And they haven't been Cryptic for a long time.)

And global handles should NOT be email, "real" name, or account name, but a separate handle.

As to whether it's useful:

Make a bunch of friends in CoH across several servers. Make a new alt. Check your friends list.
Now do the same thing in Rift.

It's pretty much the Best Feature Ever for an MMO, since MMOs are fundamentally social experiences.

[merrier]

I'm not sure I want all of my characters to automatically be friends with everyone each of them is friends with. Sometimes you just want to be 'alone'.

What I would like is what EQ2 has, with some extras. There you can send tells to friends cross shard and see if they're online. Add to that an ability to do instances across the shards with friends, and I'd be all set.

[the_real_seebs]

I'm not sure I want all of my characters to automatically be friends with everyone each of them is friends with. Sometimes you just want to be 'alone'.

CoH has a "hidden" feature which solves this pretty well.

[Annalea]

... City of Heroes is not included in that list, so far as I know; they have a global system, but it doesn't extend to other games. (And they haven't been Cryptic for a long time.)

You are correct! Shows how long CoH has been outside of my sphere of information for!

As to whether it's useful:

Make a bunch of friends in CoH across several servers. Make a new alt. Check your friends list.
Now do the same thing in Rift.

It's pretty much the Best Feature Ever for an MMO, since MMOs are fundamentally social experiences.

It's useful, beyond a doubt. But at this point, I would much rather see effort go towards more RP-oriented stuff and ideas like what Laeris has presented with the Community Dev position.

[the_real_seebs]

I don't think they're mutually exclusive, but...

Really, I think this is more important than any other feature for providing a healthy social environment, and the biggest problem this game has right now is people logging in and seeing that their friends list is "empty". If they were logging in and seeing that all their friends had rolled new alts, they'd be having a much better experience.

I play characters on both factions. Being only able to talk to half the people I know at any time sucks, as does only finding out that people are running a DRR on one faction at a time. Rift Mobile helps, except it doesn't let me join player-created channels, which is where I mostly hear about stuff.

[Annalea]

I don't think they're mutually exclusive, but...

Really, I think this is more important than any other feature for providing a healthy social environment, and the biggest problem this game has right now is people logging in and seeing that their friends list is "empty". If they were logging in and seeing that all their friends had rolled new alts, they'd be having a much better experience.

I play characters on both factions. Being only able to talk to half the people I know at any time sucks, as does only finding out that people are running a DRR on one faction at a time. Rift Mobile helps, except it doesn't let me join player-created channels, which is where I mostly hear about stuff.

They're not mutually exclusive by any means and I really love the idea. But I do think it's a massive undertaking and, from my perspective, there are other things I would prefer the manpower to be devoted to first.

I'm mostly speaking from the situation of being on one of two roleplay servers (the second being the EU one, Argent). Generally, with one exception, anyone I'd like to talk to are going to be on a roleplay server and I wouldn't be willing to transfer off of my roleplay server in order to play with others, including the Argent server (roleplay transfers are a very big problem with continuity of character). Essentially, everyone I'd like to talk to on a regular basis is only on the one server.

My character, Annalea, is my main and is quite accessible either in game, on the forums or even in-game mail. My guild has also been around quite some time - anyone logging in and seeing an empty friend's list could easily do a guild search and see that we're still around! It's not a perfect solution to the scenario you describe, but I have found that returning players have not had much trouble reconnecting to people - though, you're right that it could be better.

The 'one exception' I mentioned above would be a very important issue you touched on - the ability to communicate cross-faction. I would personally love to see something like that arise, as I'm a big proponent of roleplaying across factions and that would greatly improve the process! However, I would venture a guess that implementing cross-faction communication would be an easier process to achieve than a Global Handle... the identifying key still being your character.

Now, here's where I think the usefulness wanes. In games like Champions and Star Trek, there's only one server and it's quite instance-based. If there are too many people accumulating in Drozana Station, the game will create a Drozana #2, if that one gets too populated, Drozana #3 and so on. I would argue that the Global Handle idea is much more relevant in this situation. Not only would a returning player not only miss out on seeing alts, they might not even bump into them for quite some time! By contrast, in Rift, it's one world. If you go to Sanctum, you are sharing that Sanctum with all your server. In the Cryptic games, it's an essential part of coordinating your experience.

In Rift, I think it'd just be a nice thing to have, but not the most defining feature.

[the_real_seebs]

I have alts across three servers right now. And the thing is, my friends make new alts. And without a global handle feature, I have no idea. I don't think any of my friends know all 10+ of my active alts.

I log into CoH, and I immediately know which of my friends are online, even if I haven't seen them for a year. I hang out with people who have loose affiliations of guilds and friends across multiple servers, and we hang out in global chats and organize events where everyone hops to a single server to group.

It really is that big a deal for many players. Even if you only play on Faeblight, you might have friends who also play on another server sometimes to hang out with their friends. You might have a friend who decides to roll a cleric alt and can't remember the 20+ people from the previous friends list, and so on.

[Zerromi]

The revamped version of RealID - with Battletags, the ability to disable your appearance in Friend of Friend lists, etc. - yes.

It's one of the few things I think Rift is lacking, and I hope it comes out. I would really like cross-realm friend-based LFD, plus it could easily tie into End of Nations.