Blizzard's Battle.net director on Real ID, cross-game integration and BlizzCon
During GDC Online, Blizzard's Battle.net project director Greg Canessa presented a "postmortem" for the latest version of the service, which enables online play and discussion for Blizzard's titles, most recently StarCraft 2. Speaking to Joystiq before the talk, Canessa was happy to discuss the recent past of the service with us, and talk a bit about the future.
Battle.net is in use by all 12 million World of Warcraft players, three-plus million StarCraft 2 players, and other users, but it recently came to the attention of an even larger audience when controversy arose over Blizzard's decision to implement Real ID, requiring users to identify themselves by their real names on Battle.net. Forum users did not respond kindly to the sudden and mandatory attachment of their real names to their comments, flames and LOLcats, and that part of the plan was cut, with Real ID still being implemented in non-forum features.
"The vision behind Real ID," Canessa said, "was to maintain parallel levels of identity: we have that sort of anonymous character level of identity, and then that Real ID tier that spans games, and there are incremental features that you get for being part of the Real ID community. The vision for that spanned games, got into cross-game chat and so forth. In reality, the in-game social suite was very popular, the cross-game chat that we did, the stuff within StarCraft 2.
Battle.net is in use by all 12 million World of Warcraft players, three-plus million StarCraft 2 players, and other users, but it recently came to the attention of an even larger audience when controversy arose over Blizzard's decision to implement Real ID, requiring users to identify themselves by their real names on Battle.net. Forum users did not respond kindly to the sudden and mandatory attachment of their real names to their comments, flames and LOLcats, and that part of the plan was cut, with Real ID still being implemented in non-forum features.
"The vision behind Real ID," Canessa said, "was to maintain parallel levels of identity: we have that sort of anonymous character level of identity, and then that Real ID tier that spans games, and there are incremental features that you get for being part of the Real ID community. The vision for that spanned games, got into cross-game chat and so forth. In reality, the in-game social suite was very popular, the cross-game chat that we did, the stuff within StarCraft 2.
