Posts with tag opt-out

Drama Mamas Lisa Poisso and Robin Torres are experienced gamers and real-life mamas -- and just as we don't want our precious babies to be the ones kicking and wailing on the floor of checkout lane next to the candy, neither do we want you to become known as That Guy on your realm.

When is your privacy not your privacy? When it's connected to everyone else's privacy. This week, the Drama Mamas help a reader whose desire to reserve sharing her email address and online status for her real-life friends is heating up her WoW friends list -- and they're boiling over at not being included.

Hi Drama Mamas, I've decided to only add people as Real ID friends who are RL friends that play on another server. I'm one of those people who sometimes like to hop on a character unknown to the folks I usually play with and spend some hours ingame on my own or with my boyfriend. However, I do have a lot of ingame friends I'm pretty close with and talk about a lot of things apart from the game.

After installing the patch and logging on my main, it took only half an hour before I got the first whisper, containing an email adress and asking me to add them via Real ID. I told the person no, I'm only going to add very few RL friends to that list. I recieved a very sulky reply. Today the scenario repeated itself, meaning two days of playing very little have passed and two people are already angry at me for not adding them. Is there anything I can do to prevent other ingame friends to react the same? Why can't some people accept that sometimes I do want to play, but don't want to chat? Taz'Dingo, Anonyma

This is not a discussion of the good (yay, crossrealm chat!) and the bad (boo, privacy fail) of Real ID. This is a guide for how to truly opt out of this feature and how to adjust the settings if you do participate in game.

To be clear, everyone who does not have a parentally controlled account has in fact opted into Real ID, due to a security flaw. Addons have access to the name on your account right now. So you need to be very careful about what addons you download -- make sure they are reputable. In order to actually opt out, you need to set up parental controls on your account. This is not an easy task. Previous to the Battle.net merge, you could just go to a page and set them up. Done. Now, you must set up an account as one that is under parental control. Once your account is that of a child's (a several-step process), your settings default to Real ID-disabled. Any Real ID friends you have will no longer be friends. In order to enable it, you need to check the Enable Real ID box.

Setting up parental controls:

1. Go to the appropriate battle.net site for your region. (That link should take you there.)
2. Push the Create or Manage a Battle.net Account button.
3. Log in as normal.
4. Click on Parental Controls, which is an option listed under Manage My Games. (And, if you're like me, you'll be sad that you are still not in the beta.)
5. Choose the No - Setup Parental Controls button.
6. Fill in your info as both the child's account and your own. (Why they make this distinction, I don't know. Parental controls always used to be an option for adults to manage their own game time.)
7. You will receive an email. You need to save this email, because the link in there is the only way to get to the parental controls. Otherwise, you have to make Blizzard resend it. Click the link to get into the controls.
8. Save Settings and then be told it will take up to 30 minutes to go into effect.

That is how to opt out. How to optimize opting in is after the break.