Tale Seventy Seven: WoWBook

"Blizzard's partnership with Facebook, announced today, means that players of StarCraft II and World of Warcraft can create a social network with their friends who also play those games on Battle.net and frequent Facebook.

"Step one in our relationship is to have this Friends Importation," says Battle.net project director Greg Canessa. "Really what you are going to do once you buy StarCraft II and you take it home and install it and log onto Battle.net for the first time, you'll be able to essentially hit a button and bring all your Facebook friends that are also on Battle.net into Battle.net and create (Real ID) relationships."

For the full article, read here.

I only have four friends of my 192 friends on Facebook who play WoW. A good 90% of them don't even know what WoW is. And when they hear what it is? They look at me like I have a third head or something.

I don't care about what people think: in fact, I'm quite a proud nerd who loves arguing about superheroes, have most of the game consoles in my living room and play quite a bit. I've shamelessly written Dragon Age fanfiction.

But a game, which could potentially put my family and career in danger?

The risk is too much.

Blizzard goes on to say: "Culturally, I think we have become more and more accepting of social networking in the context of your real identity and Facebook, of course as the leader in the space, has led this charge. We're now at something five years ago I don't think any of us would maybe necessarily be comfortable with. We all now have our own Facebook pages and we have got a lot of our information on there. We've got our real names and pictures of ourselves on there and so forth."

And while I agree that we are moving to a more social society, I do not agree with mixing in Facebook and WoW. I have a Facebook page to stay in touch with my friends. I have a WoW to get away from them and stress.

The part of the article that made me laugh bitterly?

Do you expect any push back from diehard Blizzard fans from the Facebook features?

And their answer?

We don't anticipate any.

......... How very wrong you were, Blizzard. How very very wrong.

*However*, I heard from a friend that he read on EJ (as soon as I can find the thread, I'll link this here) that this change comes not from Blizzard but from Activision, who owns Blizzard.

Who interestingly enough? Just signed a biiiig fat deal with.... Facebook.

*punts the "geniuses" behind all this*

Photo Courtesy of: www.penny-arcade.com