What I found interesting in your post were 2 mentions you made of “developers”, one of them being “The developers’ blatant ignorance” and the other “if the developers had implemented it differently”. In this case my mind takes me strictly to those that implement features, those that “code” (a.k.a. developers) and not the development company as a whole (the creative team, management team, technical team and whatever teams or people are necessary when developing a game/product). Do you truly believe that a developer has any creative power over the final product ? He is there to create the features that he is asked of by others on management levels, he is there to solve technical problems, create highly reliable and efficient code that meets the clients requests. The only creative power he has is over the technical issues that face him, in the way he chooses to solve them with the available resources (technology/time/money/knowledge). Never assume that in a company like Blizzard and many others, the developers have any creative decisions over the final product, over how it looks and what functionalities it will have. Most likely they aren’t even the best people to go to when you want to define a product and it’s features (they will have a say in what’s technologically possible or not, but that’s all), they just receive the product specifications and they implement based on client needs.

Imagine a man named “Blizzard” gets into a Taxi and says “Take to the airport fine man!” ( also imagine that he talks this way :) ) and the Taxi driver says “No! I will take you to the train station instead, because this is what I think is best!”. What do you think “Blizzard” will do ? he will find another taxi driver that can take him exactly where he wants.

It’s quite frequent the case, where the developers are blamed for unsatisfactory or missing features on a certain product. Blame the developers for the bugs you have in your application and all the “Error 37′s” you get when trying to connect to your Diablo 3 account and most of those are due the to the publisher aggressively pushing the release date no matter where the implementation process stands and whether the product has been thoroughly tested or not.

But it’s not. At least, not if you are on a quiet server or haven’t found a guild/your guild has suffered a D3-end-of-expansion-death or have been lured back by the scroll of rez and don’t want to prohibitively limit your options. For some of us, the only way to get into decent raids and RBGs is through use of sites like openraid, which uses realID to make groups across realms.

Blizzard knows that people are doing this and clearly WANTS us to do this and are pointing at the cross-realm connections as an answer for low pop servers. Instead of merging or sorting out individual server issues, Blizzard is now encouraging people to use realID to find solutions, making it something you feel compelled to use for expansive gameplay.

I kind of feel like it was implemented for a variety of reasons. One of which might have been organization. Now you no longer need to have one person’s 9 alts on your friends list; you just need their RealID. And, with the advent of all this cross-realm gibberish, it makes some sense.

Just kidding! I enjoyed reading it.