Real ID

The real dope on Read ID.

A smart player will try everything within his/her power to secure their account.  They will not buy gold, they will not visit gold or account selling sites and they will usually have an email address set up just for wow that is not used for anything but that.

There are many things you can do to protect yourself from being hacked but none are more important securing your email account.  If a hacker has your email account they essentially have you, they essentially are you.  I have never once in my life received an e-mail from anyone selling gold or accounts or pretending to be from blizzard.  That alone makes me 1000% more secure then most of the WoW population.  No one knows how to find me to try and hack me.

Your email address, when it comes to something like this, should be held as closely as your social security number.  You would not post your social security number online because you know that it would followed shortly by identity theft and years of battle trying to restore your credit.  Online, your email address for WoW is almost as valuable  Giving your email out is like giving your social security number out.  Once it is out there then there is a chance that someone can and will get into your account.

The best way to secure that account is to not allow anyone to have that email address.  To use it for wow and wow only.  Sure, you can get hacked even if you do not give it out but the chances are so much lower.  Like sure you can get hit crossing the street but if you look both ways first you drastically lower your chances.  Same thing, keeping that email yours and yours alone drastically lowers the chances.

Now that I went over the importance of keeping your email safe you should get where this is going.  RealID wants you to use your email address, that one you use only for wow to protect yourself.

Lets step back one moment and see what you do to protect yourself, besides keeping your email address unknown.  You do not go to untrustworthy sites.  You do not go to gold selling sites.  You do not go to power leveling sites.  You make sure to keep your computer safe.  All of which is completely under your control.

Now back to RealID.  You give your email address to your friend so you can talk.  Now you have to ask yourself, does he go to power leveling sites, gold selling sites and other sites that you would avoid like the plague.  Can you be 100% sure that the person that you gave your RealID to will never get hacked?  No.  You can not be. Even if you would trust them with your life you can never be sure what they do on their computer.  You can never know how secure they are.

If you do everything in your power to protect your account (email as it may be) then do not, let me repeat, DO NOT use RealID.  Using RealID is like giving the email address you tried to protect to everyone in the world that might want to hack an email account because you can never know if the person you gave it to has a secure computer.

So, in summation, while the concept of RealID would be a huge asset to the game it is not a smart one yet.  Wait until they make a special identity thing where you can create a username for your RealID before you use it.  As long as I need to use my battle.net login email I will never be using RealID but as soon as I can make a user account named TheGrumpyElf or something else, then I will gladly use it and be happy to have it.

Don't be a Dick.
Don't share your e-mail.
Don't use RealID.