I have a huge amount of respect for This Lady. Not only has she put heart and soul into a blog I enjoy reading, she’s become a good friend. We ran a ten man ICC together, we’ve spammed healer chat together, we’ve bitched about things, swapped recipes and animal stories. We’ve planned rp, co-written rp, and laughed about rp together.

And she’s leaving at least temporarily. And I can’t blame her.

Bricu’s linked SaveBlizz for folks to go see. It’s a great idea. If you’re against this invasion of your privacy, you ought to really consider things like canceling that Cata pre-order or that SC2 pre-order. And hey, if you don’t want to? That’s okay, too. I get that we all game for different reasons. Unfortunately I don’t think what we WANT re: Real ID matters so much as what we do with our money. The biggest weapon you have right now is that fifteen bucks in your pocket. If enough of us take it away, they have to pay attention. I’m not sure they want to take the gamble that the Facebook Farmsville players will pick up our slack when their integration goes live.

Oh, and just so we’re clear on where I’m at? I’ve already canceled my second account, and I’m mulling over my first. We’ll see. I’m watching and waiting.

One thing I’ve toyed around with, for the sake of our little community of people, is how to stay in touch and to keep the RP alive outside of WoW. If we have enough people fall by the wayside because of this situation, I may start up a Tuesday night IRC RP room for us until another MMO catches our fancy. Our network of friends is close enough I think this might actually work. I know I’m not done with Yva, not even close, and WoW doesn’t own her. I do. Her character concept is /mine/, and I know I’m not the only one who’d be more than happy/willing to carry that character concept over into another venue for the sake of keeping my community in tact.

It’s going to be a tough few months, folks, so I’d recommend buckling down and gritting your teeth. We’re going to see people drop off that we care about. We’re going to have to cope with changes we don’t like. My only recommendation is to keep doing what we’re doing, making noise and rabble rousing, and look towards alternate solutions like IRC chatrooms for RP. Just becomes one venue closes doesn’t mean the stories have to end.

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