I know what you mean :). While I love the social interaction, sometimes I just want to play without the usual crowd.

What about if each character has to opt in to the account option? Then at least it is only one-click away.
Or what about doing it like many chat programs, you can set it to show you offline?

A global friends list that links to account rather than character scares the crud out of me.

I played a ton of Guild Wars and having all your characters be the same Person had the super downside of only being able to be in one guild was Muy Painful. It was impossible to have one alt in a RL friend guild and then another in a hardcore pvp guild and etc etc. It caused a decent amount of strife that I saw. Sometimes you wanna be in a couple guilds and be able to have multiple social circles that might not all intersect nicely.

In that kind of situation I don’t want all my alts linked to my main. Also sometimes I just wanna make a silly new alt to test a class I know I will be horrible at playing and I don’t want people seeing my secret sucking shame. <..> maybe I am too paranoid.

Lookey that, BBB. You have addon legends posting in your blog. Wooo!

I beg to differ. The mass majority of “advancements” made in the default UI have been because of addons. Blizzard makes the UI the way they feel they need to. Players find it is inadequate for their needs, and plug the holes with addons. Eventually Blizzard sees that there’s high demand for certain types of addons and plugs the holes themselves (sometimes still not to the players’ satisfaction).

Nearly the entire raid UI came about by absorbing the features of high-demand addons. The new combat log, LFG system, multi-item mail, tweaks to the AH, the loot roll frames, opt-out loot, click-casting (although there’s no official interface, the entire system that Clique and addons like it use is Blizzy’s code)… really it’s hard to take the release day UI compared to the current one and be able to find new features that were not taken from addons or 3rd party apps.

So, on that note… I’ll just say, go get an addon to do this for you! I know a certain bearish addon dev that wrote one of his own…
http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info6931-2.0.3.348.html

I agree completely with your point about friends. I wish they would also go one step further like City of Heroes.

Why isn’t there an Account Friends option?
It should require an accept by the other account (like becoming a guild member)
But then, no matter how many alts my RL friends make, I can still see them online.
Better yet, make it look across realms, so I can see when my RL friends are playing on another server, where we all have alts.
Even better, allow me to whisper my friends on another realm.

Sure there are some possible issues with this :), but this is an MMO with lots of encouragement for interacting with RL friends.

Sterling

I am stunned by the idea of an enchant scroll created by the enchanter. It’s a brilliant idea, and I wish (though doubt) Blizzard would execute it.

If they added a search feature to the Armory that allowed me an opportunity to find all of the crafters of say, a Belt of Blasting, on my server, I would be very happy. Sadly, this feature STILL evades Blizzard’s radar…

Why the crap do I have to remember to add my alts to the friends list? I mean, if it’s on friends it makes mailing easy (especially when other players have names close to mine for whatever reason.)