I'm very sceptical about this. Not because I personally don't have the talent to gain a real OTB FIDE title and now I've been able to get an online one from FIDE for very little effort and €15 but because the idea that you can merge an OTB rating with an online rating on FIDE Online Arena seems fanciful at best and downright impossible at worst.
This is what FIDE said they want to do with people like me who have an an Online Arena grade.
source: fide.comRating Alignment
Rated games are played with a variety of predefined rapid, blitz and bullet time controls. Rapid and blitz ratings are aligned with over the board FIDE rapid and blitz ratings. The 1st day of each month, as soon the FIDE rating lists are published, rating changes from over the board rapid and blitz games are added to (subtracted from) the relevant Arena ratings.
In this way, the Arena ratings reflect the overall players’ activity, over the board and online. However, the traditional FRLs (FIDE rating lists for over the board rapid and blitz) are totally independent from online gaming results and will continue to be used for the pairings and ratings of over the board tournaments.
This makes no sense from a chess statistical perspective. If you have a Arena rating of 1805 in blitz, then participate in some OTB blitz and play in the open and get 2/7 with an average rated opposition of 2000 elo. Why should your rating change from 150 ecf blitz rating (+1.62, K=15) be used to adjust your arena rating for your online games but in turn any rating changes gained online are NOT reflected back in the FIDE rating lists for OTB chess.
So you have this curious situation that you can get to 2100 on FIDE Online Arena but still have a 150 ecf/1825 elo rating which is used to adjust your Arena rating if there are any OTB blitz games played. Why is that called rating alignment? It seems to preserve and encourage rating mis-alignment.
What do you think about this?