Character Name Conficts

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Crizaig wrote:

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salec wrote:

For users that really, really want to be known by a single name, two premium options could be available.

The first premium option would simply remove the unique identifier for their name. So for 50 coins, instead of being Salec.571 I could be Salec. But for say 1000 coins I could lock Salec completely to myself.

Obviously these options would only be available as long as no other players created characters of your name or bought the exclusivity. That sort of competition though, in my opinion, makes it even more compelling to buy into it if it's available.

Just playing devil's advocate :)

Having to pay for names is a shitty idea and could fall under the pay to win way of thinking.

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Phaeded wrote:

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You can prepend you're account name to your character name on your own if you want. I think forcing it to be that way is unnecessary.
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Mark_GGG wrote:

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salec wrote:

Champions Online:
Champions solved this problem by prepending your account name to your character name. When your character was referenced in-game by NPCS, only the character name was shown. But in chat or other community features both were shown in the form of SomeAccount.SomeUser.

[snipped]

Guild Wars 2:
GW2 went one step further to solve the privacy issue that was created from Champions Online. In GW2, a random number was used in place of the account name. This number was generated by the server and was not optional. The number itself is only there to ensure no duplicate names so it can be relatively small (2-3 digits). Again, the big difference between forcing a user to append the number themselves vs the server doing it is that the gameplay references by your character name without the number.

Could you explain to me how either of these provide any benefit for PoE? As far as I can tell, either of these options would do nothing but massively reduce how many names are available for players to no actual benefit in our game.
You can already prepend your account name to an otherwise taken character name and that name is probably available. You can do the same with numbers. But you also have the option not to, and forcing names to be prefaced with such seems to be be arbitrarily restrictive without benefit - the benefit you list in those games is that NPC dialogue omits the prepared part of the name (thus giving the illusion, within that text, that your name doesn't include that part), but while I'm perfectly happy to be proven wrong, I'm pretty confidant that this is of no relevance in PoE, as no NPC ever calls you by name - no-one cares who you were - you're just an exile now - in some ways this re-enforces the storyline themes of the game. And because of the limitations of voice-acted dialogue, I would personally be surprised to ever see that change. So I don't see what benefit you're hoping to get from restricting naming options in this way, when players already have the option of naming their characters in this fashion.
I'm not trying to dismiss this out of hand, I simply genuinely don't understand where you're coming from on this, because your suggestions clearly do reduce the number of names available for a player to chose, and I don't see where the benefit comes from being restricted to names only starting with your account name or with some numbers when you can do that already if you want to, and avoid it if you don't.