Character Name Conficts

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salec wrote:

Hello amazing developers,

A very common problem in multiplayer games is the reliance on having universally unique character names. With the high number of characters allowed per account and the fact that this is a F2P game, the number of created characters is going to be supremely high! I've already experienced many cases where the name I desired for my character is already taken. This is terribly annoying and really affects the user's first impression of your game.

So please, rather than insist on globally unique names and force people back into the days of AOL screenname hell, consider some of the possible solutions that have been done in the past by other games.

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.

For example, chat messages would show up as "SomeAccount.SomeUser: ZOMG This game owns!" but in-game references would be something along the lines of "Oh wise and powerful SomeUser, please get us off this effing island".

The downside here of course is that the rest of the community knows your account name and will be able to tell if another character is yours or not based on this. Sometimes this is desired, other times not so much.

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.

Anyways, back to the grind!

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Fruz wrote:

EDIT : nvm char name not account, forgot about this thread.

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gunnaro wrote:

1. I tried most of my old World of Warcraft character names. All taken.
2. I tried some names I could think of that were cool. All taken.
3. I looked up cool old names for real Templars. All I tried was taken.
4. I found a random name generator (http://www.wizards.com/dnd/tool.aspx?x=dnd/4new/tool/cng). After trying out about 8-10 random names I liked, I finally gave up.

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Fuz wrote:

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Fruz wrote:

EDIT : nvm char name not account, forgot about this thread.

You have a great name :D

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Fruz wrote:

@tmaciak : well this is honestly not much of a big deal, and can prefix/suffix names fairly easily.
It would be cool to have the possibility to have more freedom about naming eventually ( even though I like the fact that one's char is unique, just from its name ), but I don't want devs to work on that instead of more important things that the game needs atm.

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raics wrote:

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Fruz wrote:

@tmaciak : well this is honestly not much of a big deal, and can prefix/suffix names fairly easily.
It would be cool to have the possibility to have more freedom about naming eventually ( even though I like the fact that one's char is unique, just from its name ), but I don't want devs to work on that instead of more important things that the game needs atm.

It is a big deal. A lot of players give much thought to naming their characters and even if you do find a nice free name, walking through a town filled with 'acrobat0112982' and 'XYYslayer' scatters any specks immersion you've manage to scrape. Should we assume those are their phone numbers or license plates? :)

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Fruz wrote:

The name of the toon isn't even displayed on top of it =/, it's not like PoE makes you look at it at every single moment.

EDIT : don't remember if there is even an option for that tbh.