Suggestions for new character naming

The last name is not so bad an idea - but of course has the same centre problem that similarities will occur and restrict some people in their naming. I have seen this in "Sword of the New World", in where you actually created a famlily of characters so that every name is composed of a fore- and a surname.

I would not have a random name, though. It would lead people to creating accounts until they have a desired or at least acceptable name, which is not what it should be like.

The problem with allowing space to be part of characters name is very likely a programming or database issue, wherein space spereates not only words, but strings of information and it would need a more elaborate read-out to spereate an name-internal space from an informational one. (I only can but presume this, because I have seen this very often in games, especially in MMOs.)

Yes, I see now the problem you are presenting for the future. As of now it is still doable, but at some point it will be merely impossible to find a name untaken. And PoE is headed in that direction gaining recognition and attention by the minute.

But to that avail I couldn't make a statement now, because for that we have to know the position of the developers on that, what they have planned in this matter and how far they have given thought to this.

- Cazy

Yeah, I realise that the last name bit is not ideal at all. It was just a random thought. I'll toss all my ideas no matter how bad they are. In the event one of them actually ends up inspiring someone with something that would actually be good.

Well if a friend has a name lets say (poopoohead) and there are others with the same name, how is friends invites going to work?

through account name instead? You shouldn't be running more then one character per account at a time after all, right?

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Cazychel wrote:

The problem with allowing space to be part of characters name is very likely a programming or database issue, wherein space spereates not only words, but strings of information and it would need a more elaborate read-out to spereate an name-internal space from an informational one. (I only can but presume this, because I have seen this very often in games, especially in MMOs.)- Cazy

Parsing spaces in names is hardly a complex problem though; companies all over the world do it all the time. I'd really hope that's not it. The only other thing it could be is that reading a particular number of spaces is hard and thus could prevent easy reporting of problem players (like those II1Illll|1|l1IlI| names people use)...but reworking the name input box to only allow one space at a time would be a good solution to that.

I think people get too aggressive on the "it's not hard to make an original name, look!" defense. Yeah, of course it's not hard; it was fairly unlikely IdRatherHaveAMoose would be taken. But whether it's hard is really beside the point (well, a point, at least) - some people simply disagree that it should be a "challenge" at all, hard or easy.

my very first character I wanted two names with... and ended up using an _ to seperate the two names...
i didn't like that as much

One character per account? Thats crazy talk. Id rather keep my 24 slots and just use my imagination to name them, thank you very much.:)

He meant simultaneously as you shouldn't be able to log into your account twice with different characters. Thus invite per account name would be viable, but still complicate things as you couldn't invite people by character name - which would be rather stupid.

I was running a free game server for a few years (Lineage2), it was a small server I would estimate that no more than 5000 user played on it during the time. There was also a unique name policy (but there were numbers and some special characters allowed). By the time the server has ended there was more than 85 000 unique names and even with the numbers and special characters allowed it was quite hard to come up with some nice looking and meaningful unique name. That was just a few thousand players. Now imagine what could 70 000 players PoE has now do. Or imagine it with 500 000 players in the future. There will really be no other way then just smash your head against keyboard and happily play with your “fgjhnwdcfweriuoghed” the mighty Marauder.

I consider myself lucky because I was able to (shortly) participate in closed beta so I was able to use couple of nice names I wanted. But even in closed beta I had to use “_” in some of my names because they were already taken. I cannot imagine what would new players do in two years from now.

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Cazychel wrote:

He meant simultaneously as you shouldn't be able to log into your account twice with different characters. Thus invite per account name would be viable, but still complicate things as you couldn't invite people by character name - which would be rather stupid.

Why would that be stupid? Someone has to tell you the name of their character so you can invite them anyway, so they'd just tell you their account name instead. It only changes things if you're inviting random strangers or something, surely.