Character Names: Realism or NøT

For everyone born after 1990 creating screen names most likely has numbers trailing after the actual name they wanted. Some of you might remember the xxUserNamexx trend

. There have been MMOs, and other game genres, which try to add more realism by forcing players to not have numbers in their name. Picking a first and last name, or a unique name that can't have numbers or symbols.

Our avatars are our MMO personas and when we can't lock in our name first, the majority of us, tack on numbers or symbols to still maintain that persona.

Question to the community:
Is realism so important you'd want AoC to force non number/ human readable names?

Invalid name examples: xxFartManxx, DerpMasterFlex123, ©arl

My take on a solution
Some gaming clients have started to allow aliases for users. In real life you have a baby and name him John the attending nurse doesn't go "Nope try again John already exists...Do you even love this baby?" As amazing as that would be to have happen it does not. There are loads of Johns wondering around. So when creating your AoC character you can choose to have it be a non unique plain text name but the system will generate a trailing number tacked onto the end.

Issues and solutions

Issue
In global chat how do we DM/Whisper the right Waffles if there are two (Waffles#123 and Waffles#987)? Both show they are talking in chat so it looks like they are the same person.

Solution
In chat yes we can't truncate the numbers. They'd be left on but simply reduce the contrast a little bit so they were just slightly harder to see.

Issue
I have two "Quail Man"s in my friends list. Who the flip do I tell them a part?

Solution
Steam allows for you to have a custom alias for your friends. that only you can see. So in your list it would read:

Quail Man (Not Doug)
Quail Man (Doug)

In the world you'd just see their name. Yes you could bump into two people with the same name but TBH this happens to me almost regularly. IRL I have the same name as a bunch of dudes (thanks mom...).

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Comments

Grievousness

Holy crap, I just looked that up.
They named it X Æ A-12 Musk at first.
I am so glad they decided to go for X Æ A-XII instead.
The mother truly is right when she says roman numerals look better.
If that's the reality of modern day names might not enforce "real names".

On a more serious note, actual real names are so boring that nobody would pick something normal.
I mean you don't go into a fantasy world to name yourself "Bob" or "John", that kind of defeats the purpose.

Also there is something really good about a free name choice in online games.
You instantly have a glimpse into someones mind, I mean what kind of persons would name themselves
"xXxNOOBxXxSLAYERxXx" for example?
Just give it a thought.

Also in case you care:
SeñorWaffles sounds good to me, it has a more exotic appeal than MrWaffles.

mrwaffles

@Grievousness

God I'm glad I'm not the only one who didn't know this and look it up lol.

And thanks for the SeñorWaffles comment

. When I get to choose my name during name reservation it's a consideration.

Dummo

Grievousness wrote: »

Also there is something really good about a free name choice in online games.
You instantly have a glimpse into someones mind, I mean what kind of persons would name themselves
"xXxNOOBxXxSLAYERxXx" for example?
Just give it a thought.

Definitely, I judge from the name.

Ravudha

Prefer everyone to have unique names, and the game to not allow numbers after names.

When I play a game and see players with numbers in their names (Sepheeroth3142), I just can't take them seriously. To be fair, that's only when the player has obviously plucked their names from somewhere else or used something really generic instead of coming up with something original.

Atama

SeñorWaffles would come with a side of huevos rancheros.

Vhaeyne

I just want a simple common sense "(first name) (Lastname)". A-Z only. Have the game handle case not the player. No Alt-codes. Each section can't be more than 12 chars.

If we had both first and last names, We could have a lot of clouds and sephiroths with the right spelling.
I am still going to hate them, but at least ill hate them for being a weeb, and not a weeb who tried every way to spell the name until they got one.

I feel like that would solve a huge chunk of the problems. You would just have to get used to "/tell first last message".

Sendbackup

so me having the name "Heals_for_Gold" is problematic?!!?

NelsonRebel

I like that people can put in creative names, I get a good laugh from alot of them in ESO

If you want you should be able to
toggle names and their actually game account names via an ingame selection.

mrwaffles

nelsonrebel wrote: »

I like that people can put in creative names, I get a good laugh from alot of them in ESO

If you want you should be able to
toggle names and their actually game account names via an ingame selection.

See I thought about that too. Mostly so switching between alts was a bit more easier to communicate with people. I talked about this idea with a friend and she mentioned that people might want to keep alts private even from others they are close with. She games with co-workers and likes to jump on the alt to be alone (also to not get caught playing on the clock lol ).

As for having a good laugh at peoples name, my favorite all time was running into "BroboTeaBaggins"

Cold 0ne FTB

Aeri wrote: »

Due to the way AoC is supposed to work, name changes (outside of a GM-enforced change for something that breaks rules) shouldn't be allowed at all, IMO.

Players/characters are supposed to have a reputation in this game. Being able to change your name whenever you want defeats that.

I also hope that there is at least some enforcement on naming rules, so that you don't have any xXThisIsMyNameXx characters running around.

Reputation could be tied to the username of the player themselves. Personally if somebody had a bad reputation, I would extend that reputation to every character on that account.

I think that each account should have two sets of name. An individual character name, this would act as away to distinguish inbetween different toons and an account wide username. Maybe add ingame settings that allow you to view people by either name or both at the same time.

KnightPixie

I would prefer no numbers. But possibly having special characters like ñ, ü, á... would be nice to have. I also wouldn't care if "-" were available for surnames as well.

From what I've recently seen in the interviews you can have same first name but the first + surname will probably be locked. It was also mentioned the players may have control over what is displayed on screen (first name only vs full name toggle). Because of this, I am assuming that it will function like other MMO chats where the full name is displayed and not "Jane#7328".

Marcet

Vhaeyne wrote: »

I just want a simple common sense "(first name) (Lastname)". A-Z only. Have the game handle case not the player. No Alt-codes. Each section can't be more than 12 chars.

If we had both first and last names, We could have a lot of clouds and sephiroths with the right spelling.
I am still going to hate them, but at least ill hate them for being a weeb, and not a weeb who tried every way to spell the name until they got one.

I feel like that would solve a huge chunk of the problems. You would just have to get used to "/tell first last message".

Yeah and your name can be Boring Boomer.

Damokles

It would be more then enough to implement a simple "First Name Surname" system.
That way you will always be able to pick your favourite name.

PlagueMonk

Grievousness wrote: »

Holy crap, I just looked that up.
They named it X Æ A-12 Musk at first.
I am so glad they decided to go for X Æ A-XII instead.
The mother truly is right when she says roman numerals look better.
If that's the reality of modern day names might not enforce "real names".

On a more serious note, actual real names are so boring that nobody would pick something normal.
I mean you don't go into a fantasy world to name yourself "Bob" or "John", that kind of defeats the purpose.

Also there is something really good about a free name choice in online games.
You instantly have a glimpse into someones mind, I mean what kind of persons would name themselves
"xXxNOOBxXxSLAYERxXx" for example?
Just give it a thought.

Also in case you care:
SeñorWaffles sounds good to me, it has a more exotic appeal than MrWaffles.

You know, if someone chose to name themselves "John", I would be like, "REALLY, you couldn't put forth a little effort?"

@mrwaffles how about Waffles San?

BaSkA_9x2

I hope you don't have to choose a first name and a last name. Regarding which characters are allowed, I hope they don't outright ban every symbol in ASCII other than alphabet letters, many are fun to use.

mrwaffles

BaSkA13 wrote: »

I hope you don't have to choose a first name and a last name. Regarding which characters are allowed, I hope they don't outright ban every symbol in ASCII other than alphabet letters, many are fun to use.

Yeah thats what @KnightPixie was saying. There are a bunch of other characters you could use. The on down side thought is in the western world people wouldn't easily be able to type it in. they'd have to click you in person or in chat. Unless you got them Alt codes memorized

Beekeeper

ASCII codes make setting up a friendlist or banlist a complete chore.

Solmyr

Forcing unique names is how you get stuff like 'JohnWasTaken,' 'XxllJohnllxX,' 'TheRealJohn,' etc. Compared to modern tag systems, it's just objectively worse. You end up with 10x more wacky usernames because everyone is twisting themselves into knots trying to find a normal-sounding name that hasn't been taken.

For a game that's bending over backward for the sake of immersion in so many other areas, I'm honestly kind of baffled that they're going to be forcing unique names. Besides milking money from name reservations, I can't think of a single reason to go with that approach.

mobtek

I have Surnames planned for my mains and alts, I wouldn't mind having hyphens for some and option of the joiners "of the" or accents over à á â ... å ā etc which would help with uniqueness with a special char palette key to pop up for naming or modifier to see the accent options in game.

Scarbeus

No numbers or ASCII and strange alt codes, but allow character accents naturally as they are part of all sorts of languages.

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