Another discussion about names

I have different conflicting opinions of the whole name system:

1) It is often much easier to get old players to come back to try new content than it is to coax new players to risk a game they took a pass on previously. City of Heroes is VERY friendly to the interrupted-player compared to most other MMO's I've sampled. It is very VERY easy to come back to without a feeling of being left behind. Anything that raises the spectre of a barrier for returning players will have some sort of negative impact on the game. This has to be weighed against the potential benefits of any purging.

2) It has not been proven that any kind of name purge will free up any of the names that people are seeking. It is known that previous purges had VERY little impact- both from dev statements and anecdotal evidence. Even among those names freed, we don't know how many are DESIRABLE names and how many of these long-departed players were stuck using alphanumeric substitution and 1337 speak to get what they want. Either way, if you "raise the threshold" to increase the # of desirable names freed, then you also raise the barrier mentioned in #1.

3) Heck, we don't even know if other player behavior (name squatting) may have a bigger effect than old-account names when it comes to "desirable" names.

4) There have been several million characters made in City of Heroes and unlike fantasy games, these names are often real-world words or phrases. Names can be as defining to a character as the costume and powerset, and sometimes, when names carry dual meaning, using synonyms or appending adjectives to the original word will dilute that value. Thus, having to compromise on the "ideal" name can be as crippling to a character concept, if not more crippling, than a costume appearance or the lack of a powerset combo that you'd use. This can make good character concepts flounder or be discarded, and frustrate the player.

I know I've abandoned more than a few concepts because the name/appearance/story couldn't mesh together as I intended.

5) Name handles have historically (until recently) been unique in muds/mmo's and were often the principal identifier. Changing this in EXISTING games, where the standard is well-defined, is risky behavior that will lead to confusion and frustration as peoples' assumptions are challenged.

6) There is no "RIGHT" to exclusive access to a name. Plain and simple. The dev's game structure creates a situation where squatter's rights and "firsts" apply, but they could easily structure it any other way, changing it as they see the market needs change, as is their right in the EULA. I generally believe it is bad to make such changes to an already-launched game unless there are CRITICAL issues.

One can argue that unique names make sense in the genre-- generally, due to product trademarks, there's only one hero for each name. We have a superhero registry, so there's an in-game reason for enforcing individual names.

But would a VILLAIN succumb to the to the rules of a hero / villain registry?
Is such a registry international? or National? If there's a "grey fox" in the US registry, does he have name rights for "Grey Fox" internationally? If one of those international versions travels to Paragon, does he have to change his name and register locally or is there some international treaty? What about the German translation of "Grey Fox"?

The simple hero registry system works fine as a cursory explanation but doesn't hold up to hard examination... or when it does, it opens up the possibility of identical names.

7) Duplicate names are less of an issue than people assume. Just like real-life, most of us have someone out there with a name identical to ours. I've worked in an office with seven 'Daves' and we naturally adapted- with aliases, proximity, and context easily clarifying which we're talking about.

In any given game, users are logged on for only a limited time, and that time is spread among many of their alts. The population of any one zone or chat channel is limited to an even smaller segment of the population. For all but the most common hero names, the odds of two characters with identical names being in the same region or chat channel at any given time. When that happens, most (non-mmo) chat will append a subscript number to each user to distinguish them. Thus CO's 'character@global' default chat handle isn't necessarily the only way to handle it. A similar 'character@shard' could similarly be hidden most of the time.

CO's 'character@global' probably should have defaulted to the chat option of "global hidden, but available on mouseover" as this would have been less glaring and intrusive, but they likely assumed that duplicate-name confusion would be great enough that they needed the clarity. Interestingly, though, I tried CO- a single server system that had at launch hundreds of instances of zones and subscribed to several popular "global" channels. There were very few UNINTENTIONAL duplicate names... despite NOT being divided by server or zone, and despite the fact that these specialty global channels often cause clustering of people with common interests (and thus slightly increase the likelihood of common names).

The challenge of duplicate names comes with PERSISTENT IDENTITY- is the "Yu Ying" I spoke to last night the same as the one that I'm speaking to today? This is where globals become more valuable-- we're an alt-heavy community and we already frequently use globals to keep track of friends across alts, so why not use it for keeping track of persistence among characters of the same name?

(To answer my last question, and wrap this up... I don't like CoH using globals for this on principle. CoH initially introduced the global system with assurances of privacy and the understanding that it would be shared/known only to those you wished to share it with. This was obviously blown by a few design oversights and then a more recent issue pretty much stripped even that thin veneer away. I still, though, adhere to the original ideal, and prefer that it only be abandoned to address a critical game issue. I don't think that the naming system has reached that threshold yet, so I don't support any of those changes.

Well if you have5 first names and 5 last ones, you get 25 combinations eh?
Lots of super hero names are two or three words total.

Maybe I should make a super hero name generator for inspiration ? Lot's of names I've picked at first have been taken and I've been so much happier with the alternative.

Here's what I love about this argument.

Player A: This unique naming feature is unfair. I can't get any good names because everyone else got them first. I want to be able to use the same cool names they have.

Everyone else: We don't have any problems coming up with cool names.

Player A: Your names suck.

Everyone else: If we took all the names, and our names suck why do you want to be able to use them on your characters?

Player A: . . . *head explodes*

I have no dog in this show.

Whatever the devs decide I'm fine with.

However, the fact that when asked in person during a conference, and a majority of players said they are FINE with the current system . . . speaks volumes.

The only thing I would say, is that THIS issue shouldn't be a priority with the multitude of other things they need to work on.

If we had to pick one or the other, (and from the recent PAX answers to a lot of questions and long requested features it looks like there is STILL a juggling of priorities at Paragon Studios EVEN with their increased staffing) I'd rather they spend time developing tech for cross server teaming (tfs, pvp, PUGs) than waste it on this. Just my opinion.

I only play on Virtue, which is one of the highest-pop servers.

I *just* got Sparkdance for my Clockwork Elec/Elec dominator. That's a wonderful name just sitting there unused, and I snagged it 6 years in. I had several other backup/thesaurus versions to try in case that failed, but I didn't have to.

I made a Praetorian MM, too. The roleplay concept is that he's not a guy with a bunch of faceless minions, but a leader of a small gang of petty thieves and criminals. The inspiration was the Artful Dodger, so I tried Jack Dawkins, but that had been taken. I swapped to Jack Wild, which was the name of the child actor who played the role in the black-and-white musical version of Oliver I grew up with, and is arguably a "better" name. It was not taken, which surprised me, but I'm very happy with that.

The ONLY time I've ever used numbers was substituting a capital I for a lowercase L for 2 alternate-power-versions of MY OWN characters, since the game doesn't use serifs in text. I'd never do it to "steal" someone else's name.

There's really no need to pretend there aren't perfectly good names out there. If you can't be Shadow Lord, well, why would you want to be? Try some alternate words, try tweaking the substance a bit. I'm sure you can find something perfectly lovely (like Sparkdance!) that no one else is using.