I hope that, in D4, Blizzard allows us to use the dash (-) when naming our Characters.
In D3 it was really annoying to want a Character named “Chao-Ahn” and having to type “ChaoAhn” instead.
Also, allow a space. For example: “Chao Ahn”. The number of characters used in a name could be limited and starting or ending a Character name with a space or dash could be disallowed.
I can also see why numbers wouldn’t be used in D3. Especially if it would cause issues with BattleTags or the numbers assigned to Characters “behind the curtain”. (As I understand it: In D3, Characters can have the same name because there’s a unique number associated with each Character that’s hidden from view — “Behind the curtain”).
In any event, I hope that D4’s naming convention is a little more flexible.
Agreed. Simple “First/Last” not being possible feels archaic in video game design. Allowing more characters is usually better.
I don’t really like seeing alt-characters in names, but there’s also no reason to have the redundancy protection like WoW has. D3 allowing people to have the same name wasn’t a problem, and I don’t think it would be a problem in D4 either. That protection is what drives the silly names.
It’s a really simple way to write the name code, I really hope this is done right this time.
Oh, I forgot about that. In the streams I watched, there were multiple players on screen with numbers contained in the name.
However, that could just be for the D4 Demo. And the numbers seen may be the numbers that are hidden in D3. They may do something similar in D4, but hiding the numbers, like they do in D3.
If that’s the case, maybe Blizzard could consider adding a special character, like the (#) used in BattleTags. Although, I’m not as interested in using numbers in a name as I am in using dashes and spaces.
I think that D3 bases most things on our Battletag so our chars are really Battletag#1234-Charname#number On screen you personally see charname and others see Battletag. The two number identifiers are not shown.
WoW is similar. It is Charname-server as an identifier. So you can’t have repeats of the same name per server, but can overall in game.
No idea what they will do for D4, but they seem averse to last names/spaces as well as titles (unless title is earned in game).
Player inserted dashes they tend to frown on. They don’t seem to like any punctuation used. Strictly letters. We shall see if that changes or not. Given all their games are set up to work without those symbols, I sort of expect that to continue.
The irony here is that they still allow alt-code symbols that are present in the font the game uses. Pretty much every possible punctuated version of Legolas is out there in WoW’s hunter community for example.
Not allowing titles like “King” or “President”, etc. is fairly routine. But in this day and age we’re well beyond the Windows 95 eight dot three naming convention. The game should be able to allow a first and last name for characters, omitting specific words like they do with the profanity filter. Hell, they could even make it so you have separate fields for first and last names, that way the game would parse them correctly and players would have less ability to do odd things with them. No need for dashes and whatnot. The game engine could even store the character name as FirstName.LastName#UniqueID. It’d literally be an extension of how D3 stores them and then displays them.
There are ways to do this while still forcing players to adhere to the conventional naming rules. Seems kind of lame that they have characters with first and last names as NPCs, but can’t let the players themselves have that option.
I was searching for what the D4 naming convention might be and found this very interesting discussion. I like all the suggestions for changes to what will become the D4 Character Naming Convention. Implementing all of them would be one extreme, and might not be possible ;-). Hopefully what Blizzard does (or has done) is closer to that extreme and as far away from what is allowed now for D3 as possible. I still have 2 inactive (no subscription attached) WOW accounts from the time when giving accounts personal names was allowed. So there is hope what Blizzard decides (or has already decided) for the D4 Character Naming Convention.
Sooo in D4 no “special” Characters are allowed. not even Space…
Wich is rather unfortunate since I always namend my Hardcore Chars the same Name, just with Roman Numerals. First is “Nergal” then, “Nergal II” then “Nergal III” and so forth… It would be really nice if Blizz would allow special Characters.
