The games has sort of reached a point where nobody is able to give their characters anything resembling a “real” name. A ton of players resort to using non-standard characters in their names, which can make things kind of a nightmare. I ended up mailing a ton of stuff to the wrong person because I didn’t realize they had a weird character in their name.
Now I don’t necessarily have an easy solution, because I know this is something that would be way more difficult than it sounds. However, I do think it’s something genuinely worth looking at.
What if you only had to worry about coming up a single unique name? Effectively what Battle-tags were supposed to be, and how they’re used in Diablo 3, but I know some people probably wouldn’t want their existing Battle-tag being displayed publicly, so I’d opt another route.
Of course, I’d probably allow players to “hide” their player name as well, maybe just putting some sort of “asterisk” next to their name, just so when you inevitably have a hundred different characters named “Arthas” running around, you’d at least know whether that is or isn’t their “Player name”, to hopefully prevent someone impersonating someone else.
I’m sure there are ways to refine the idea further – maybe free accounts are given a temporary name and string of numbers at the end, or maybe allow players to “claim” their existing Battle-tag name. Since a lot of players probably have the same name as their Battle-tag, maybe first-come, first-serve for who keeps it? Or whichever account is older gets priority?
It might be a bit of a headache at first, but how cool would it be to actually give your character the name you actually want? I feel like that would be an enormous improvement, personally.
Just allow a single space or apostrophe.
Now you can do last names. And troll/Draenei/whoever-else-uses-apostrophes names.
3 Likes
Just hide the players Bnet behind the Character name instead of the server.
Poof, you just freed up thousands of desired names.
So then we’d have a serial number attached to our name or what? How would I differentiate between the three thousand characters named Legolas on my server?
It’s the one that jumps when you hit the space bar.
4 Likes
I am proud to say I’ve never named a character Legolas in anything. But this was funny.
2 Likes
I want last names Tricks Dirtwater or maybe Tricks McTrickster. EQ had last names, I was Orbital Darkfire.
Why must we have just one name? Maybe middle names too Tricks Michael Stinktooner…
I’m still amazed this hunter remains unique in all of Azeroth considering the source…
1 Like
The only thing I would worry about adding spaces, is that could really clash with the way titles are designed, not to mention how NPC’s reference you could get a little wonky.
Not that it’s a bad idea (and apostrophes definitely need to be possible), but I think a new structure would be a lot more beneficial long term. Otherwise you’re just going to wind up with even more unreadable names, and I think that that feels great either.
I’d take it further and say they should add surnames. Maybe make it optional or with premade surnames for those that want one (so if you make an orc named “Broxxxiggar”, you can choose a surname “The Red” from a dropdown menu if you don’t want to have to come up with a last name).
1 Like
Id just attach your bnet to your name
So my main would be Moritz-Hellfire-Moritz#21399
Although i would also allow for ’ in there since its part of many races naming conventions.
Merge a crapload of servers and it ceases to be a problem. Or fix crafting orders to allow them cross-server without being guild-only.
It’s impossible to find an available name on the top 20 servers, and very easy on backwaters like Dethecus.
I think people just lack originality. Or at least, that’s what I think whenever I see a special character in someone’s name that’s clearly meant to be a letter other than the character they ended up using.
For transparency’s sake, I also lack originality. But the random name generator has worked pretty well for the majority of my alts. I just click through until I find one that doesn’t look like gibberish. 
I have 30+ characters on one of the most crowded servers in the game (Moon Guard) and I’ve never once struggled to give a character a “real” name. Sometimes the name I really wanted was taken and I had to find some way to keep the flavor or reference, but it’s really not that difficult.
