Names are first come first serve. People need to understand that in a 20 year old MMO they might need to deviate from the handle they have used since they were playing D1.
I’ve also never had a problem making a new character even on A52 and have never needed alt-characters to do so.
I suppose when the quality of name that people come up with is stuff like “Burgerburp” then, yeah, someone out there probably already has that (bad) name.
My response to most of these threads is generally “Oh, you mean you’re struggling to get the ten thousandth name for a DH that has ‘Illidan’ in it? I genuinely don’t care.”
If you pick a high pop realm, plan to come up with a more creative name.
Blackfang for example, nothing amazing, is taken on A52/other high pop realms–cannot even find similarities that work. If you’re going to high pop, I’d say you’re best off not trying to use real words in it.
A dead realm on the other hand…you probably don’t even need to come up with a combo of real words. But is it worth it?
His point is that in other games people just see your account name while your individual characters can be whatever you want them to be. Imo that’s preferable to what we have now.
A huge issue for me is that they claim after 2 expansions of inactivity names are freed up, but when? Where are the announcements for such things? How are we to know? It was infinitely easier to put a ticket in to a GM and ask if you could get a name.
Because Blizzard decided to terminate their entire GM staff, they claim this system has been automated, but I’ve never once seen or heard of it actually working.
A ton of my names are just lifted from novels and have one or two letters changed or shifted around.
In all of my time on this game I’ve never been so stuck on getting one particular name that I couldn’t come up with something just as good or better.
I feel like that’s what most of these complaints come down to as well. It’s not really that there aren’t any names left to pick. It’s that the one name they super duper want isn’t available.
If Blizz properly implemented their naming policies, nobody on an RP Server is supposed to have that name. It’s fine on a non-RP Server. But, RP Servers, they’re not supposed to, yet they do
Whenever using battle tag handles just on the forums, even, come up, paranoid people freak out and talk about “but if they know my battle tag, they can stalk me in real life” and such nonsense.
I mean…for me it would be that I like having unique character names and don’t see a need to be identified by battletag just so that some rando can have my names.
2 decades of a system being built on with an unknown number of dependencies that would be required to be untangled and changed causing an unknown number of errors for an unknown amount of time. Changing naming system could also cause havok with their back up systems. Not also account for the systems that use Name-Server as an identification method (Mail etc) that would need to be changed to include Btag.
When a rename is required your character name is changed to something else, probably to make it unique.
IK you’re not joking, and they don’t know the difference between B-Tag & Real ID. Even then, our living addresses is public record. I mean, phonebooks would have our phone numbers in them.
You have to jump through hoops (that isn’t Blizz) to remove that information from public records.
B-Tag hides what servers you play on vs what we have now regarding our characters. Even with a private profile, doesn’t hide the character’s server.
I’m pro-privacy, and B-Tag would make it even more private by hiding your servers. You don’t have to accept a B-Tag request, and that’d be the only way for those using B-Tag to find you (server wise) is to be accepted as a B-Tag buddy, first. Even then, displaying yourself offline hides your server, too when you do accept the B-Tag request. It’s a win/win, in my book.
If you really want an answer I can try to explain it
Diablo was a single player offline game that had an online option. It was set up originally to use our Account Name as the primary unique ID, not the character name. So an ID in Diablo games is Btag > Char name as far as the database goes. If you want to find someone you need their Account name. Always have. That still exists that way. Servers were not a thing that even factored into it.
25 years ago or so when WoW was being developed they did not do it the same way. They made Character name - server the unique ID that was the base of the entire database and social system for WoW. In WoW there is only ONE Allilance-Mirasol-Mannoroth for example. That is how the whole game works. Each server can have only one of that name for each faction on the server.
Why? They wanted each Server to be its own community of unique individuals where you built your own reputation, made friends, joined guilds, fought bad guys. They did not want 100 XlegolasX characters floating around making it impersonal.
As time has gone on, that database architecture and game structure has stayed in place because everything is connected to it. Everything.
These days with cross realm and cross faction nothing feels unique and personal anyway so the name identity does not seem to hold the same weight logically.
To change it they would need to completely change the entire structure of the game and database. Ideally, to Battletag as the main unique ID, with us being able to select any char name we want. The trickle down on that change is MASSIVE, including to the Armory, forums, and every single item in game. I do think they are moving that way though - Warbands is Battnet (Btag) account wide not specific to char-server or even WoW license.
This is how Battletags work. The text part can be whatever we want, and the system appends the numbers after it to make it unique. On every other Blizzard forum that is what displays - the text part of the chosen Btag name.
For one thing, Diablo’s multiplayer is far less dependent on your character’s name for nearly all forms of player interaction. Pretend for a moment that there were multiple Quarm-Illidans on your realm…
What do you do when you’re trying to get a buddy to send you reagents? How do they ensure they’re mailing them to the right Quarm?
What do you do if one of the other Quarms begins intentionally bricking M+ keys and people recognize “Quarm-Illidan” as someone they should avoid? Do you just accept having a bad reputation for something you didn’t do?
What do you do if another Quarm goes on a heated, racist tirade in Trade chat? Do you just live with the angry whispers and misguided reports you’ll inevitably get?
Most importantly, what do you do if someone you pissed off at some point deliberately impersonates you? How will people know it isn’t the real you?
Run a scan and repair. I have had no trouble with naming toons, but admittedly I haven’t tried since they merged the server log on’s
This could be a real " bug " since 11.o that you have stumbled on.
