Forums » Suggestions

Names

Sep 30, 2007 samuel.penn link
Should there be more restrictions on what character names people can choose?

Generally, players use sensible names. However, there are a few characters out there who have names that consist (almost) entirely of punctuation. There's nothing to prevent !%! or 2%A%2 as character names, which to me makes things feel more like UT where everyone is just a target to be shot, rather than like an RPG where characters are actually people in the game world.

Does anyone else feel this way? Should there be an attempt to make names fit more into the RPG background of VO (even if only to ensure that they are vaguely pronounceable)?

btw, I'm deliberately not proposing any solutions at this point, simply interested to know whether anyone thinks it's worth discussing solutions. Not having played any online RPGs other than VO, I don't know how other games handle it. The only thing I would say is, forcing anyone to change their existing names would be a bad idea.

Sam.
Sep 30, 2007 PsyRa link
No. If your imagination is not up to keeping immersion when a couple of weird names show up, well the rest of the game just ain't going to do it for you either.

It would be a complete waste of developer time to try to figure out how to contain it. People are infinitely clever about trying to get around rules like this, just to be a pain.

I honestly doubt the majority of the community is interested in the "lets play pretend" aspect of the game anyway.

Don't bother, its not worth it.
Sep 30, 2007 Suicidal Lemming link
It's easy to ban certain symbols, since the game already supports it.
Oct 01, 2007 PsyRa link
The problem is Suicidal, once the devs say they are doing something, anything, to make names more immersion friendly, when they fail, there will be those who complain that they didn't do enough.

Better to not do anything, rather than waste time trying to explain why |%| is not allowed, but l33th4ck3rd00d is.

Besides, why shouldn't implant using Serco have names with unpronounceable characters in them. Who knows if they don't connect direct to each other to communicate, and that those symbols make perfect sense to them.

What are you, some kind of Sercophobe?
Oct 01, 2007 samuel.penn link
Well, the rest of the game has done it for me for several years. But anyway, there is a perfect solution (from the point of view of catching them all), and it's already implemented - the random name generator.

However, there doesn't seem to be a strong feeling of opinion for this, so it's pretty academic how it might be done.

btw, some of my characters are Sercophobes :-)
Oct 01, 2007 SuperMegaMynt link
Take solace in that a mint by any other name would smell as sweet.