Pages

Friday, March 22, 2013

What's In a Name?

Harbinger Zero is lamenting the loss of his Sith Sorcerer's name in SWTOR. "Lamenting" may not be the right word; he's mad as hell, and he's not going to take it anymore.

I totally sympathize, having lost a couple of my characters' names in the forced mergers this past summer. It sucks to lose a name you're attached to and that you feel helps define your character. Too many game developers don't seem to understand what a character name means to the player. For many, it's a game breaker.

Holding names kind of sucks for new players, though, because a name you really like may be tied up by some other player who hasn't logged in for months or even years, and their level-1 placeholder character still has the name you want.
I've been burned by both situations. That's a major reason I love Cryptic's @ handles. They distinguish me as a player from my characters. The idea of unique names for every player character is incompatible with the goal of having millions of players logging into your game. Player ID is one thing, character ID is totally different.

2 comments:

  1. I logged back in this morning, and I can confirm that the character I know for sure I played in February is once again marked inactive.

    Six weeks. That's all it takes. And this on an RP server to boot. Player beware.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yeah, it sounds like you lost out to a paying customer. I determined never to log in again when they turned the "veteran reward" of cartel coins into a last ditch attempt to get another 15 bucks out of me for another month of sub. Sorry BioWare, I am attached neither to the Star Wars IP nor to your game.

    ReplyDelete