A solution to the loss of names due to transfers

If legacy names were the only unique identifier, chosen when a player creates their first character on a server, it'd be easier to have a much larger namespace. Avoiding the usual unnecessary vowel bloating of names.

e.g.
legacy = lu'cas
children : george.lu'cas, bob.lu'cas, sally.lu'cas, pablo.lu'cas, mary.lu'cas

Each character would be unique to the server but wouldn't lock out other players from having a cosmetic first name or alias. In chat they would still be bob.lu'cas even if they only chose to show Darth Bob as their visible name.

* The only other way to preserve privacy with that method that would be to mask the bob.lu'cas identifier with their playable name 'bob' and hope most people just chat in dedicated channels and don't need to whisper with slash commands. (If the legacy is hidden, mask the chat name.)

If you want to mail that user, they would have to give you their actual address "bob.lu'cas". As in real life, your not tossing your address out to strangers. Guild/Party invites should be available through chat context (right-click) menus on the player's name. I forget if we already have that level of chat functionality at the moment.

What if there were two bob with hidden legacy? How would you solve that one? I also don't need to chat to use the Group Finder, and still don't need to chat while doing the content.

If people want to get really private, in chat they could just tag a number on the end. It'd be based on login/privacy-enabled time and how many concurrent players with the first name 'bob' are online and are hiding their legacy. Hiding the legacy any time after login would just make you the next number on the list.

A more basic solution: you could just color code the players' chat names based on class. Red Bob is the sith juggernaut.. Purple Bob is the sith sorcerer. It'd be rare to see that many people with the same name in a group chatting and worried about their legacy privacy though. Usually, from what I've observed, group communication is directed at either your class, spec, or your current role.. or in some cases a player's choice of light side or dark side conversation choices rather than your name.

The number thing seems feasible. However, wouldn't it change every time you log in? How would you be able to mail Bob1 if he is Bob4 today, but you just don't know it? Now, I would like people to know Bob, just not by his legacy. Bob can have his own set of friends outside of his other characters.

The rest of what you offer are just simple variables that can still lead to 2 of the same people with the same thing going. Bob and Bob could easily both be Juggernauts with Dark Side 5.

Not really. You're not some magical snowflake of individuality here. We all pay to play and we all play by the same rules. When you sign up for your account you're told (if you actually bother to read) what you get for your terms of service.

Being able to ask bioware to ignore their own rules is not one of them.

And how exactly would they give you their actual address if you can't /tell or mail them to ask them for it?
If I see an item for sale on the GTN by 'bob', how do I know to mail 'bob.lucas' to ask them a question about the item? If I recieve two emails, one from 'bob.lucas' and one from 'bob.fischer' but both have hiddne the last name so that I just see "From bob" in both messages then how do I know they are from two different characters?

The concept is simple: there must be a unique identifer for every character. The unique identifier must to be floating above the character's head and listed with sales on the GTN and listed with messages in chat channels and so on.

Whether that unique identifier is "Ben" or "Ben Kenobi" is irrelevant - what is relevant is that if another character with the same identifier is moved onto a server then one of the characters has to be renamed.

For this game, the unique identifier is the character's name (not name & legacy, just name). The uniqueness domain is the server, so we have issues when moving characters. If I'd designed it then names would be globally unique, but they didn't ask me. :-)

You still haven't caught on have you? When Pirates of the burning sea had it's own server transfers, at least players didn't have to change for the most part, you could have two Billy's on the same server or more, with different surnames, visa versa so it wasn't like names would be much of a problem.

There's plenty of not catching on to go around Raith. You still haven't caught onto the idea that the only thing that Burnig Sea and Old Republic have in common is that they are MMO's and your characters have names.

You misunderstood. What if someone wanted to keep both names, but someone else already had that. A surname just adds more characters to the name. Billy Jones transferred, and he couldn't be Billy Jones again, because someone else already got it. How did they solve that? Forcing the guy to change one of the names. He didn't want to, so he did change it, then went to the forums to complain and offer a half-thought idea on how to fix things. Billy Jones is identified by being Billy Jones, not Billy James or Billy Jone. Why would he want to change his surname? He was there when the game launched and picked that name and played with it for a while.

Yea that's the real problem. If players can't stand to see their legacy/surname public like that, an expanded system can't work. The masking suggestion was just to try and meet the privacy concern half way but it wouldn't be a foolproof solution. At least the namespace is a bit better than WoW's though since they included apostrophes.

At this point in time the legacy name is just a free unique title (per server), if you chose to use it.