The obvious solution to the name problem

Guys, given the amount of pixels and rage that have been spilled over the name issue, don't you think that if it was *that* easy that BW would have already done it?


It reminds me of one of one of my favorite movie scenes...

O-Ren: You didn't think it was gonna be that easy, did you?

The Bride: You know, for a second there … yeah, I kinda did.



This sort of Monday morning quarterbacking by people who largely do not have the skillset to be commenting on how to change complex code in a complete and launched game is ultimately not useful to anyone. I doubt the BW devs are even listening to this, because I'm sure that they have experienced programmers who are intimately familiar with the game code who have been wracking their brains about this problem for months.

Though if you find it personally entertaining... do keep on. No harm or offense in it... it's just not useful.


Paige

This would work perfectly. So when you wanted to whisper to Bob, you would whisper something like "Bob Walters".
Walters being his Legacy name. It is forethought like this which BioWare has been lacking.

I am not a mechanic ether, but I can tell a car company how I donot like his product and make solutions for the car to be better. Such as" your car does not accelerate smoothly, it hestitates and is anoying". It is up to the company if they can do it or not. A lot of improvements have come to products because of customer feedbacks.

Sure, but most of the comments here are more analogous to:

"Your car doesn't accelerate smoothly, you should fire the spark plugs at twice the current voltage"
"Your car doesn't accelerate smoothly, you should add huge spoilers to the front and back."
"Your car doesn't accelerate smoothly, you should add an extra cylinder."

To a novice, those sound like helpful suggestions. To an experienced mechanic, they are idiotic.

The vast majority of posters here have next to zero knowledge about software and because of that, their suggestions on how to fix issues range from the insultingly simple-minded ("Apply unique id numbers to names? What an innovative approach....") to the destructively bad ("Just allow duplicates of names. Who cares?")

And in the end, pretty much everyone (on this topic) is suggesting changes in the foundation of the game and a number of high-profile UI flows to fix the "problem" that their incredibly unique and personal name is not at all unique or personal, and they refuse to let go.

So, whatever. Do your thing, I guess. Keep on tossing your suggestions ("Hey Ferrari, your cars aren't fast enough, you should add two more tires!"). I'll keep laughing at all the people using weird accent marks to try and get their "cool" name.

Ahhhh it's the Wii Friend Code all over again!!!!

Completely false.

To use your poorly thought out analogy, it's more like "Why are you still using standard when other car companies are switching to automatic?" Or insert power windows, power steering, anti lock breaks, etc.

In less than five years time, this will not only be a standard feature in mmos, it will be expected.. It will have to be. The point here is, like everything else, BW continues to fall behind the curve.

Cryptic's naming system is about the only thing they did right IMO, but many people don't like the idea of everyone knowing their account name, so that opens another can of worms. I like it so you can't be a total douche on one character anonymously.

You act as if every other multiplayer game out there has this option. Very few do, and fewer still MMOs. The reason being is that MMOs require people to type other names often, compared to other games. If I see someone in the world, I'm only going to see their character name. How can I send them a message? They haven't typed into chat or anything where I can link directly, nor do I know their hidden character ID. This is why MMOs generally stick with unique names.

That guy is never at his post, he's always afk during ops.

That's a completely different topic than I was addressing: I was specifically talking about the (large numbers of) people who post comments saying that they dislike behavior X, think it should be fixed by doing procedure Y, and that Bioware's devs are idiots for not figuring that out.

Are there other ways of handling naming? Sure. Bioware picked the one with (one of the) cleanest UI flow(s). This is something that people largely refuse to admit or outright ignore, because they would make horrible game designers and never even thought about it. There are other schemes that are less convenient, yet allow for more naming possibilities. However, they always come at a cost, and again, the unqualified wannabe-game-designers on this forum never spend a moment thinking of them. For the most part, however, the bulk of the name complaints come from a group of people who would happily inconvenience large swaths of users just so they could be 'BobaFatt'. Overall, those people are a small minority, and game designers should ignore that sort of selfishness when designing a game.

And yes, the given-name:surname scheme is viable, however, it requires that people pick their surname at first character creation, and that they *always* be identified as given-name:surname in every single listing and display location. If you can't figure out why, then I don't have the time to explain it to you.