Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Sounds like a key ingredient in the recipe for espionage...

im not into it

This has been suggested ad infinitem. The trouble comes when folks who have perpetraited scams and major theft decide to change their identity to either profit by the selling off the infamous character or changing the name and continuing to fly without the consequence of bad reputation for scandalous acts. An API list would not help those who have no access to his API code like a prospective victim. Because ways of avoiding this are few and cumbersome at best I say, "no thanks"

It's better to leave it the way it is and let the character creator learn to choose his names more carefully.

I agree, name changes should be allowed. On Steam for example you can view Aliases of someone, other names they've been known by. Combine that with either paid or limited #/year changes, then I don't think you're losing immersion or risk abuse for espionage or whatever. I would love to change my name simply because I hate it, but I'm not going to train a new character to do it. That's just stupid. If you can change your portrait you should be able to change your name. IRL changing your name is much easier than changing your "portrait". Make it happen.

I honestly doubt we're losing many people just because they chose a poor name. How long did it take you to discover you couldn't change your name... a month?.. and why would you assume you would be able to change a name in the first place? I still believe this will cause more issues than it will resolve.

Bump for a CCP to answer.

That's an interesting point.

I get what you're saying. I really do. But since Eve is localized into Russian and Japanese and such, it is extremely hard for people who have no knowledge of those languages to say 'Yeah, thats just screwing with us'. Especially when you add to it that very few people have real words as their name, it would be extremely EXTREMELY hard to enforce that. And then you top it off with Eve being a long was distant even from the pretense of role playing for most players, a lot of people are happy to roll with a handle, rather than a genuine name, because that's the nature of the interwebs. A lot of those names aren't really supposed to be said out loud, just read off a screen. Its supposed to be individual and unique, not practical.

As for adding names and stuff... Hmmm... I think that mechanically its a no-go. Since your name as originally typed is the only way to persistently find a character. Imagine trying to look up a guy you were friends with back in your old corp, maybe to call in a favor or just to chat. You put in his first name, because he was first name only...The results already put out everyone who has that name and a surname. And add to that all the scamming crap... Bleh. Given that even people with names that they thought they invented (like mine) have a few other people with similar names, and so even minor changes can make it impossible to find someone without blind guess work.

I'm sorry, but it just doesn't seem that there could be a place for this in game. It's just... The way it is. Changing the only unique identifier for your character, at any cost, would break various aspects of the game. Even non-sinister uses of this would be at best deeply inconvenient.

the sad thing is that even a compromise, like having a thing similar to your corp title that you can fill out yourself would mostly not be read and even then its not going to be used to refer to you.

really? i dont play many mmos, but pretty much every game that ive ever played didnt let me change a character name once the game was started,

I wonder how many of the other games that you are thinking of encourage the amount of asshattery that EVE does, where Your name is the only persistent way to keep track of someone. I would bet that most if not all of those other games dont.

I've never bought a character off of the Character bazaar, I don't support the practice, but it would make sense for a name change in that situation at least, I mean the new owner presumably is not the one who infiltrated your corp and stole all your BPO's (although I suppose it could be). I can certainly see where it would be worrisome if scammers and spies could simply change their names and loose their notoriety, on the otherhand as stated earlier, it would be simple enough to put a record in the employment history showing the name change. I think I would change my name if given a choice, I had other names I liked but they were taken and last names were not an option back then.

We're talking about changing "Name", not "Player ID number". Of course you can have your justice on that persistent ID number, which has been behind the name all the time.

And what you describe is kinda extreme case actually.. mostly you'll see law-abiding citizens getting his or her last names, or correcting their 9 year old childish mistakes. Big deal.

What would make this post is a list of all mmos that dont let you change your name .............I dont know of any except EVE.