EVE General Discussion

One character name change per account

I like this idea



good points

I can imagine that some people would pay a lot to change The Mittani's name to 10058. Someone go start a Kickstarter page.

Not empty quoting a Chribba post.

This has been discussed numerous times in Features & Ideas discussion. For years and years. All of the points in this thread have been made again and again, to no avail. Someone did claim that CCP's CEO or somesuch had passingly mentioned "looking into it" as any other modern game allows it, but my Google Fu isn't sufficient enough to confirm this.

I really hope the name change does come someday, and I don't mind heavy restrictions with a reasonable price. However as CCP simply has skirted around the issue for almost ten years, my belief in it actually happening isn't at an all time high.

And what I would be willing to pay for a one-time name change? About 15-25 euros sounds reasonable and I believe that is standard price in many other MMO's altough can't confirm this.

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"Your name is your reputation" is what even CCP has said IIRC as an excuse not to implement name change, but
your name is not your reputation in this game, and hasn't been ever since alts and character trading became widespread. People keep deluding themselves about it, just like they are against "NEX and pay to win" but are amazingly a-ok with PLEX used for everything from turning real money in to game currency to PLEX as currency for any kind of service CCP offers.

I don't need that service because i try to choose my names with care.

But i know at least one incident, where someone other got a name change, because he did not realized, that the Name he has choosen had some "real live past". The name was however not famous enough to say "he should have known that".

Therefore, there is obiously a possibility for real problematic names, but i don't like such a service on a regular base. Names are unique identifiers. If you spoiled the reputation of your character, you should not be able to wash yourself clean from it by changing names like changing pants.


TL;DR:

It is your responsibility to pick a proper name in the beginning. Choose carefully.

have a look for natural sounding names, "google" them for problematic pasts or similar, and ask yourself "Do i want to be called that way 'for eternity'?"

And after that: Consider every action you plan to do - concerning your reputation.

When I started playing this game I was what, 15? I wasn't sure if I'd keep playing or not. I just scrobbled together a few words and called it a day. I've since wisened up, but apparently need to be punished forever?

And no, name is not your reputation. You already can wash your sins away with buying a new character or simply using an alt to do your dirty deeds from the beginning. See my post above.

good argument.
I might change my attitude to "one name change for much money - so you will just do it, if you really feel pain with your first choice."


I do not agree on that point.
If you buy a character, you also buy the characters past = his/her reputation.
If you create a new character, the character has no reputation so far.
If you use alts, you have - different characters with different reputations. Other players do not know, that two characters have in real live the same person in behind. They just see your characters + their names. Therefore you could play two completely different characters ingame - that's okay.

First and foremost, a namechange should point out in your bio, as first thing, "Previously known as".
That said, probably 2 plex.

I would pay for it, not because I dislike my name (it is actually the name of someone I know, spelled differently) but because someone once told me, in WoW if I remember well, that fanny has another meaning in English, which I didn't know about when I created her back in 2006. Oh well... at least EVE players are not as childish as WoW players.

My trial character had a name that I came up with on the spot, a avatar which was rushed though decent and a mediocre assortment of skills. My trial character didn't have a bad name as much as one "borrowed" from a couple of novels since I needed a name on the spot. Once I decided on subscribing for a year I decided to create this more permanent character that I could claim wasn't lifted from any one source. While I wasted a few weeks in my test character, I ended up with a character that I will be happy with for years to come.

I suggest new players who plan on staying consider creating a "permanent" keeper character as well while you are in your first week or two, otherwise it gets really hard to start over once you invest more time in your character.

As for those characters that are a few years old I think the name change option could potentially be another source for revenue for CCP. It looks as though those that want to change their name are willing to spend a very large amount of real world currency to do so and I don't think the number of people would change much by lowering the prices for this service. It is true that other games do charge a good amount of cash to transfer characters between servers or change names.