EVE New Citizens Q&A

Game breaking? Is it so? Will you stop playing just because somebody at other end of the New Eden will be allowed to change his name? Someone whom you don't know, someone whom you have never met, someone who have no impact on your gameplay?
Sure, everybody knows there are some "issues" (actually, I would rather say minor inconvenience, not issues), that could arise with this, but if this service designed and implemented correctly they will be minimized.
So please, try to back up your claims of this "game breaking" with some valid arguments or examples, otherwise it is you, who are not qualified to weigh in on the topic.

Here is another example for you:
Lets say, someone has created character and gave him name which is effectively violating the naming policy, but either because it is not offensive at first glance, or because 99% of people don't really care about you what you name is, he was able to stay under radar long enough and was minding his own business. He made some friends/enemies during
that time and then.. then someone reported him and he is now forced to change his name. And this why all that nonsense about "reputation" is fail hard. He was not banned and forced to create new character (the usual suggestion from "experts" on this matter), he just received name change.
Sure, his account is now flagged as he had an inappropriate name, but this irrelevant in our case. Yes, name change caused by policy violation and the paid service are not similar things, but in the end the result is same: you will be able to change your name. So it is not a big difference between them.

This is not the appropriate forum. Feel free to mail me.

Provided searches still turn up the toon using the old name, (as has been consistently stated would be the case ) then it's completely fine imo.

It's actually something I would use on one of my alts, it's name is obviously connected to this one ,
which wasn't an issue when I rolled it as it was in Corp with me but it's now used for much more and is nearly in command ships.

I had considered selling it once the leadership skills finished and buying another with a less obvious name but having heard much talk about this from ccp and the csm I will hang on to it till I hear more.

Yeah consequences and all that but once searches still work that's not an issue,

First off try and find someone on this thread that would benefit more from a name change mechanic than me. My name is random button mashing and I could not even begin to tell you how to pronounce it and no one in here even knows what to call me for short.

That being said I've lived in the same null sec system for a long time. When certain reds come by I know exactly where they are headed and what they are going to do 9 jumps out. I know when they get to my system what they will do and how long that I have to wait before it's "safe" to resume ratting.

You may say that if I can look up and see who the guy was before that it should not matter however much of this happens at a subconscious level. So much of it that when I try to show new people to the area the ropes they will often loose several ships learning the local space to stuff that I would not have done with player so and so 3 jumps out or what ever but I would not have thought about it.

The majority of the decision making you do with regards to intel is done on a subconscious level. Now you can learn that player X is now player Y but that takes time to remap your memories of player X to player Y in your subconscious. Eventually you can do it but then if he can change his name again now it gets even more complex and if you have multiple players doing this then it becomes a game mechanic that only PLEX rich players can afford to play.

To try and give a real life example, I used to race motorcycles professionally. In order to roadrace at that level you need to learn how to remap your autonomic reflex reactions. You essentially need to learn to not pull you hand away from something hot when you are not expecting to touch something hot. This is not something you can think around when it is happening you need to reprogram your reflexes. While not autonomic there is a lot of decision making in eve that happens without your conscious thought and it happens with regard to your familiarity with various players based on their names.

Allow name changes and you break the subconscious link between that players name and all of your memories of his / her past behavior. This game is all about consequences for your actions. You allow name changes you break a link not all links but a link from past actions to current decisions. Thus I term it game breaking.

I completely agree with your post.

Also, I'd like to mention that maybe it would be ok to allow characters which are still in the starting NPC school corps within the first 3 months of their 'career' to change names (paid of course). After that.. you're keeping it!

Frankly only way to do would be to have a name change listed as "also known as 'that name before the name change" in a bio.

^ Exactly. 'Game breaking' is hyperbolic nonsense.

Most likely they will grant such a request, mainly as your name doesn't actually change but it's just a capitalization error.

I had the same issue with an alt in the past and they did fix the surname error for me.

1: Limit the name change to once a year.
2: Make it expensive.
3: Make a search history of names.
4: Have the ability to mark peoples names down if you don't want to be tricked again (like on skype).
5: Add a star next to it to let you know it was changed.

Applying these feature will fix absolutely every problem with this concept and make everyone happy.

A lot of people would, yes. Possibly enough to kill the game outright, especially if Star Citizen escapes the infinite development cycle of eternity and there's a competitor in the genre.

Lack of ability to completely escape the consequences of your actions without leaving the game entirely is pretty much the only actual unique stand-out thing in Eve, it's very understandable that CCP is reluctant to weaken that particular aspect of things. They're unlikely to allow people to alter the identifiers other people see for their characters for basically the same reason they've never seriously considered setting up multiple separate servers to replace the single-shard environment.