Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Only tells me I have a person on a contact list, and then only that I actually put them on a contact list instead of simply knowing their name and their reputation. I still need to check every watch-listed person in system to see if I knew them under a different name if I don't immediately recognize them, and provides no solution for people I knew well enough by name and reputation but did not have on my watch list. Do I have Erotica1 on a watchlist? No. Can I recognize Erotica1 and know about her reputation and actions simply by seeing her in local or on chat/forums/etc? Yes. Easily. Same with my knowledge of literally hundreds of others peoples actions and reputations. Even aside from the big names, I recognize many other people active in lowsecs I frequent, being able to recognize frequent local pirates, hotdroppers, cynno killers, etc. All without a watchlist involved.


Unless of course it's the person selling it to themself, attempting to remove the bad name and recognize on sight reputation that character has. Your name is also part of the thing you are selling. Some chars sell largely on the strength of an awesome name.


Of course I can't answer it. That's because there is no clean answer. If I sold Anhenka to another account of mine and renamed him Bob the Wombat, would all the posts I made as Anhenka show up as being made by Anhenka or Bob the Wombat? Especially since nearly all of these services (killboards especially) identify a person and their previous actions based on their name.


A fairly safe assumption based on my decent level of understanding of the system, API's, and how third party tools pull that information, yes. Someone who actually develops third party tools could do a better job of explaining it, but I don't to be one to know that they are not currently designed to accommodate this sort of change.


Don't need a hard % when this thread gets remade and shot down several times a month. Never once has the general consensus been "Yeah, this is a good idea"

And that last paragraph really assumed nothing. That this is not a popular idea is not really up for debate, judging by the outcome of all the previous threads as well as the contents of this thread alone. That it would take a good amount of developer time to introduce is also not a question. That the idea has been brought up, argued, and shot down hundreds of times before is a simple historical precedent. Given those facts, that the idea has no traction is a very simple deduction.

1. what does it change if someone would use it to change its own name? again it wouldn't provide any advantage in the game .. they would have to pay for everything .. and wouldn't provide any "clean name" like previously stated.[/quote]
This is jaw-droppingly naive.


This is a fig leaf over the huge number of problems this would introduce. A name is a name. Adding previous names, or aliases, or anything like that to the contacts list is completely futile.


So what? If those things matter then train your own character or buy one with a better name.



You're in denial.


They often ignore stuff that's been hashed out dozens of times over the years and is runs counter to the fundamental nature of the game and is intensely opposed by both developers and players. Don't take it as some glimmer of hope. They will never allow name changes for the same reason they will never allow skillpoint remaps. This idea is dead on arrival.

1. explain.
2. no one spoke of adding aliases to the contact list.
3. your answer has nothing to do with my response, which was directed to answer his comment.
7. explain.

and your last paragraph is just an assumption. you don't know what they think and claiming that you do is a lie.

EDIT: the post is ****** up cause apparently you can only post up to 5 quotes..

And this is why we can't assume people know what they talking about.

Sails past 5 pages of discussion and argument on the topic, posts an even less complete idea than the OP's hole riddled proposition, then declares it good and without flaws.

I'm done with this thread. We have explained it multiple times already, but if the OP wants to huddle in a corner, rocking himself and insisting it's fine and that all our statements are just assumptions, then he can do so. I for one am done arguing with a 4 month old character about an issue that has been shot down for being terrible in hundreds of threads already across the past 10 years.

Super-duper TLDR: Name recognition is important. If a change modifies the ability of others to recognize you post name change in local, it's going to get shot down. Every time.

But it is. Your idea specifically states this limitation and is built upon it. I reread you OP and it's point number 1.

"1. only available from buying a character from the bazaar"

Say I wish to use this service, but only on a character I already own.
1. Create an account and run through a proxy.
2. Create a sales thread and sell my character to me.
3. Change my characters name.

I might not even require step one, after all why should CCP care as long as I pay and sell it through the bazaar?
In other words, YOUR limitation is NOT a limitation.

But your idea is based on the premise (I believe is false) that you should even get the choice to change a characters name. Simply because you don't like it,or because you couldn't be bothered to wait until another came along with a better name.

Like I said before and you've as yet failed to address. Buying characters comes with consequences and choices. You are buying the time and effort of another player. This includes their choice of name and it's fitting that in order to bypass the input time required, there are some down sides. Especially if you can't wait until you see one, with a name you like.

well you failed:

his·to·ric·i·ty
ˌhistəˈrisitē/
noun
noun: historicity

1.
historical authenticity.
ex "an effort to assert the historicity of poetry and the political power of poets"

i am butthurt? an assumption that you need to give evidence for..
i ridiculise people? an assumption that you need to give evidence for..

you come back with the same boring points that have been showed to be false..

"It would create an another avenue for players to dodge the reputation that they have created"
-it's already a problem anyway.. you can create alts and be a spy.. at least with the name change option you can actually see what name was used.. and if the guy already had problems with you, your corp or alliance.. he is probably with his corp / alliance on your contact list. as red.

"It would add additional visual clutter"
-one single tab showing alias of toons.. or even just put it in the employment tab.. isn't creating any clutter.

"It would slow down the process of actually identifying who is in the same space with you or the same system by having to reference an alias list "
-like i said higher, you are aware of that person's intention by the contact list standing mechanism.. the alias list couldn't be that long cause of this "4. limiting the number of name change (with a timer, 6 months, 1 year, 2 years etc..)" .. looking for info would add about 2 seconds to identify someone, which is already done countless of times in a day for new toons that shows up in your local/space/system

"Managing that alias list becomes complex from a corp director/CEO aspect"
-i don't see how this could be true. more info please.

"Effective dates on aliases related to corporation membership would be critical to this working properly at all (and that would be a true pain in the ass both from a UI perspective as well as from a data management perspective - to whit there are companies that specialize in versioning services and tools, is that really something that you want to force CCP to have to manage TOO? )"
-can you clarify this one? doesn't make sense to my eyes. versioning? and you laugh at historicity.. lol

"It takes the burden off of the person who creates the bad reputation on the character"
-well if you sold that toon, the burden isn't on the person who created the toon anymore.. don't see how this moral issue applies to the whole thing.

"It takes the onus off of the person seeking to buy a character to actually bother to research before they buy"
-they would still have to research in order to get the SPs in the right place, amount of SPs, the price range etc..

TL;DR
same old points.. which can be fixed with just a tiny reasoning and simple ingame mechanics which are already in place, mostly API and contact list. i'm seriously thinking that the whole point of the nonono i don't want name change, is that people are to lazy to show info.. if your corp/alliance is big enough to worry about spies, probably that it's already infected by them..

i'd like to point out that english isn't my native language.. and i'm trying my best to write coherent phrases ;)

Naah. You can just buy a character with a name you like.

so your first point is that one single tab with 5 alias on it (if you take the example of 10 years..) would make it so difficult that it would sign the death of EVE Online? i can't even think of something more ridicule than that.. it's laughable at best..

for your second point. why would you resell a toon that fast anyway? you buy it because you need it.. i don't think it would "hurts a large number of legitimate character sales"

you took the example of 6 months, but i think a year would be better, make it so that the name change option resets at the same time of the skill remap.

with all these posts, there is nothing that shows this could be "dangerous" for EVE Online and wouldn't change the gameplay at all.. i think it's more the laziness factor in looking up some names in a list that bothers most of you against it, which would take max 2 seconds..

the only real point, is that in a quick glance at local chat you could determine if it's dangerous or not according to names that you are used to see and know. but chances are that this toon with the name change, is already on the contact list of your corp/alliance so you would see him as red anyway.. because as pointed it's only a name change, it wouldn't delete his name from your contact list.

Renegade,

I gave the example of 5 aliases because it's not the most extreme case possible under your proposed idea. But even that many aliases is too many. Under your example of possible every 6 months, some characters might have as many as 20 aliases. And I talk about this in terms of the next ten years because if you are designing a system that could potentially function for that long you must think about what the consequences of the system at least as far out as its estimated life cycle. Which you clearly have not done (though you're in good company I guess, because CCP often doesn't either).

I also didn't imply that this would cause the "Death of Eve" so thank you for misrepresenting my position. But that is your MO in this thread so far.

So......at this point you've shown, clearly, that you're stuck on your idea as is (and that is fine by the way) and are not interested in entertaining opposing points or critiques. That your proposed feature adds needlessly complex rules and limitations for marginal or no benefit to the majority of the playerbase.

Designing software enhancements should be based on most benefit to most users.

Multiple people have stated in this thread that it's not a good idea in their opinions. They have mentioned the fact that this has been suggested countless times over the years and it is meet with the same responses from the players and the developers (disagreement and silence respectively).

You can obviously take the silence of the Dev team as them simply waiting for the "right" way to implement this. Or you could infer from their lack of discussion about a name change feature as indication that they aren't keen on the idea.

Your choice. Good luck.

I find it entertaining that some people expect CCP to send them a special message every time an old, debated-to-death idea gets reposted.