I'm sure you've all dealt with the feeling of going to create a new toon, figuring out the concept for the character and making them look the part only to find the perfect name has been taken. I understand this is gonna be a problem for a game that's been out this long but it kinda bugs me, every time I find a good name for my new toon its always unavailable. The thing that bothers me the most is that 9/10 of these characters are still sitting on the brainiac ship and probably wont ever get played. Is there some way to detect the characters that don't get played and possibly reclaim the names after a period of time? I like my characters to all have their own theme but i've given up on thinking of unique names and taken to just calling them variations of Ereez but this sucks when your tryna give them their own identity.. Before anybody tells me to be more creative, I literally have spent hours on the name screen with no luck. I know people could just log in every so often to keep their name but there's probably lots of people who've quit playing all together, what can be done about this? Edit: Also I was wondering, Do you tend to have consistency with naming your characters or do you have unique names for each one?
There was a name reclaim not that long ago, the developers have said they have no plans to do another one any time soon. Sorry but you're outta luck.
I'm not really sure about the first part, but for my toon names I just add an adjective. For example I like Greek gods, so my toons are called Divine Apollo or Noble Dinoysus. And to go back to the 1st part I would go onto wavedox and search the name up and look at their cr, not sure how to reclaim it though. Hope this helps
As far as I've seen by now, it's only hard to get a good name if you're going after iconic names ... Let me give you a great example. I created a new character when the Skip to CR100 was available (just to mess around, nothing serious) and my name is so basic I had a hard time believing I actually got to use that name. It's Jackal. There are no invisible characters or anything, I just added AL to Jack ... You'd figure something so basic would be unavailable by now xD My point is to go after something that isn't remotely iconic. I used it because it's very similar to my name and it works great.
Instead of a name reclaim, just let us add two spaces to our toons names. It would allow much more variety in names, I'm not sure why it hasn't been done already, they did it to league names.
I got 99 problems but naming my toons aint one and most of my toons are like less than one year old (except my main Rasca)
Yeah, the name reclaim already happened as stated, so don't count on it happening again soon. Honestly, I can't for the life of me understand how it's hard to make up a name or find one that's an interesting combination of others or using titles. I have seventeen toons in total, have had more over the years that have been deleted, and only two have had names you might hear in a comic book. You know, typical names like *Thunder Girl" or "Mr. Mindful". (not actual names I've used). I only have one toon that someone else has (or had) in use at the time of creating mine, and it's a name I'd been trying to get for a while but the other player has left the game or is using it as a placeholder (it's a level 3 on the Brainiac ship), so I used a lower case 'L' as an upper case 'i' and the name is all in caps. That's the only time I've done something like that. I've never had a single toon with an X or a number in my name because the one I wanted was taken (unless the numbers were intentional to go with a tech based or robotic toon). My advice is to avoid iconic names or names based on powers in general, though the latter can be done to good effect if you're willing to put in the time coming up with different combinations and grab a thesaurus or dive into Google. Anyways, I have a number of methods I employ to come up with my names, and in hopes it might help you to think outside of the box, I'll share them with you now. My process is often making up names completely, like right now on the fly I could come up with something completely weird and made up out of my head for an alien character, like say... Krulgor, Melsyndicor, YsorNagoth, Ageosis, Gemyseon. I might write those down and swap and combine bits. So take 'Krul' from the first one, and then add 'seon' from the last one to make Krulseon. Maybe I'll stick with that or add on to it to make Divine Krulseon, Commander Krulseon... or how about Krulseon Fire if you're making a fire based toon. Most folks aren't going to be asking about your name anyways, so come up with something that sounds fun and interesting to you. If someone does ask, make it up and tell them that Krulseon Fire is... uhhh... umm... it's the name given by your enemies for the weapons your people rain down on them from low orbit, and how it lights up the skies like fire, burning the air in their lungs as you crush them into oblivion! Or I guess you could just go with xxSuperman00101xx, if that' easier and takes less work. Now lets say I wanted to come up with something for some kind of fake mythical warrior or God. I'd think of ancient mythology and use similar sounds I know they used to generate my own words. I'd ramble off words and twist them around to come up with something like Aparthasis. If that's taken, I'll start replacing letters or adding some to find something available like Aparthasisous, Apasiseous, Asapitheous, etc. I also try to take into account what sounds more feminine or masculine, so based on these names, I might try and go softer for a female and come up with a variation that sounds more gentle and soft like Apartha. Off the top of my head right now, I'm starting to think it sounds too much like " a parthenon", so I might keep twisting it in my head more. Partha, Parthanea, Apatheana.... Patheana. Ok, so right now, Patheana has that Anna sound that's familiar to us as being female, but different enough that it sounds like a goddess or warrior or something. Now, if a toon standing at the broker in the magic wing was wearing all sorts of the new AFIII gear or Greek robes and had the name Patheana, would you even question if that's a real Greek name? Probably not, because it looks and sounds like it might be legit. But I just completely made it up. Now here's the kicker. I just Googled it to see if it's a real word (which I always do before committing to a name) and found out that it's the name of a school in the Dholpur District of Rajasthan, India. But so what? It still sounds like it is along the lines of what I'm looking for so I'd still use it, because no one is going to ask or question it and technically I still made it up. Then there's names that are relevant to your powers, which are probably the most difficult, but not impossible. So say I wanted an earth sounding toon, I'd start by looking at different types of rock like igneous, sedimentary, etc. Then I'd start by narrowing it down to Mr. Igneous, Captain Igneous, etc. If I know my toon is going to be tiny I might go for something that sounds right, like Pebbles. Knowing that's likely taken I'll go for the titles again e.g. Corporal Pebbles, Sgt. Pebbles, or add on to get Pebble Smasher, or if it's a speedster maybe something like Pebble Racer, etc. (cheesy but I'm just throwing out random ideas as I type). If that doesn't work I might combine the two for Pebbles Igneous. If that's not working I'll look for things associated with the power, so for rocks I might Google types of grains of sand and find out "Hey, there's something called Lithic sand... Lithic reminds me a bit of Lilith, which is a girls name", and see if that's taken. If it is, maybe I'll try Lilly Lithic or go back to titles like Mrs. Lithic, or Kid Lithic, or if it's a male I might try Luthor Lithic, Lietenant Lithic, etc. I'll also Google the topic with searches like "The study of rocks" or "geology" and start quickly scanning articles that discuss the topic, looking for words that stand out that I can use. I also try to name my toons based on what I think they'll look like if I know what gear I want them to be wearing. Being an artist, the visual aspect of my toons is my favourite part of creating them, and I often have styles in mind that I want my toons to work towards getting before I even create them. That helps me know if they'll be technology based looking with hard armour that's futuristic, or soft flowing cloaks that lend well to magic users, weird alien heads or creature legs, etc. These are all things I take into consideration ahead of time, and sometimes that changes and sometimes it doesn't. For example, I have a toon with a name based loosely on his power and what he does (controls quantum) that's one word, who started out as an alien toon with a head piece I bought from the MP. I've had that toon since quantum came out and he's never changed his overall look much, until about a month ago when I noticed I'd unlocked the "Professor" title on him. So I swapped out the alien looking head and now he's changed into a regular human dressed like a scientist with a few tech looking pieces added on for flair. That's the nice thing about generic one word names, is that you can use game earned titles like Professor, the Protector, or Champion of Earth to help your name along. That's a toon that I can literally change his looks daily, and his name will always work because it's fairly nondescript but is still associated with his power, but he could be human or non. Another great tool is the thesaurus. I've been able to make great use of this for both toon names, as well as interesting league rank names in the game. My last piece of advice is Google Translate. So again, using an earth based toon, I might enter the words rock, shard, earth, ash, earthquake, boulder, etc in the English side, and start seeing what it gives me if I ask for the word to be output in Swedish, German, Estonian... whatever. You'd be surprised how many great sounding names you can come up with that way. If the name is taken but you like the general sound of it, so as I've said above, and start adding or removing letters and twisting it into something new. You now have all sorts of ideas you may not have used before. It just takes some thinking outside the box really. I'm sure you can come up with something unique and original, without having to add x's, numbers, or other letters onto names that have already been taken by someone else.
This, i create Acquagirl so that i can switch her to water......took me like less than 20 minutes to find it....FYI Acqua is the word for water in Italian
I always get a kick out of the "be more creative" or the "I don't understand what's so hard" posts. In any MMO over time players come and players go. In this game a lot of those that left got stuck on the Braniac Ship (this led to several changes to the tutorial being made before the Xbox One launch.) The vast majority of those players who quit never even make it to level 30 unfortunately. So what happens to all those names you ask? They remain taken because when you delete DCUO off of your hard drive your characters remain on the host server. Over 3 million unique accounts have been created (and that's a low ball). So unfortunately it's not about just being creative, it's about playing a guessing game with countless other players all over the world who for some reason didn't become hooked to this addictive and one of a kind game that the current devs and previous devs poured their hearts into. Also when the previous "Name Reclaim" happened none of us on PS or PC were aware that the names would be shared. Which lead to a lot of confusion. So why are names important? https://forums.daybreakgames.com/dcuo/index.php?threads/why-are-names-important.223174/
This. Also: Both name reclaims were done to make crossplay between PC and PS work - one to prepare it with locking names on each other's platform servers in case it was taken on any of them, one to clean up the remaining doubles directly before crossplay - so the crying kids "mommy I want that name!!!!" benefited by accident, the name reclaims were not done in the first place to given them cry-babies candy.
Yeah it gets to a point where creativity is irrelevant and your just tryna find something that isn't taken
Translation: The name reclaims we had were technical necessary. You don't get your name: grow up, deal with it, stop crying, or check the boards if the name is for sale. Next name reclaim only when active population drops so much that the remaining servers need to be merged again.
In the six years of DC Universe Online's existence, quite a few characters have been birthed and named. Should you be in the market for creating a new character right this second, you can probably imagine that trying to find a unique name is quite problematic. I think my previous post was too long so I simplified it. The previous name reclaim was not just for cross play however Wade. While I don't have the exact numbers, a lot of players purchased "rename tokens" in anticipation of the reclaim and used WaveDox to search for a name that they always wanted. Well looks like I made it in before "First come, First served" rhetoric.
