(Suggestion) Time for a Name Purge

I study onomastics (the science of names), and believe me, there are TONS of Old Norse names that have nothing to do with any of the Old Norse gods, or wolves, or bears.

And Old English? Again, thousands of uncommon names, the best place for those is the PASE database.

The point again is that there are skads of good names out there that are not variations on anything that's already taken. There is no scarcity of names.

This is a common RPG issue. for example The Noob covered it way back when... And I *have* seen players with some variant of the name "Ohforf" in EQ2

LOL that's how I ended up with Becky for one of my names. I was getting so frustrated because everything I was picking was taken, so I went d***it Becky and it took the Becky so I stayed with it LOL

Sounds like the way I came up with some of my names. I just changed certain letter and I had a name that had never been used before.

Which is amusing as a guild mate had an issue with all their choices being taken so they did go with the random generator and their toon was named Oforf. The irony of that was when he realized the random name generated, he made his last name Uxsake.
Oforf Uxsake.
I miss him, he left the game some time ago but I left his character in my alt guild on Everfrost (now Halls of Fate)

My first character was named from a character in a book, just because I liked the name. Some have random names I made up, some have names from Nature that I nabbed in the last name purge, and when I've ran out of inspiration or in a rush, I have been known to use vegetables for names, or even various Scottish words for poop...

EQ2 has never done a name purge to my knowledge, and likely never will. Get creative

Any name that is taken? That someone else wants? Can be crafted with any number of alternative spellings. That a lot of times end up looking even cooler because of the new spelling.

We did have a name/character purge a very long time ago. Characters under level 5 who hadn't been played in a long time were dropped.

If you look back at the forums, I believe they did ONE.

Thanks Sigrdrifa, got a chuckle from that. I know when I recovered my accounts last fall, ALL of my characters had a 'W' or something else at the end of their names. Almost all of them were restored to their original name with the "freebie" welcome back rename, though.

I was quite astonished that my new Conjurer was granted "Bookwyrm" on the first try, though.

The best solution is for them to reinvent how names are done.

They should steal eso's naming function, in which you aren't limited to a first name or first and last. You can have Any combination of names up to a certain character count.
It makes it MUCH easier to find a combination of a name you like without losing it.

Another game they could rip off is Neverwinter. This game uses an @ in the name, making every name proprietary.

Example, I could name my character Arthur Linkletter, and so could a half dozen other people.
The limiter here is the account name.

So if my account name is Jovie, my character would be visible as Arthur Linkletter@Jovie

I'll be blunt. The old standard for naming rules in mmo's is archaic and flat out insipid.

It is our game, not theirs. As long as a name is not profane or outright vulgar, it should be allowed. And There should absolutely be a way for more than one person to have a name.

It takes a bit of out of the box thinking combined with a little time and effort. If the new studio wants to get on in the 21st century, it's time they updated many of their outdated modes.

100%. My brother just returned only to find out that his Wizard is now Pinballw. He was so upset that he's no longer the Pinball Wizard.

Hey! Tell him to try the /rename command in the chat line anyway. You get a free name change whenever they add those zzz or www to your name, and maybe the Pinball that stole his name has since moved off the server, or deleted that character.

Your brother's name loss could have originally happened years ago: Tell your brother to try /rename and see if he can get it back!

I remember this from playing Neverwinter on the XBox. From a security perspective I am not a fan, because it reveals a player's account name. At that point, a less than honorable person would only need to get their hands on the password to compromise the account. This game has been around for along time; many players have likely revealed enough about themselves through casual remarks, forums posts, guild chat, etc., to make social engineering a real threat. While Daybreak does allow for 2-factor authentication (you HAVE enabled that, right?!), the current options are SMS or physical authenticator/token based (without a link to even acquire said device). Daybreak/Darkpaw, please shift to using an authenticator such as Oracle's DUO, or the equivalent from Microsoft or Google!

Allowing any name up to a given character limit works for me, as long as it's engineered in such a way to incorporate "special" characters like spaces and punctuation. I don't want to be running around and seeing "Aragons_a_newb_001" from the <Git Gud Club>.

They should have a way of having it more like the real world where you can choose whatever name you want. There are thousands of people like John Smith in the world. And they have all of our account information behind the scenes. It would be nice there were alot of names I wanted for some of my alts Mystique was one of them I tried all kinds of variations and finally gave up.

The problem comes when player A sends a tell to Bob. How is the game supposed to know WHICH 'Bob' player A means?

Sorry, I'm feeling humorous and couldn't resist. How is "Dude" unique?

lol ... I had been reading the forums for a while without posting. It occurred to me that a lot of posters started with "Dude..." It just struck me as funny to use that as my forum name.

Dude...I like it.

this, people who want name purges just aren't creative or can't be bothered to actually look up names they can use that aren't already taken.

i've made 9 characters in EQ2 i didn't have much trouble finding names, if a name is taken try alternative spellings, even ones which are new. if that fails you can try a name from a language with english influnces and meaning as an alternative name. there's 1000s of names out there, but people would rather steal names from inactive players rather then take the effort to create a unique name for themselves.

allowing both first, last and a public account handle, private account handle would be a good way of doing things.

if there's one Arthur Linkletter you can type out /tell Arthur Linkletter or /tell A Linkletter, if there are multiple Arthur Linkletter's you could instead type out /tell @Jovie for an account wide tell. basically like how code vein has profile name and code name, which you can swap which is displayed in co-op except without an account wide tell function.