Your issues seem like they can all be easily solved by turning floating names off in your UI.

Please explain how that can solve either the issue of name scarcity or inappropriate/immersion breaking names. Admittedly it might help the latter, but I fail to see how it would solve it.

Edit: Let's not forget meta-gaming like Cayle brought up either.

As you said, it helps, but it does not completely fix it by allowing people to ignore names they do not like.

You also have to remember that there are two sides to this. Unless you are wanting to run an enforced roleplaying only server, there are going to be players upset that they cannot take the name that they want (or give their character any public name if that is the case).

I realize that. This has its disadvantages, and there are very likely to be complaints about it, especially since it's a departure from what players know.

However, there are disadvantages to the traditional system as well. For the most part, players have gotten used to them and don't complain about it as much, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to move forward and explore other options.

Like you said, there are going to be players upset that they cannot take the name they want. That is the flaw of any system that requires a GM-enforced naming policy- people are going to disagree on which names are acceptable or not. This will hopefully remove that question from the equation.

The confusion and inconvenience you have brought up are non-trivial concerns, but if the design is such that players are mostly dealing with the same people over-and-over, I think it might be feasible. Like I said, it works in the real world. I guess we won't know if it'll work in a game until we see one that tries it.

The only time there is going to be a problem with disagreements over which names are acceptable or not are when there are ambiguities in the naming rules, which typically only happen in smaller indie games. Most large scale and commercial MMORPGs are usually very specific in what is allowed, and some go so far as to offer examples within the rules.

But as you said, we won't know until it is tried. If it didn't work, it would likely be easy to update to a standard naming system. I guess it just feels to me that it is a pretty radical system to fix a fairly small problem.

Name scarcity is easy to resolve as characters in most MMOs are not references by the names but by their UID. Just don't put in a duplicate name check and you're set.

As for the second part, "immersion breaking" is often subjective, but that's not the bad part. The suggested solution of renaming others locally will attract two types of players - the arrogant RP nazi with an undo sense of entitlement and the problem player who will have a blast renaming everyone to the most vulgar name he can think of... primarily for public display. The former will go ballistic the first time the latter posts screenshots/videos with the former's character renamed to something insulting or offensive.

So you think I have an undue sense of entitlement? Just asking.

Do we really need this? Roleplayers are playing a different and very specific type of game; and one that requires far deeper immersion than most others. Unfortunately, that immersion is easily broken.

Even if the policy is clear, that doesn't mean every player will like it.


Maybe. But it might have unquantifiable social benefits in the behavior it encourages. It might have social drawbacks as well, of course.


I'm afraid UID is another acronym I'm not familiar with, but if your game has a whisper function, character names need to be unique. Even if you don't, it opens up problems with players being mistaken for each other, or impersonating them intentionally for scamming or harassment purposes.

Of course it's subjective, that's why I want a system that gives people choices.

To the rest, I'm afraid I don't agree with your profiling. Furthermore, if someone wants to put vulgar labels on a screenshot, he can do it with MS Paint already.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universall ... Identifier

UUIDs are VERY handy.

It is a unique identifier. SSN is an example. Should only be 1 instance of that value to identify an entitiy. They are useful for players so they can be referenced instead of their name in the code. This is a common database practice as well.

--Josh

I actually played a MUD that allowed duplicate names. The way it worked was that the first person with that name could be referenced in whispers just by "/tell jackolantern". If another "jackolantern" was made, they could be referenced by "/tell jackolantern.2". This did reward people for creating a unique name, because it was easier for other people to reference them, but it did allow players to take a name they have their hearts set on. Players also had an ID that they could be referenced by, but no one ever used them because people never remembered them, or how they could get them.

The downside to the system was that lots of mis-tells happened.

Alright, but you're not going to present these UIDs to the player, are you? So there could still be problems with non-unique names.


Hm, so when you encountered the second jackolantern, would it say that you see "jackolantern", or "jackolantern.2"?

Either way, this system sounds about as confusing, if not more than the one I was proposing.

Not to anyone in particular: There seems to be a lot of opposition to this idea, and I'm not sure if I understand why. Don't get me wrong, I do appreciate that people are interested enough that they'll try to point out any flaws they can find. It is very helpful for my to think about every aspect and get my thoughts written down. However, it feels like there's something obvious I'm missing. Could anyone fill me in?

Ok, it is a long an complicated explanation that I'm truning into an demo of the kinds of things Memotica can do. The first partis on my blog. I'll put the second part up tomorrow either before or after work. I've worked out the diagrams, but need to add them to the post draft.

Oh and perhaps a warning... I don't yet have a "Hello World" example and this "example" is like diving straight into class inheritance.

Oh yes, it was pretty awful lol. I was just adding that I had seen a system using IDs that allowed duplicate names. It is a terrible system that players can pretty easily abuse and use to scam other players by creating duplicates of other players and then try to fool their circle of friends into giving currency, items, time, etc. Even if you allow players to check the ID (like this game did), it is highly uncommon for players to check the ID of their friends everytime they see them to make sure it is who they think it is. If you are always displaying the ID, it hurts immersion and makes people begin to think of each other in terms of ISBNs and barcodes lol.

Interesting, but you spelled my name wrong. Looking forward to part 2.