Pretty much any of those activities. For the new recruit, how does the guild officer recruit them if they are not in the same area? Maybe you would not allow that, but that is a convenience that players expect in an MMORPG. For the jerk who keeps stealing kills, maybe you want to put him on an ignore list. How do you tell the game who you are talking about? Maybe you decided to put him on an ignore list after you left the area. Also, which has been brought up, is reporting to a GM. After they have left the area, how can you reference them? Pretty much any other instance where you need to reference someone to the game server itself if they are not in your immediate area.

The way we get through real life without hardcoded names is because we don't ever have to reference someone in a computer terminal to tell a server to do something to them or with them. If we want to report someone to the police, we just go do it, and it is up to them to figure out who it was. If we want to invite someone to a guild in real live (I don't know...maybe a worker's guild? lol) we just walk up and ask them to join and then go fill out the paperwork. We never have to reference an individual to a server that is controlling our lives or our surroundings.

Also opens up a whole new area of fun. Master of disguiese work out the money on changing appearance on your own. But allow players to pick pocket other players and possibly get away with it. im not talking about your grand sword. but it would make it to me fun. so some kid stoll a couple shillings. good on him. he is the one that has to pay for a disguese. You will know he did it. find him later if he didnt change or even chase him, then murder the thief. lol. have fun with role playing open roles, keep the mystery. who cares who knows who. if we are friends ill find you well travel together, there will be access to you name in some sense. Heck that even allows bounty hunters as a class. even more fun. PVP full environment with bounty hunters. heck yeah
that makes it hard and fun. maybe thats just me, but i hate floating names. If you have a high awareness. you sense it. and it leaves a trail. that you or any bounty hunters in the area can follow. REap the bounty.. I vOTE NO ON NAMES. For fu n sake

That sounds fun to run around and cause chaos, but not when you actually want to organize players and work towards goals.

However, I have always liked player-to-player stealing, and have ever since playing Achaea: Dreams of Divine Lands. However, I just don't know how it would work in a modern, graphical MMORPG. Achaea had a very complex legal system to back it up that I don't know would work in a large-scale game.

What if it did work like this. you have a theif skill. you pick pocket some one if you are good your get away with a few gold peices, or an average max based on lvl and value of money. then if person getting rob has a high awareness then that persons name pops up on the screen or they are frozen till in game authorities are called. two of an equal skill coin toss. But if you have the skill to check your person you can randomly check in a crowded are if you are being pick pocketed, always 100%. same thing if they get caught. person pays penalty. Also as a side not if your a thief we write a code connected to the last 10-20 people robbed. player doesnt know so if this person is caught then the npc authorities return go to the most recent, then to the back of the list going forward and how much was stolen. then remaining names start his new list.

If you want to allow that, just let them transmit references long distance. Personally, I don't care for the way current games make physical location irrelevant. You kind of have a situation where everyone's in a room talking on their cellphones instead of each other. But if that's the kind of game we're talking about, just let players exchange references remotely.

You can use a reference in your contact list for all these.

If you didn't get one? Do you expect to see these people again? If yes, then you'll have another chance. If not, then there's probably no reason to worry about them. It would be a good idea for players to get into the habit of adding people they meet to their contact list.

Let me ask you something though. How does a unique, hard coded name help with any of this if the name is long and/or difficult to spell? Unless you have a photographic memory, you need to make an effort to remember a player before referencing them after they're gone, hard coded names or not. It might be a little easier to recognize people on their second meeting with names, but if you want to report someone before meeting them again, then you'll need to have somehow recorded their name anyways. Not that much easier than adding them to a contact list.

You just have to scroll up your chat and/or action log to see their name. If they didn't do anything to get on it, they were probably just some person in the background that you won't care about.

How big is this contact list? That sounds like an incredible burden for players to add everyone they meet to their contact list and give them an alias.

Also, what if there is a crowd of people you don't know all standing in one place and people are talking back and forth to each other? How do you know who is who? What will you see on the screen if player's don't have publicly-known names? How would you ever know if the person standing next to you is saying "Hi" to you, or the other people standing in the group? In the real world, we can see who's lips are moving, each person has a distinctive voice, and we can tell which direction sound is coming from, but in a game you will not have these advantages.

I would have to say with that in mind i would allow floating speach,

In a crowd of people I don't really think it would solve the problem. At least not in a 3D game, where your perspective is going to be more from the side at around head-height. You have to be able to distinctly see everyone's head to use speech bubbles to tell who said what (anyone who has done a 50+ person raid knows you don't see anyone distinctly if you have that many people in the area). If it is over-head, 2D, that would likely solve it.

Also, speach bubbles have to disappear so people can see the playing field. Will the conversation just disappear as well. How will player's text be represented in any kind of chat box if you don't have an alias for them?

I am for names in a dialogue box. and use of a name, I just think they dont have to be unique, i would allow any name you want. I mean just on the game window you wont see the name. i would be down for their name in the dialoug bubble. If they dont talk you wont know them without clicking on them. Actually most importantly i get tired of seeing things like red2040284, then i am left wondering who was red2040283, let alone red.

I should emphasize again that the game I was thinking about is slightly different than most. It is focused on city-building rather than adventure. Players will be divided into small communities, and will primarily socialize within these communities. Travel to other cities will be possible, but will be a major undertaking. The fact that the playerbase will associate primarily with the same people over and over, and will exist in a physically compact area will go a long way to making this easier.

I'm talking about this from the point of view of a more conventional game partly for simplicity, and partly as an intellectual challenge.

That's a great point. It might be a good idea to set up some kind of system to let players add people based on logs.


Presumably large enough to be practically unlimited. People don't need to add everyone they meet, just everyone they want to remember. Admittedly, it is a burden, but not much greater than any steps you'd have to take to record their username.


Well, that can partly be solved by floating speech bubbles, like rcodax suggested, and partly by emotes that let you target players.

I hadn't really thought too much about what players would see when a stranger speaks, but I think it might be a temporary, dynamically generated "name", perhaps a brief physical description, maybe just race and gender, appended with a number if necessary. It would refresh every time someone enters or leaves the zone. Or it could just be an ID number.

These are good questions, thank you.

I actually missed the part about it being a forced division into small communities, and thought that you were assuming through the game's design that players would stay in small communities and rarely see outsiders. Now a lot of this makes more sense. An idea such as this I don't feel would work in an open-world, highly-populated MMORPG, but likely would in smaller communities. Speech bubbles would likely solve the problem, as long as large crowds ("body piles") could not form. If they can, that is when speech bubbles start to break down. Too many of them, and the playfield can get completely obscured. Too few of them, and you can't distinguish a player's head to see who said it.

Going by your design, for the chat box, I would suggest something like:



I would definitely shy away from using player IDs. It just feels tacky and makes players feel like cattle ("28472A got out of the pen last night").

The other thing I didn't mention is I intend to have player governments take over as much of the social moderation functions as possible, which includes making and enforcing a naming policy for their city. It might cause a lot of problems to let any city you pass through forcibly change your unique, hard coded name.

Yeah, that makes sense. A brief description like that would probably work best. Since I'm not really planning on having different races, I think what I might do is let players set a brief description of themselves via one or two menus of options: "A rugged gentleman", "A refined roughneck" etc.. Or it could be based on their actual character model, their clothing, their skills, or their age. I'll have to think about it some more.

Actually, I got a different idea to identify who said what. It could go along quite well with the short descriptions. The problem with short descriptions is that you can still have more than one player who fits that description in one place. What if, when someone says something, the text shows a certain color in the chat box, and a momentary aura of the same color glows on the player?

Well, I was thinking that if more than one player had the same description, a number would be appended based on the order of arrival into the area. Yeah, that is tagging players like you warned against, but it's temporary and they won't see it.

The color idea sounds cool, but I was planning on an interface that was part 2d, part text (more of a graphical MUD than an mmorpg), so it wouldn't really make that much of a difference in my case.

Personally I think the whole idea built around this was a soild discusion, but some where down the line it went crazy.

If people don't have one name, or everyone sees a person as someone different, or if a player can switch there characters name at anypoint it will be chaos.

This whole idea has been over thought for something no player will care about, unless it bothers the hades outta them.

RECAP, this is CHAOS, Kronos~