Walked into class last nite (teach Cisco/MS courses couple nights a week as 2nd job) , youngest student I have is 21. He gets there early with his portable PS4 Gaem case to play for while. He's mainly a console player.

He's playing ESO , I check it out , he likes it and begins to tell me about his first character leveling experience .

I say cool , walk off to prep for class , he pipes up , "Only that that really sucks is it doesn't show character names , pretty f-ing stupid for a fantasy game."

No wonder I kept seeing player after player's name tags with numbers. Mostly strange, unrelated to an RPG. Dumb idea.

I think having the option to toggle which name is shown would be awesome. I get a lot of friend requests, and messages from random people. It gets pretty annoying after awhile.

Tomorrow they have and AMA on Reddit for consoles , someone needs to not only ask the devs about this , but point to this thread.

I believe this is a console issue and not a ZoS issue. In other words they didn't want to have it that way but had to.

I hope for console players some good will comes from it. That is leader boards will be by account, not character. People won't take up 3 or more leader board spots running with their alts.

What are you talking about? Nothing like seeing a tall high elf chick with maximum settings (if you know what I mean) and the name YOUGOTBEEF420. Just makes my game that much better.


/sarcasm

I think be best to have an optional toggle or have it so if you view them you can see their PSN/gamertags. It makes it somewhat pointless to make other characters if everyone is just going to see them as your username...

Every single person, LITERALLY EVERYONE I have talked to about this topic is strongly in favor of using character names. Guild chat is the only place it makes sense, and even there it is preferable to use character names.

Fellow players I implore you to not drop this topic. Do not accept that this is the way it has to be.

This is a FANTASY game. We should not have to see GOATSMAKEMEHAWT and JIZCAPTAIN420xXx running around.

Talk about a landslide poll ...

92% for Playernames

8% for Gamertags


WOW! ZOS I hope you are seeing this & not just blowing it off like everything else.

BTW it's the Xbox's fault , again.

They said so in the reddit AMA , that is was due to Xbox regulations.

I see more and more reasons why the PS4 outsells the Xbox by so much.

Edit: Whelp I'm wrong , this was Zenimax ***. Neverwinter on the Xbox uses character names instead , so apparently it is easily possible. Sorry Xbox , this was Zenimax trying to blame you when it was actually their own laziness.

RPG = Character names. So it has been since our character sheets were written on actual paper.

I don't know and don't want to know who's fault it is, Sony, Microsoft, ZOS, Sheogorath... whatever. I won't blame anyone but I want character names to display when I target at them one way or another. It ruins the goal of this game that is to be immersive and a fantasy role playing game with friends and other players or solo if you like it so (That's one reason they keep the UI so minimalistic by the way... Or so I heard.).

Sure ID and tag are helpful when it comes to social purposes but not when it comes to role playing! How can I call to someone named by an unspeakable robot name that looks like a code of some sort in the first place? xD "1_gaZousiDaDAxXXXXXXX? Nice to meet you elf, my name is super_HOT_Momy34, let's go kill some bad guys! They call themselves Atronachs, what a stupid name eh?" And if that guy makes another character it's the same stupid name that displays. ZOS said they find it confusing to display characters names along with gamertag or PSN ID, but is it not confusing to see very different characters named the same way? I want to play with a friend that is lvl15 and I run into him but don't notice he's not a tank type anymore and that he's lvl5...

I've never seen that in any rpg or MMORPG on consoles I've ever played and I don't want ESOTU to be the first. lol I love the lore, I love immerssion and role playing (In my head or with others xD). Character names is an important feature, for example there was a thread on FFXIV official forums where players wanted to be able to change their character's name and they were willing to PAY for it... to pay! xD Some months later Square Enix made an optional service that allows players to rename their characters to fit the lore or their mood, and you have to pay real money to do so. That's just an example to show how important character names can be for players, some of them don't care but a lot of us do care. So just not seeing them display in game is insane. lol

Why can't we see names in game and gamertag or ID on the radial menu when interacting with others? Please fix this ZOS, I believe in you! I know, it's not a high priority compared to login issues and so on, but still.

PS: Sorry if my English is not always very understandable, that's not my native language. ^^

Seeing 30 xXxX420xXxYoLoSwAGg0dQuICkScOPeFazeOptic420 in one place makes me really happy

They said during their reddit AMA the other day that Live requires gamertags to be shown. They had no option because those are rules set forth by Microsoft. What sucks is that PSN also have to put up with it because ZOS probably can't be bothered to write separate code for PSN.

For those wondering, you don't need to use PSN names with online games on Playstation, there have been a few games such as MGO2 which didn't even make it possible to see someones actual PSN name unless they gave it to you. All you could see was their metal gear online name.

Here are some highlights, and what they said specifically about the issue.

Gamer ID Instead Of Character Name

This was a hard one for us internally. As you know XBOX has standards which have to be met when using their Live network. They very much want a service which is consistent and delivers quality. For instance, if you have a friend logon to XBOX Live come online they want to make sure you are notified about it. For this reason, many of the features that are expected to be working for their services overlapped with what are normal services for ESO on the PC. Friends list, ignore lists, muting, etc. all had counterparts active on our service. If you ignored someone in our game, it was expected that you meant to ignore them on the XBOX live service. So originally we had some places where we needed to show you a XBOX gamertag to be compliant, but otherwise you could see a character name.

Even though this was possible, through testing, it became very confusing. It was also a very complex thing to keep implemented on our end, sometimes requiring a doubling up of code for what was essentially duplicated functionality. In order to eliminate the confusion for our players and reduce points of failure due to the complexity of the system we chose to simply show the XBOX gamertags. Though it does, admittedly, hurt some of the roleplaying and immersion elements, the social benefits and clarity made this decision the one we chose.

I thought something was funny when I was noticing so many stupid names with numbers and [- -] faces in their names....wow, talk about immersion breaking. Other games like FFXIV are able to allow names but this game can't...I don't even feel like playing anymore especially if everybody is going to see my gamertag instead of a name....

Also what's the reasoning behind naming your character? I'm sure I missed something but what's the point? And why does it matter if somebody else has the name if nobody is even allowed to show their name? Everybody sees gamertags...so why bother with names? Why not just show all our character names as gamertags? It doesn't seem to matter since names aren't allowed.

For a role playing game, I would expect some role play type names but I never see them, it's all gibberish with numbers, this is pretty sad. I was having fun but started noticing the names and turned me off after realizing it's our gamertags.

Whatever, I'm sure they'll do just fine with one less subscription and yes I like to role play and I like being immersed in a role playing game so this is worth quitting over.