Kaitona wrote: »

Have you played any other online games before like this one? From your post, I doubt it very much. I have played almost every major MMO that's been released over the past 15 years and this is the only one I've encountered with a naming system like this. DCUO is on consoles and it lets you use your character name, not your account name. Neverwinter Nights online lets you use your character name, not your account name. Whatever lame reason the company is feeding us just doesn't stack up. It can be changed, they choose not to change it. Stop drinking the cool aid for a minute and think outside the box.

I gave you both a technical and a psychological reason why double character names on a shard/server aren't common practice in the industry. You seem to be talking about something else entirely.

Vorpal_Spork wrote: »

We're not talking about double character names.

Well, if I go by the thread title and @Kaitona 's original post, double character names is what we're talking about here. Dunno how that other topic crept in, though.

Kaitona wrote: »

Why are character names reserved in ESO? Why can't two players on the PS4 US server have the name Dave? All anyone sees is the account name, so why is there a limitation on names? Doesn't make any sense to me.

Kaitona wrote: »

No, I personally don't care for double character names. This thread was started after I spent 40 mins trying to find a name that wasn't taken, only to log into the game and play as my PSN account name. Seemed like a giant waste of time. I could just have easily had a non-unique name and their coding could have worked out who I was by my PSN account when it came to mail and anything else that identifies me. A unique name plus a unique account name is overkill for this game.

Sorry, that wasn't obvious to me from your original post, then. I agree that two unique characteristics seem a bit redundant, but given the amount of freedom allowed in the naming of a character when compared to other MMOs, I don't see it as much of a hindrance to one's creativeness. The proposed preference of players to not having to share their very own (character) name with others remains valid, though. After all, we all love these games mostly because they're not like RL in many ways, where most of us do.

Just come up with say a 'family name' add that to Dave maybe?

I always liked seeing character name and guild name. It is kind of a bummer to come up with a nice name only not to see it. Instead I'm seeing others with the names like xxPornX69xx. Honestly, I'm not sure why Zen thought this was a good idea.

In-fact I think it was Zen just being lazy.

Redoing this part of the system (the name data alone not so much, but everything that references ... yeesh) to allow characters with the same name would be a pretty major overhaul. I don't expect this to come about any time soon. Possible, yes, as long as character@account is unique. Neverwinter is a prime example of this working. I have come across characters (at least in the PC version, presumably same code base) with the same name add my control wizard there. Even partied with one.

Display, on the other hand ... it would be nice to have more immersion, if there's even any policing on character names ... wouldn't be a difficult change.

I mean, I can't even mail someone from my friend list if they're offline because I don't know their character name. Parts of this need to be addressed in some form or fashion

Kaitona wrote: »

UrQuan wrote: »

If you don't know anything about databases and you're not willing to listen to what the people who do know about databases are telling you, then you're just being willfully ignorant. You can go ahead and keep thinking that it's stupid that 2 characters can't have the same name, just remember that you're dead wrong.

Your 'knowledge' is outdated my friend. MMOs have been handling naming conventions just fine since Ultima online. This game takes a giant step backwards. I can only assume this is your first online game, so I forgive you for your ignorance. Go check out how other online games handle naming conventions. And please read the entire thread before you post again, you're still hung up on the original post.

I can only assume you've never had to work with a database, or try to make any changes to the underlying structure of a database without completely breaking the application that uses that database, so I forgive you for your ignorance. Seriously, there are people in this thread who actually understand how databases work. Read their posts.

Here, I'll give you a hint: if the character name is the primary key for the character table (which is likely, as that's a pretty standard way to do things), trying to change it so that there would be a different primary key (which would be absolutely necessary in order to allow there to be 2 characters in the game with the same name) would require that literally every single operation that refers to the character table would have to be re-written. At that point it's almost easier to scrap everything and code the entire game virtually from scratch. You'd be less likely to introduce fatal errors that would take a ton of work to track down way.