Unhappy with your character name, but don't want to lose your time and energy?

I would give Anet my eternal loyalty if they made this feature available, but so people dont abuse it, make it like the change territory thing,

you can only change your character name up to 3 times or something .problem solved, no abuse there huh?

And to the people that said about hair,face etc, Yeah that is a excellent idea, I mean after playing the same character for 100 hours, who's not tired of his/her face?

/signed

Here's the thing, when I got GW a year ago I wasn't sure about it so I was just going to mess around a bit. So I created a stupid name for my main character "Glichy Mc Glich". Apart from the fact that I spelt it wrong I have gone to far to simply delete him just to get a new name, but I hate the name, it doesn't go well with the rest of my other characters. So yeah this feature would be awsome, however this thread was made over a year ago, and nothing has happened since. I wonder if its still a consideration from Anet.

Technical aspects aside, I'd like it. (and aesthetics, but that's somewhat off topic)

/signed

Wouldn't it be possible to save the starting names where they are now, but have the modified names be somewhere accessible, and the client would only write the secure/unchangeable name if an accessible one wasn't available/created? Then each character would be linked (friends/ignore/etc. lists, for example) according to their secure name, although the accessible one would be the one that is displayed in the game. And a name history would be available, to avoid scammers (marked with change dates, in case somebody who wants a name that was previously taken aren't mistaken for someone who was once a scammer, for example). I dunno, maybe I missed some obvious flaw in my "brilliant" plan.

/unsigned

It's your own damn fault you named your character 'Iol Owned Noob'

Yes.. I've seen that.

Just suck it up and realise that 'funny' names aren't really funny or cool at all. This is just to make up for being an idiot when you made your character. The only way you can learn your own common sense is by making mistakes. Learn from your mistakes and make better names.

/signed

Better to have the feature in place than not to have it. There are different ways to make sure it's not abused, but that won't be a hard game mechanic to figure out.

And in response to those who believe this will cause problems in the database (i.e. cascading a name change through multiple tables), it really won't be that bad. The name should not be a key whatsoever; there should already be an automatically incremented number representing your character across several tables in the db, leaving the character name to be a single text field. No worries there.

Maybe people who don't make funny names still want to change them. I try to make my character names sound somewhat reasonably like a character from that continent would have, but sometimes I realize that it just wasn't quite right, but I'm too far in to warrant a restart. You play for a while and then you have one of those moments where you go, "Why the heck did I think this was good?" So far my Elonian character sounds *maybe* about right, but there might come a time when I look at it and simply cannot picture him with that name in this situation. I also have a Canthan-born character with a more Ascalonian-styled name, and while it doesn't bother me greatly, I would like to just tweak it to be more "Canthanish".

And as to the point you made, I don't like "funny" names either, but if someone wants to change it so something more reasonable, why should we stop them? The quality of a name is subjective, after all.

(The only characters that I have with remotely funny names are my mules, since I have no reason to care about them outside of their storage abilities. At least they are descriptive and correctly spelled, though.)

Being able to change your character names would be great. But you'd have to put some kind of limit on it to prevent/discourage abuse.

I'd suggest either making the namechange feature a set number of uses for each character (like how many times you can change your home server), or put a price tag on it (1,000g or something).

And preferably make it something you change at the Character Selection screen rather than ingame.

charge people 4.99 to change their name.

Why? because people who are serious will change it, and the people who would just abuse it can still abuse it...but are paying 5 bucks each time, so in the end, they're losing.

/sototallysigneditsnotevenfunnyhowmuchthisidearoxmy sox

/signed


And yet , a year later, and 123232 posts later. No answer

... lol just noticed someone ressurected this year old thread, >< was geting my hopes up for nothing.

/signed.

I also dislike my hair!

ah bah I named my paragon ''Vynas goes paragorn'' >.<

ah well, have ti live with it

If people are so worried about abuse why dont they put it on a sliding scale like skills. 100, 150, 200, 300, 400, 600, 700, 900... that way it would get really expensive... eventually. I mean the point of a scam is to make money right? If you're spending 9000k changing your name you probably arn't making money. Just a thought.

Anyways. /signed

I'm so tired of hearing people quote this as gospel. Unless the fields are the primary keys in the database tables (which is possible with the name, but doubtful with appearance), then they can easily be changed.

No problem whatsoever, so unless you know this for a fact (do you even know what type of database they're using), don't go quoting what is most likely a myth.

It all depends on how their database was architected. If it's an Oracle database, then it's likely that _all_ characteristics of appearance can be changed. It's whether or not Anet considers it a worthwhile investment of their time and money to do.

/signed

Oh absolutely a great idea. Some of my database guys at work have done this when we've screwed up on the database design and created a primary key with something that we later need to change. You create a new table called something like "Display_name", with the fields "character_name" and "display_this_name", or something similar. Then you have to go back and refactor all the code to change all references from "character_name" to "display_name".

That said, I doubt that Anet will do this, due to the cost involved. Of course if they turned it into a gold sink or charged you $5 to change your character name, then it might cost-justify.

Maybe if it was limited to one or two times. not an unlimited number. Peopel would eb changing their name everyday or some every hours. It would be insane.

hi woot.

unless everybody from Jeff Strain down to Gaile Gray are lying in posts and interviews it is just that secure and unchanable.

the devs know what their database is and they have said it is unchanable once made.

you have (as i) no idea how it is set up so saying it would be easy is total ignorance compounded by Bandini

/signed

Yet they can force you to change it if it is deemed offensive