MMO Tropes: Name Unavailable
If you’ve ever played an MMORPG, then you have more than likely encountered this problem. Especially if you start playing a game that has been long established. You diligently create your character and spend time and effort customising them to suit your needs. All you’ve got to do next is choose a name, so you type in a pithy and droll title only to find that it has already been taken. So you quickly come up with another and that too is rejected. Next you try the same name but with some “alternative” spelling but the game resolutely tells you that even that permutation is already in use. I have found that even with a list of names that I’ve drawn up prior to playing the game, it can still take anything from 5 to 30 minutes to find one that is available. Naturally, this process is very frustrating, which is hardly the ideal user experience for a new player.
This problem is common to a lot of older MMOs. The Lord of the Rings Online, Star Wars: The Old Republic and Age of Conan are prime examples. Newer games tend to have a more flexible naming system often using a surname that is account wide. This often negates any issues with duplicate names. New players are often aware in advance that securing their name of choice in an older game is going to be problematic. The main issue is that a lot of these games do nothing to help beyond rejecting your choice. They do not give you any clues as to what names are available or any potential spelling changes that are required to bypass the problem. They basically say “no clues” and you’re left to randomly try various permutations until one is accepted. The problem with all this, is that if you do not secure your name of choice it can diminish your gaming enjoyment.
If you’re of a sceptical disposition about the monetisation of MMOs, then you’ll see a direct correlation between this inherent naming problem and the fact that renaming tokens are readily available to purchase in the respective game store. Such items can cost anything between £5 to £10 which seems excessive when you consider that the game itself has contributed to the player ending up with a name they’re not happy with. Although it may sound trivial to some gamers, having “the right name” is an important aspect of character creation for a lot of other players. I like to have character names that don’t obviously clash with the in-game lore and I don’t really care for “humorous” monikers. As previously mentioned, a new player should not really be having these sorts of problems. Surely the best business practice is to make their introduction to a new game as frictionless as possible?
My recent return to SWTOR was prompted by a scheduled “character name purge”. Developers Broadsword sent all players an email stating that inactive accounts would lose their names if they didn’t log into the game by a specific date. That date has now been and gone and as far as I’m aware a substantial amount of names have been released so that new players can access them. When I reclaimed my Age of Conan account recently, I had to rename my old character as a similar policy had been implemented. I didn’t complain as I last logged into the game a decade ago when it went free to play. All of which goes to show that game developers are fully aware of the importance of character names. In light of such, it would be nice if the MMO genre adopted a more equitable policy regarding them.
