I brought up this topic up about 4 months ago and @CCP_Swift commented that he wasn’t able to answer at that moment. Just wondering if there has been any development on this issue since then?
This is the original post
From what I’ve gathered from the community, many are not satisfied with their name because it was made when the player was young or when they didn’t know a thing about what they wanted in eve. It’s like when you made that first hotmail account when you were 11 and now as an adult you’re going to your first job interview at 18 with pokemonboy11@hotmail.com.
There are however legitimate concerns to this suggestion that I’d like to address:
This would make it possible for players to disappear, it’s important that we can save and track a player, especially if the player is influential.
Solution: We would not want CCP to totally delete the old name. The old name should be saved in a log on the character sheet and should be searchable just as it is today. So there is no way to hide your trace. The new name should just be the ‘display name’ that people see in chat, in space and so forth. But they can still click the profile and show info to see the old name in a tab there.
Why would CCP make name changes possible when they would make more money from a player who extracts all skills and creates a new character, then buy skill injectors to make up the loss?
Answer: While it’s technically possible to do this if you really want to change your name, the time investment to extract and the money you would have to spend to buy injectors to make up the difference makes this option unreasonable for the vast majority of players. I would therefore suspect that what ends up happening here is that almost nobody ends up changing their name because the barrier to do so are just way too high.
To summarize:
In essence, name changing is already technically available, it’s just not available at a reasonable price point for most players which is why very few extract for the purpose of changing their name.
Also, if a player decides to extract and inject into a brand-new character, the new character won’t be able to be linked back to the old one which is the main concern people have about name changes in general.
If you thought I forgot any concerns about name changes please post them in the comments.
Yes, most of the players that have raised this issue have years of skill training on their accounts so it’s not easy to just start a new character.
My main thing here is that it would make a lot of players happy if they could change and if it’s implemented correctly with name logs it’s not going to hurt anyone. CCP will even get a new source of income from this.
Nope, your name revolves around everything in EVE. (By “everything” I mean business deals, YOUR REPUTATION, how you make friends, and how your enemies perceive you.) This would be breaking the core concept of EVE. If you want a different name go use a character slot. Plain and simple.
Want more than 3 personas? Go create another account. Doesn’t even have to be omega.
Name in videogames is grounded hard. I want people to have consistent names. I am just totally against it. OP needs to make a VERY compelling argument for this.
This is weak at best. It destroys what drama is built around… Your name! I never ever hope CCP allows to change names for $$$. Most games don’t! They have never touched that from what I have seen in my life.
Yes, I totally understand your main worry here. That’s why I am advocating for a log of name changes on your character ‘show info’ where your previous character name is still searchable in the exact same way it was before. It’s just that your main display name can change but you can still click the character to see his previous name. Kind of like how corp history works.
Right now, the system is set up so that it incentivizes people to totally erase their history and go and create a new account if they want to change their name which is the exact opposite of what you and many other players that have raised the same concern want.
If you make it easier for people to change name and log their previous name you are actually getting more people that keep their core identity through the in game tracker.
Fair point, Steam has this. My main concern is how people would run from drama via changing name. (You can do that with alts anyways) I will be more reserved in this. And always I defer to CCP as they may take discussions like this into consideration.
Not sure if I follow all of that exactly but, I believe this is a separate topic beyond changing names for $$$ Yes you can make a new alt dump $1000+ and run from drama/mistakes.
And when the name wasn’t available then? That was a case why I wanted to rename char myself. GMs told me that they can’t do that because “history of player interactions” so I biomassed the old character and started new with same name except single characrter and the “history of player interatcion” is now gone anyway.
It is nonsense. They can rename characters and they are doing it. Try create a character with name “No Homo” and see how long you can keep that name.
CPP simply wants you to (hopefully) pay more for training up new character, buying the skins and other apparels again etc.
How does this matters when the only other option is to biomass and create new char?
And it does not stopping GMs to rename your character if some LGBT finds your name offensive. All this stuff is stored in database based on character #id not name. Name can be changed anytime and it will all work - this we know because GMs are renaming players with “bad” names already.
The only real impact of renaming is that players who are hunting you will be having a difficulties to track you especially if that name change was drastic such as “SomeNameThatOffendedLGBT” to “Gallente Citizen 123456789”.
So if you didn’t know, all these players with name “faction Citizen number” had their name renamed by GMs.
Not necessarily lgbtq related names, but straight up names that ppl shouldn’t use considering 13 yr olds and sometimes younger play this(even though 13 is the age limit technically) and with eve being rated T or pegi 12, some names they are forced to change via their policies.
If you make it easy for people to change their name with an attached trackable and searchable log, I think more people would much rather do that than scrap their entire character and maybe years of skill training.
So I think the effect of this would actually be that we would have fewer people who try and delete their eve history by extracting and starting a new character.
Sorry for the slow response. We are aware that there are valid reasons to want to change a characters name, while also preserving identity in a single shard universe where a capsuleers actions are permanent. There are some amazing ideas in the community that would combine both these concerns.
That being said, gladly will continue to relay this desire to relevant parties and will update as soon as I know anything.
