put yourself in our shoes for a moment. 15 years ago we didn’t have the nice graphical appearances of our characters we do now, 15 years ago, our picture profiles were cartoony. Specifically, gal characters used to look japanese, and as you can see i have a samurai name, but now that we have carbon characters, personas has changed. I’m not asking CCP to wipe our employment histories or our contact block lists, i just want to be able like once every 2 years have at least the option to change our name as the game’s lore changes, no changed employment history, no changed bad lists, just name only
just like real life spies, even spies has name changes, so why not have a tab that shows what names that character has changed and when it was changed
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Honestly it makes no sense not to allow it. Like you said, if they simply added a tab for name history, then that solves any potential issues. But I dont even believe that is necessary. Characters already have a unique ID tied to them, the name is simply a box in a database. Whatever argument about personal history within game…what difference does it make if nothing else changes. So people may not immediately recognize a name that shows up red or blue…so what. Most people dont remember the names of every character they have put in the contact list. I have plenty that i dont remember why, all i know is that there was a reason. Especially for negative standings. And most I have never interacted with again. Any character with sufficient history in game for it to matter are going to be well known and a name change would end up being broadcast by friend and foe alike. The argument that you could just start a new character is asinine. This is a game built on the idea of taking literal real life real time “years” to earn and learn. It isn’t another cookie cutter MMO where you just willy nilly create new characters because you want to try a new build, and takes you at worst a month to max level. It is impossle to replace a character you have years into without paying absurd amounts of money. Which is an unreasonable ask by anyone anyway. Plus, i dont think most people would want to lose their characters history anyway. They are just tired of looking at a stupid name they picked when they were young and dumb, or didnt know if they would even keep playing and were just trying it out. It just makes no sense to me that ccp is against it. I can see it not being a priority, but actively against it makes no sense.
Some names get known for certain activities, allowing an easy way out, even if you keep standings isn’t a positive change. I get it that people have issues with their chosen name, but EVE is different than a lot of games, where your reputation actually matters.
Imagine if someone had a negative rep on the same level as Chribba. Why should that individual be able to escape the negative rep they earned by making a simple name change?
For another example, we have to deal with awoxers in FW that are well known for it. It would be a pain in the butt if they could just change their names every so often and leave us wondering why some random people we don’t recognize on our contact list have negative standings.
No one would escape negative rep, and it would be easy enough to send out a notification to anyone who has that character in their contacts, updating them to the change.
If they are not in your contacts list, then you obviously dont need to track them enough for it to matter. Keeping all the old information and still having a link to the past names means that if you were looking for a specific character, you would still be able to find them. So lets say you keep an OOC list of contacts, pen and paper, or excel, google docs…and you dont see that person any longer. You can just search for that original name and it would pull up the character with the new name. Show Info tab for previous name and there you go.
I understand the appeal for changing a name, but at the end of the day, it creates more problems than it solves, and you can always make more characters if you want to interact in nee ways with the game’s lore (although I do understand that isn’t the same.)
I also think it’s cool for the game’s history to have the same name for a character, but that’s just my opinion.
Let’s be honest here. The only reason you are wanting to change your name is because of FOTM. Some new movie or game came out, or some new social trend on TikTok, and you’re wanting the name of that character…
It would not take years to implement this. Databases are not that fragile, and if their database is setup in a way that this would screw stuff up, they need to go back and fix that ASAP. I work with and in databases everyday, and a change like this would not be that difficult. I could not believe that the programming would be the issue here, they are not amateurs.
On a complete aside, the whole argument about history seems invalid to me in game. And I mean that from a inside the mind of actual capsuleers living and operating in New Eden. We are clones, that have our minds transferred to new bodies whenever we die, or feel like jumping across the universe, or need a different set of implants. Our bodies are not static, the only thing that is static and immutable is our mind. It would stand to reason that in game, it would actually make sense to be able to change our name and appearance on the fly. New body new look, and with a new appearance comes a new name and new life. In world, the explanation has something to do with the connected/registered signals I believe, like a subspace signal that registers each capsuleer and keeps records. Now I don’t think that changing names should allow you to basically erase your mark or history from inside the game. But it would make in the world and lore.
It is even a plot point within EVE lore, The Broker does exactly that. Uses clones to change appearance and names as needed. However, even that could have a cool in game explanation, you pay a hacker to disrupt the signal or registration or whatever that connects your information to everyone. It would have to be very expensive and therefor not something that would be done on a whim.
Another aside, a lot of the argument against it doesn’t really make sense. Creating a new character does exactly what people argue against. Oh, this guy was a ganker, I don’t want to lose track of him. But then he creates a new character and ganks you because the new one isn’t red. And can do that an unlimited amount of times. And with the ability to just give skill points to people, it completely gets rid of the problem for new characters not being able to do the same stuff as older characters.
I don’t think that most people who want to change character names are trying to erase their in game history, just a stupid or bad name they made in the past. I for one wouldn’t want to lose my history in game or friends lists or connections, just what name shows up in game.
It would be cool to have the option. I’ve played on an off since 2005 and I’ve been married and divorced twice in that time frame as well as retired from the military. For some reason I made wife characters both times… It would have been really cool to have been able to change their names instead of delete them.
