Character name accents

Since we're potentially getting character renames in 2.0, I'd like to suggest that we have the ability to add accenting characters. Nothing fancy, just a hyphen or apostrophe, maybe a limit of two each? That way people can pretend-name themselves as Zilartians, Kuluu, and Padjali. And they don't actually have to be part of the formal name (IE - /pcmd add First Last), just flavor text on the name plate. So if I name my character Nag'molada Douchebag, it shows "Nag'molada Douchebag" in the chatlog, but I can use "/tell nagmolada douchebag You're a douchebag" and it works.

As a developer myself (not an SE one) I see many problems with that specially in the way most systems store the information in back end servers, it might not be difficult for them to add the ' and - but I see some issues if they decide to add á,é,í,ó and ú, specially for stuff like player search, they would have to validate searches for names like "Pokémon" and "Pokemon" which could be the name of 1 guy or 2 different ones.

This would also make sending tells annoying.

What would be annoying about it? You'd send the tell as if there was no accent to begin with, as it would only be for display purposes mostly and not actually be necessary to type out. As such, there wouldn't be people with the 'same' name either.

I would really really love it if we could have an apostrophe ' ! The ability to have a capital after it would be better. eg. Sa'Ni

I'm all for this. Being an RPer myself I tried to convert my character's name into something more traditional calling her "M'hana". As long as the formal name (Mihana Zhralyia) and the character name (M'hana Zhralyia) are kept separate then there should be no problem. If someone wants to add me to their party they can just type my formal name and it will work allowing you to use the character name solely for nameplate appearances only. Checking the player or hovering over a character name will reveal their formal name allowing you to easily pick out for invites. Or if it really bothers someone, add in a toggle feature to display formal or character names. You'll still have to invite/trade/etc, by common name of course.

lol @ the grass tag

But I like this idea.

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Originally Posted by Reiterpallasch

What would be annoying about it?

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English keyboards don't make those symbols easily.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Molly_Millions

English keyboards don't make those symbols easily.

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Right, but in my proposal, it doesn't actually affect anyone in that way. Think about XI (and how XIV *should* work) - it doesn't matter if you capitalize someone's name or not, the /tell or invite or dbox still goes through. Similarly, if the game allowed for apostrophes and hyphens, they'd only show up on nameplates and log text, but you could/would basically ignore it when typing. If you included it, the game would strip it out before determining the recipient.

Now, I wasn't actually suggesting Latin characters, but I'm fine with that too - just make an equivalency to base ASCII characters. In other words, if I use é in my name, it's stored as an "e" in the DB and /tells and such use "e", but shows in the log as é.

My only problem with Latin characters is the nonsense that it will inevitably lead to when people start accenting every damn vowel in their name, hence the suggestion of a limit of two hyphens/apostrophes.