Getting rid of surnames

[Grendel]

I'm glad your on Besaid and not Kashuan. (^o^)

Well if you did decide to reroll on Besaid you could name yourself Rinoa Heartilly like you originally wanted. You'd only possibly be confused with Rinoa Heartlly or Rinoa Heartly.

[Rinoa]

Gren, that is tempting, but i have my secondary as Rinoa Hartilly. Plus Leonhart has stuck, and i like it.

[Darkshade]

Nah, that's what CTRL+R is for. If someone has a stupid hard name to remember then just don't talk to them.

[Rinoa]

Does Ctrl+R block them or something?

[Ashaylin]

Oh, so they got rid of surnames in XI? I can't believe Square would be so stupid.

FFXI never had surnames.

Use Ctr+R to reply to a /tell.

[MeowMeow]

If you removed surnames then lots of people would be upset. Imagine all the Sephiroth Randomsurnames that would be enraged since they can't be sephiroth anymore, since 12,000 people already took every other variant of the name before them. Not to mention the people with normal names... All the Chris's and Mary's in the world would be sad pandas.

Would be stiff competition over the name Mina as well, seeing as I've seen a few other Mina's running about. No fun!

[Fensfield]

What? No, God no!

Did I already post here? Geez, I hope not. But honestly, ew, no. So it's a half-second's more typing - So what? Do you know hard it is to get the name 'Hana' in most MMORPGs, or even a variant on it? Or James! I could actually use James, my real, given name, for a character of mine here!

Besides, that's why there's the Ctrl+R command, or the ability to type '/t <name>' on its own and have all subsequent tells go to the target player.

There are only two ways I would ever support something like this:

1. In the event Surnames were merely abstracted away, with only forenames appearing by characters on-screen and surnames buried in character info, which wouldn't make much difference to anyone really and might even be kind of nice.
   
   
2. If the forename+surname system were replaced with the system used by Phantasy Star Online and Phantasy Star Universe, where a character's database identifier is a system-generated alphanumeric string and names merely something for players to recognise each-other by. This system had the drawback of making it impossible to use a standard '/t <name>' command since names didn't point to characters in the database, and so to send a tell, you had to go through your contact list.

Both the above options allow players to share forenames, as does the current Forename+Surname system. Being able to have whatever forename you want is a wonderful addition to the game and something really rare in this industry, and of the two alternatives to Forename+Surname I can think of, the only one that removes the extremely small inconvenience of having to type a character's surname once or twice at most per individual set of tells replaces it with having to go through the contact list instead (removing the benefit) and would require a total rebuild of the way Final Fantasy XIV identifies player characters and god knows how many other parts of the database (as would removing forenames+surnames and replacing them with unique forenames only, for that matter). Even if the server doesn't refer to our characters in-database by name at any point you'd still have to completely rebuild the multitudinous parts of the server code where database ID and character-names intersect.

Setting aside the fact it's a feature that I would think it obscene to tear out, it simply is not worth burning development resources rebuilding the databases and code that manages identifying objects in the game world to please the portion of the playerbase has this strange aversion to typing out a single extra word once or twice per conversation (and/or didn't bother to read up on the chat commands).

[Colino]

Absolutely no.

Surnames is one of the cooles things about the game and adds to immersion. I mean I can think of at least 4 to 5 miqotes on my friends list whose first name is Luna. lol

Yes you will get stupid surnames sometimes ("Thegreat"... wtf) but that happens with single names too, so that point is invalid.

[Yazoo]

We already have a pop-up window on our chat box now, i don't see why when someone sends us a /tell we can't just click then box and have a /reply option that would automatically set you to sending a /tell to the last person that sent one to you.

Actualy ctrl+r do it. Sorry. I didn't read whole tread, maybe someone already answered.

I love surnames. Leave it.

[Mattia]

Gotta say Mattia took me no time to come up with. But Liano took me a while. Hated thinking up that name lol. I wouldn't care if they got rid of it. Agree it is a pain when sending /tell, etc.