On Siren, yesterday around early evening EST, Limsa (of course) there was an odd looking set of PCs.. one Level 2 name 'x', the others a pair of Level 90s sharing name 'x ii' - ok. The pairs names were identical.. but you could not search for them using the Friend tool, even though they were standing right in front of you, even with a dozen spelling variations to see about alphanumeric display artifacts. The pair of same-names also appeared to operate and move independently, and were, per examine, DoW and DoM, respectively.

It seemed a bit scary until I thought about it a bit. Their names could be what we end up seeing if strange and wonderful alphanumeric characters were used to spell them, knowing those odd, like early Greek or Roman, say, vowels, would show as identical in present day English.. I really don't know what the game's character resolution or translating capability is when oddball funny-looking 'a with a fishtail' is printed as regular 'a;' for example. If that is what it was, it seems harmless enough visually, but if someone has discovered a means of duplicating toons including their inventory, that I suspect is a catastrophic exploit. I'm not yet certain it wasn't just my setup or an artifact of alphanumeric rendering, so if anyone else has seen it.. say so, so we can maybe figure out if it IS really scary.

da Shootah