I’m personally quite fond of names where each letter is one of those fancy characters with umlauts or accents on them.

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It is kinda bad that Blizzard doesn’t enforce their naming policy very well.

Unlike Awlbiste, I ablsolutely HATE all the special characters in the names. Makes it kinda difficult when trying to type in the game to them.

It was something I used to do, back in the day playing Warcraft 2 but come on….not so cool anymore and more like a pain in the butt.

Sarcasm -__-

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Awlbiste: I am ashamed to know you, ma’am! You are no longer welcome to this site unless it is to further ridicule you. (I know sarcasm, too. Maybe?)

Apadwe: The characters used to be breaking the rules because it made it difficult to target players in Player versus Player situations. Changes to targeting and also various add ons have made this a moot point and so I think Blizzard relented on that policy some months ago.

Furthermore, the passive stance that Blizzard takes on the vast majority of their policies is very disappointing. Don’t even get me started on roleplaying. Blizzard asks that the community for each server enforces their policies (while determining interpretation based on how people report and on what they report), but without having dedicated staff for each server it’s difficult to make any lasting impact.

I’ll probably write up something on this exact topic in the future, using my own background as a former Game Master of one of the largest free Ultima Online servers back in the day in contrast.

Cynra’s last blog post: If Your Name is Listed Here, You Should be Ashamed

You know, it’s always been a thing with me… while I could never bring myself to name myself anything but a lore-appropriate name (even on the few non-RP servers I have tried…) my hunter pets almost always have some sort of non-lore-meaning to them. Tux, Locke, Eltanin, Alyosha, Ivan, Regulus, Hoban, etc.– all my pets have a meaning to them that I guess could be taken as Out-of-character. That said, they are never so OOC as to break the fourth wall or seem “off” (pets named things like “IPWNHORDE” all in caps bug me to no end).

I guess it is my own little nod to Blizzard, in the end. Blizzard has a super deep lore background but aren’t afraid to give their NPCs names like Haris Pilton. My characters have a deep backstories but aren’t afraid to name their pets after the Linux mascot or characters in Russian classic novels. =P

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Yes Blizz has changed the policy on using those funny accents to allow them.

Funnily enough I was reading a thread in the Feathermoon forums just last week where the OP called for Feathermoon to be cleaned up re Roleplaying names and our guild was one of the names listed hehe. Considering that many of the guilds listed were the leading raiding guilds on the server I suspect this poster was merely a troll wanting to evoke some serious frothing at the mouth - which he/she did.

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I have to admit, Hugh Heffer made me laugh a little. But, I’m generally a fan of funny or obscure names. I still giggle whenever I talk to Ophera Windfury.

What really annoys me are people who want a name that’s already taken, so they add “x” to the beginning and end.

That, and hunter pets with improper capitalization.
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Generally I’ll back any post or player who leans toward the RP side of character naming. I’d add that the non-leet non-class names rules should apply very strictly.

But I still like my Tauren druid named Casserole. He’s a hybrid! OK, its bad, but its not an RP realm.

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I am sorta guilty of “complete or partial sentences” Wickedminx my twink - and Shadowhaze a Warlock I haven’t leveled. I’d like to think of them more as like the names of the Native American Indian names like Swiftriver, or Eagle eye, and also because I see too many other nonsence names that never get changed,
I don’t like names like Hordepwner, ect ect .. or names that include a class
My 70’s are however Fictional type names - though when I rolled horde I did follow a variation of goddess names

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Pike: I have that exact problem when I go back to the PvP servers on which I originated. Even worse, I continue to roleplay my characters, as evidenced of Ildiko the Mighty of the Shattered Hand US PvP server.

And my hunter’s pets all have Latin names that relate to what they are. For example, the strigid owl with whom Eszti is most comfortable is Alatus, which is an adjective meaning “possessing wings” while the crab that I affectionately picked up as a tanking pet is Maris for “sea.”

Jezreal: If you follow the roleplaying community a lot on our server, you’ll see things like that crop up every couple of months or so. And I can understand why; I’ve been in the same boat before. It’s incredibly difficult to be a roleplayer on a roleplaying server and yet have to live with the fact that the vast majority of the server won’t roleplay, hates roleplaying, and will never even make an effort to roleplay — despite the fact that roleplaying servers exists for the sole purpose of providing roleplayers with a haven to roleplay.

I think I’ll end this comment before I end up on a huge rant. Again. Whee! And thanks for the heads up regarding player names. I was pretty sure that I had read the changes, but couldn’t remember any specifics.

Zigystardust: Oh, some of them are quite witty and they do make you laugh. And people who add letters to their name clear say, “I chose Cloudxxstrife because Cloudstrife was already taken.”

Typhoonandrew: I was going to add this to my post, but I figured that I’d leave it as the quirky rant that it was. Non-roleplaying names can sometimes be used by roleplayers. I vaguely remember one gentleman — a gnome warrior, I believe, or maybe a dwarf — who had the name Chair or Stool or something like that. He was a roleplayer and had a pretty good in-character reason why he had that name, but had to experience a forced name change anyways. Blanket rules do prevent the occasional roleplaying use, but it’s still better to err on the side of caution.

Damned shame that Blizzard doesn’t enforce their own rules actively.

Zarah: The emphasis of this post, which I probably didn’t make too clear, was specifically roleplaying servers. The vast majority of the rules apply to non-roleplaying servers as well, but the air of idiocy that results from said names is usually pretty accepted. On a roleplaying server, however, I look at names like this and wonder why the hell they even rolled on that server and what they were thinking when they did so.

I do like, however, when names have a theme. Sometimes they’re extremely subtle, like my use of Hungarian names for my characters. Then you look at people like Kestrel who wears his love of birds on his sleeves! <ninja-waves at Kestrel>

Cynra’s last blog post: If Your Name is Listed Here, You Should be Ashamed

I’ve seen people forced to change their names, which included special characters, even though they were perfectly legitimate, such as accented a, e, i, etc.

I wish I could be an agent of the Naming Police. I wouldn’t need any special treatment, just the ability to click a button and reset stupid names.

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