Should Names Be Publicly Displayed?

Aye, and that maintains immersion! I cant wait!

 

My preference is to show the names. Unlike many of you, I don't talk to everyone I see in game. But I do notice all the names and watch the actions of some and notice some of their comments. I enjoy that part of the game and would hate to lose it with everyone being shown as 'outlander' or 'stranger' or 'poet' or 'town clown'. Plus, starting a /w would be difficult since the message would be from 'Outlander' to 'Outlander'. There are so many other things that I would prefer to see rather than something like this.

 

I see your point, but in my opinion the whole idea of playing online is for interaction. You will meet people, maybe they would walk up to you and ask you for your name. If you do not want to give it well then you are for this system of hiding your name. You can always meet people in the forums here and meet them in game also.

 

This, this, a million times, this!

 

In addressing the quote.. I would point out there are more efficient means of verifying who knows who. Rather than searching a database.. you could attach the information to the character. Then you're only scanning a list of character ID numbers attached to your character rather than checking a database every time someone enters an instance and you only have to do it once when you log in.

Potentially hundreds of thousands of PCs in a comprehensive database.. but let's say you only know the names of 100 people. That list is saved in the form of character ID numbers to you character.. loaded at log in. Someone comes within range.. it only has to check their ID number against your list. That's not enough to cause any lag.

 

If there are 100,000 players at launch, I have to have 100,000 extra flags in memory just that feature locally in the client? And even if it isn't scanning those against the game servers all the time, it has to sync with the game servers eventually. And even if it was kept locally in memory and it isn't a unique SQL check all the time, locally it adds time before it renders every player by checking a local flag.

This would be a performance hit no matter how you slice it. And I'm not sure it is worth the cost.

 

Captain Jack voted no. If Captain Jack walks up to a pretty girl at the bar to buy her some rum, he must first ask her name in order to address her properly. That would be nice to see in a game, but Captain Jack doubts we'll ever see something like that. Too many youngins out there will complain of data entry and too much "immersion" for "immersion" if it were ever in place.

Also, if your DBMS can't handle a correlation database for a user base of this size, you are doing it wrong and shouldn't be trying it at all.

 

Not having the ability to see someone's name in the game makes about as much sense (to me) as not seeing names in this forum, and that person doesn't have to reveal their name to you unless they want to.

If there wasn't PvP in this game, it might not matter as much. But I think it would look pretty silly seeing everyone named Outlander to begin with. And what if you don't want to know that person's name, because they're a jerk? Putting some stranger on mute or block with the name "Outlander" would squelch most people in the game.

 

It could be easily solved if you just walk up and talk to them. How do you know peoples names in real life? Do they have glowing names above their heads? How does this differ from an npc character. You will have to walk up to them and ask them their name.

 

This would be incorrect. You're assuming a piece of information must both be present and loaded for every player. That isn't true. You only need 1 entry per character you know. There's no need to reserve space for data here. If I only know 10 people.. the list is only 10 entries long. There would not be 999,990 blank entries in memory waiting to be filled.

Also, numbers do not take up that much memory. Yes, technically every action takes time.. but when it takes your client .001 seconds to scan a list of numbers.. you're never going to notice. The only possible concern here is the "death by 1000 pecks" which is best gauged by the devs who actually know how many "pecks" there are and how many they can afford.

 

lol the premis of the argumen i belve has been construed. in no way do i think that every person that you know in real life u know thier name by have actually talking to that person.

exple 1 how many people here can say they know who the president of the united states is or who is the queen of england.
exple 2 how many people know who the slut is in town. obviously none of us ever talked to the slut in town but we all know who she is
exple 3 we all over hear conversation every day that gives us information on people that we have never met but guess what when we see them we go ohh yea thats so and so.

thier was once a link/app on facebook that took your friends list and added everyone on your freinds list friends and then thier friends and u knew like most of the world.

the imersian aspect that i hear to counter point that yes this is a great idea how do you know someones name without talking to him i find false. in real life we have sensory perception. in the game we dont have it to the extent of real life. yes some people have better memories than others. other people dont pay attention to thier surredings and know even less. but bottom line is i would wager my months of earnings from my company thiers dozens of people you know who they are without ever have met them or said a word to them.

i personaly think that it would be a travisty if we droped the names and had to ask everyone thier name. system load and add to the fact that some people might lie. in some ways i think i probably would lie just to see how many differant names my char would be known by

on a final note some people in the game have a reputation. (good and bad) add a 1000 people or even 100000 people to it with stranger and such. reconizing someone for hey watch out hes a crook you would never know or even on the other side of the coing hey if you ever see so and so talk to them they really know about x. i think the loss of that out ways the little effect of emersion you would gain

 

What you say is indeed true in real life, I wasn't trying to go into depth with the whole Identifying thing. Yes you probably would know the President if you seen him in real life. Just like you would know by "looks" Lord British. You would never though have interacted with him, or had a conversation with him. You really would not "know" him. Sure there is gossip, the tavern keepers do it all the time, but they send you to some one to "talk to". I see your point, but really it is flawed from the role play point of view. This is a role playing game right? "looks at genre". Your characters would not know anyone from this world, you just got sucked through a portal to get here. You wont know gossip, or the mayor, or anything. If you see all the names of people above their heads, you must have some godlike divine powers of mind concentration or something, or your character does I mean.

If you overhear some one talking about some one's name, that could be considered a rumor, and should be treated so in game, you could say, "oh that is the guy that goes by calling himself a lich". Until I gave you my name you would and could assume it was true. Just like real life. If I told you my name and lied about it, my name would not highlight above my head and you would know I am lying. If I say my real name, it would light up for you. I am sorry you disagree with it but really how hard is it to gain the knowledge of your friends names? Would be no problem. but as it is, its impossible to hide your name if you want too. I see such a great roleplay opportunity here that would be lost just because people are lazy and do not want to do anything extra than log in and have the game be a virtual IRC channel with an avatar to stare at while talking on teamspeak.

 

I refer everyone to my first post in this thread on page one. More or less the same concept. I have also been promoting the idea of character knowledge/member and catching spoken dialogue off and one since kickstarter.

 

Ya, I admit, thats probably where the idea came from.

 

Technically it shouldn't be that hard to do really.

 

I'm just going to go ahead and shamelessly plug that thread I was thinking about back on page 1. This goes all the way back to May '13

Unknown tag on unknown people

It never got a lot of traction back then but sometimes it's just fun to look back.

 

I still support this concept wholeheartedly!


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk.

 

I don't really agree. But, how would a person even feel obligated to answer? If they have no choice, and the name appears just by targeting someone and using the keyword name, like we do with NPCs, that pretty much defeats the purpose if you asked me.

 

This. Another really good reason.