I've seen a few... well... lets be real.. a LOT of names on Eve Online that aren't really names, which is fine. I am an old character from the character creation that didn't know they had the option to add a last name. Is it possible to give us the ability to change our name or even add a suffix to our name for old time players who wish to have one?

Even if we have to pay a fee like WoW and the other games who allow character name changes. Allow people who have us on friends/standing list to keep us there, OR somehow publicly let it be known on the TV in the Captain Quarters. Also, just like Remapping attributes, you can only do it once, and it cannot be done again for a long time.

Thoughts?

It's better to leave it the way it is and let the character creator learn to choose his names more carefully.

I agree, name changes should be allowed. On Steam for example you can view Aliases of someone, other names they've been known by. Combine that with either paid or limited #/year changes, then I don't think you're losing immersion or risk abuse for espionage or whatever. I would love to change my name simply because I hate it, but I'm not going to train a new character to do it. That's just stupid. If you can change your portrait you should be able to change your name. IRL changing your name is much easier than changing your "portrait". Make it happen.

New people, being new, do not know they will not be able to change their name later, since they're new. When you have spent some time in the game, as you have, then you know more than new people, since you are not new anymore.

If giving people the ability to change their character name helps us keep more people in the game it is worth to us all.

Very true about the Steam. All I want personally is to add a last name. I didn't have the option back in my trial because I didn't know it was available. When I play an MMO, I suspect when they ask for a character name, they want a first name.

Bump for a CCP to answer.

Mind I still wouldn't mind CCP having some slightly stricter guidelines on naming practices. Some peoples names are done simply to **** with FCs calling them out, which really should be disallowed imo - same with totally unpronouncable names that look like someone simply smacked their head on the keyboard and went "Yep, that's a keeper!"

Name change service should be avilable in a nine year old game. It's pretty standard feature even for 2-3 year old mmo's these days.

Just put a reasonable limits and prices, and we're good to go. Let players track name changes if they cry hard enough.

Thoughts?

Your name is cool.

People with only single name are the superstars, the legends of EVE. Think of the greatest Brazilian goal scorers, having just one name tells the whole universe that you are special.

really? i dont play many mmos, but pretty much every game that ive ever played didnt let me change a character name once the game was started,

I wonder how many of the other games that you are thinking of encourage the amount of asshattery that EVE does, where Your name is the only persistent way to keep track of someone. I would bet that most if not all of those other games dont.

That's an interesting point.

I get what you're saying. I really do. But since Eve is localized into Russian and Japanese and such, it is extremely hard for people who have no knowledge of those languages to say 'Yeah, thats just screwing with us'. Especially when you add to it that very few people have real words as their name, it would be extremely EXTREMELY hard to enforce that. And then you top it off with Eve being a long was distant even from the pretense of role playing for most players, a lot of people are happy to roll with a handle, rather than a genuine name, because that's the nature of the interwebs. A lot of those names aren't really supposed to be said out loud, just read off a screen. Its supposed to be individual and unique, not practical.

As for adding names and stuff... Hmmm... I think that mechanically its a no-go. Since your name as originally typed is the only way to persistently find a character. Imagine trying to look up a guy you were friends with back in your old corp, maybe to call in a favor or just to chat. You put in his first name, because he was first name only...The results already put out everyone who has that name and a surname. And add to that all the scamming crap... Bleh. Given that even people with names that they thought they invented (like mine) have a few other people with similar names, and so even minor changes can make it impossible to find someone without blind guess work.

I'm sorry, but it just doesn't seem that there could be a place for this in game. It's just... The way it is. Changing the only unique identifier for your character, at any cost, would break various aspects of the game. Even non-sinister uses of this would be at best deeply inconvenient.

the sad thing is that even a compromise, like having a thing similar to your corp title that you can fill out yourself would mostly not be read and even then its not going to be used to refer to you.

As has been rightly pointed out. Name changes are a bad idea if people can just hide from their past.

You might argue... oh hey, put it in the character sheet like the employment history.

However, no matter what you do to record and make available the information regarding name changes it doesn't matter. The long and short of it is that I would not enjoy having to open char info and browse name changes to get an idea of who a pilot is. If you're that guy who acts like a prat or the guy who's flying the fail fit BS, I want to know at a glance, not have to find that info.

No to name changes, it's cosmetic and although it might suit the few who made a bad choice when they started off, it's gonna cause extra clicking about for everybody else.