Sunday, January 18, 2009

What's in a name?

Rilgon Arcsinh at Stabilized Effort Scope was kind enough to not only add me to his Blogroll but also made a post about doing so asking people to come check it out. One of the comments left on his post said:
"Call me petty or maybe I spend too much time on Rp servers, but one look at those character names and I sort of zoned out and closed the window.

Failsauce? Seriously?"
So it got me thinking, how much importance do you place on your character's names on WoW?

For me, going back to Ultima Online, I've always named my characters based on this criteria:

1. No Permutations/numbers. Yeah, I could have named my main RiffRafff or R1ffRaff but that would have bugged me every time I saw him.

2. Easy to spell/type. My friend's first character on Warsong I still have a hard time spelling. Asylynn? Ayslnn? bah screw it.

3. Something that may reflect the character's makeup in some aspect. IMHO, Failsauce was a good name for a Gnome DK (the worst choice for DK race). Twobitpunk seemed appropriate for my rogue, and last I checked it was also unique.

4. In the case of a crafter, I'd want a name that looks good/funny/interesting on the maker's mark. My main crafter on UO made armor and weapons with the "crafted by Little Girl" mark. They actually sold pretty well to other players.

I've never been one to get that immersed in MMO's. Even with P&P D&D my character names were not stuff like Brock Ironbeard or Willow the Nymph. I understand there are more strict naming policies on the RP servers, which is totally fine. I really do enjoy roleplaying in online RPGs beleive it or not. Still, I still would not pick Tolkien-type names on an RP server. /shrug

2 comments:

  1. WoW names are important to me because I'm a lore nerd and play on RP servers, not so much because I actually RP, but because I like thinking about my characters' backstories. So all my characters have names that, I think, would be viable within the world.

    But just because somebody else names their characters differently than I do, doesn't make them a bad player/person/blogger/etc. I mean, c'mon, the biggest hunter blogger on the net is named Bigredkitty. =P

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  2. Good point Pike.

    I like naming my characters based on something I like, and then flavour it to the game.

    For example, Klinderas is two things.
    The first half is an anagram. Klin=Link. I like Zelda games =D

    The second half just makes it sound elvish.

    Then again, I put half the amount of thought into an orcish name for my first DK. Kragarth. It sounds orcish, end of story.

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