First of all, the basic idea of having a huge so called "Mega-Server" for everyone is great. But if that means, that in this whole game community every single name needs to be unique there will definitetely be a fair amount of frustration for the players who like to play with their favorite and -in some cases- not uncommon names.

I am aware that a character system that would allow duplicate character names need some other technique to identiy an ingame character, but imho it would be worth accepting this challenge in development to make every single player happy with his character and name choice. Not to mention that a world with duplicate common names is far more realistic than the same name in partly absurd variations (e.g. Aragorn -> Ahragorn -> Aaragorn and so on...)

Please feel free to take part in the poll. I can't imagine that I am the only person worrying about the upcoming name issues...

This is one reason I preordered.

Even if the name(s) you want is/are taken, there are tons of options to naming, which I won't go into because I'm not sure if it's been revealed or still under NDA. Believe me when I say there are ways to get very close to the name you want to have without having the exact same name.

I oppose

A) I dont want to have a million elves named "Legolas" running around the server

B) If I wanted to send a /tell to one of the Legolas characters, how would I do it? I don't want to deal with stupid prefixes

C) It's not that hard to come up with a unique and imaginative name. You get a first and a last name

of course they should have unique names. what kind of question is this

I pre-ordered so I can fill my character slots with names that people have used on the forums.

So there will be "Legolas", "Leegolas", "Lleegolaas"... sigh

But I get yoour point about the tell-mechanics, although I refuse to believe there isnt a clever solution to that problem.

I always liked the way star trek online does it.

There your names are attached to your forum handle so you could have plenty of John Smiths but one would be John Smith@HCGamer and another would be John Smith@Flywheel. That way you could send a tell to the specific John Smith you wanted so long as you knew their forum handle (different from their account name for those worried about security). You could set it so you never saw the @handle if you never wanted to for RP purposes, but could view it if you needed to. Throw in the ability to go invisible and bam you don't even have to be annoyed all the time if you just want to play alone.

I hope they add duplicate names or at least a name generator for each race.

I don't think getting the name you want will be a problem, and that's really all I can say

>.< Go away NDA no one likes you!

One thing Cryptic does to handle this rather elegantly.

Basically, you have an account handle and a character handle. So the full name would read "Charactername@Playername" in terms of data, but the players would only see "Charactername"

So you Could have Legolas@Rainer and Legolas@Fenixhart and have two people standing next to each other int he world named Legolas.

While I don't think there will be a problem with ESO I actually rather like The Secret Worlds approach, you have a first name, a last name, and a nickname. The first and last can be duplicates (as there are many, many John Smiths in the world) but the nickname must be unique.

It would be nice if there were a sort of random lore-friendly name generator, to help folks who are not familiar with the Elder Scrolls naming conventions for various races.

Personally, I find it very annoying, not to mention insecure, for my account name to be given out to everyone in a channel every time I speak. It's not elegant at all. It's quite gaudy and clunky to boot.

My thinking exactly.

No, but they should allow numerals in names so I can be Gandalf69.

I've got 99 problems but this ain't 1

How about 69gandalf or legless

Legomyas!

How abou
How about gimple

Fraudo

Big fan of this as well.