A possible solution to player names in Battlegrounds?

[Bzl]

Featured on MMO-Champion a short while ago was a thread on Russians in BG's. While there might be problems (or possibly not so) that we cant easily fix in regards to this issue, I think there is one thing World of Warcraft could adopt with very little work.

It directly relates to a small problem. An annoyance you might say.

Peoples names.

Some of the anger in the thread was directly faced at Russian names. Cyrillic letters making no sense to us. Challenging namecalling in RBG, and general confusing due to the names.

In another game, "Counter Strike Global Offensive", the community based anti cheating system (Overwatch) has a resolution to remove bias towards anyone based on their names. This system replaces everyone's names with random names (from a pool of meaningful words, not just random letter combinations). The person that is suspected of cheating is named "The Suspect", but that specific is not relevant to our cause. Look at this screenshot for an example (thanks google):

http://cloud-2.steampowered.com/ugc/...CBAB71084DB51/

Would it not be possible for WoW to implement a similar system for battlegrounds? Generate a list of a couple of hundred words, assign an "temporary" name to each of your enemies, and poof, you no longer need to deal with annoying/taunting/unreadable names.

You and your teammates name can/should remain the same.

Is there any good arguments as to why this would not work?

[Deleted]

separate the battlegroups again so they can spam cyka bliad and hack among themselves

[Deleted]

Ehm.

What do you need names for? You are reacting on enemy class, not names...

And this is why, russian players are so much better. EU is about transmog and names, russia is about teamplay and willpower.

[Bzl]

Ehm.

What do you need names for? You are reacting on enemy class, not names...

And this is why, russian players are so much better. EU is about transmog and names, russia is about teamplay and willpower.

No, this is not a neccesity, merely a quality of life change for people who play organized battlegrounds. Being able to refer to players with meaningful names instead of getting into a situation were there are three mages on the enemy team and you are trying to tell your group/rbg to kill "iìiììÌil"

[Deleted]

And this is why, russian players are so much better. EU is about transmog and names, russia is about teamplay and willpower.

That statement is as ignorant as saying everyone from russia is a cheater. Pure dumb. No offense!

[Tyrean]

Ehm.

What do you need names for? You are reacting on enemy class, not names...

From experience as TC for many years now, I can say that the meta game in RBG especially rewards stacking of a few classes at any given time. When you are trying to coordinate a kill and there are two warlocks/warriors/mages/boomkin/priest/dk it can be very hard to coordinate.

[solvexx]

Pretty much RBGs have devolved to class stacking, so simply calling classes is not good enough.

[Terahertz]

Seperate russians from the EU BG = happy playerbase. You people all say that quality > quantity so it should be best for the game, right?

[Gwiez]

First let me say, this is an interesting idea that has merit in my opinion. Not just in RBG, but other BG and even arenas. But...
Wouldn't this make it harder to recognize players you've seen before? And in the meantime, how hard is it really to learn to transliterate Cyrillic? If you know the Greek alphabet, then you're off to a good start. In the US, we're constantly being told how much better educated people in other countries are. Why is learning a few dozen letters that hard?

True, it doesn't solve obfuscating names like "iìiììÌil", but for Cyrillic, just print out a list of letters. It won't take long before you won't have to look for it.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Why not make it just like Battle pets are in WoW already? Where there are no names, and everyone remains anonymous. Only for random BGs though, don't force me to try to pick out my archenemy out of his War Games group based off of his transmog. Just, no.

[DeicideUH]

I like the OP idea (renaming the enemy team). Make a list of racial names and each player on enemy gets assigned a random name from that list.

[Raelbo]

Great suggestion OP, I think this idea really has merit and you should post it on the official forums.

But...Wouldn't this make it harder to recognize players you've seen before?

It wouldn't be too hard to make the game select a specific generated name based on a hash of the original name. That way an opponent's name, even if it is completely unintelligible, will always result in the same, readable, assigned name.

And in the meantime, how hard is it really to learn to transliterate Cyrillic? If you know the Greek alphabet, then you're off to a good start. In the US, we're constantly being told how much better educated people in other countries are. Why is learning a few dozen letters that hard?

Irrelevant. Of course it's possible for a team to do this, but WoW remains a game that is played for fun, and I can promise you that in any RBG team there are going to be people (ie most of the team) who will find it a chore to learn Cyrillic - and who can blame them? Furthermore, for this suggestion to remain workable, the entire team needs to know how to translate from Cyrillic. This becomes particularly painful every time a new member joins the tea. Also, what if people want to type stuff for clarity? All in all there are still major logistical issues for a team of people who haven't spent their lives using Cyrillic.

Really, the last thing you want is stress in the RBG team because Bob can't understand Bill's pronunciation of some crazy name. That just leads to unfun.

[Tyrean]

They will never do the name replacement because of the cries about loss of community and the fun of running into known players, etc.

[Fang7986]

They will never do the name replacement because of the cries about loss of community and the fun of running into known players, etc.

I think you mean the fun of taunting and harassing people who's name's you recognize and being able to make a level 1 alt to whisper insults,vulgarities and "L3RN 2 Play NEWB!" to someone who you've taken a dislike too because that's been the experience I've seen. Hell I've gotten Bnet invites with that stuff in the send message part of it from people who got mad I killed em. That's why people would cry about it

[Deleted]

<- Dont play battlegrounds

Problem solved/never existed

[Ettan]

<- Dont play battlegrounds

Problem solved/never existed

^^ And this is why the rest of scandinavia hates the danes, they are sadly as retarded as they sound.
If you do not care about pvp a little hint would be to not post in the pvp forum.