Originally Posted by
Eurhetemec
Calling it a trick and giving only one reason for the change, i.e. "cash money" does not seem non-judgemental nor "not searching for the evil", mate. I mean, I can take you at face value here and accept you didn't mean it that way, but you sure wrote something that looked like the kind of "It's all an evil plan!!!" conspiracy stuff some people come out with.
And I'm pretty sure the main reason they allowed gender-change was that it's something people have wanted for a long time and fit in with their general ethos of improving people's ability to customize their characters. And many characters, maybe even most, don't have gendered names. But I'm sure the side-benefit of more name changes wasn't seen as a negative. Note they did put in the -30% cost too, for a month, so they're not gouging on it either.
Re: some other suggestions people are making re: names, some of these are really ill-considered. Names are used as a unique identifier in WoW (unlike some other MMORPGs where only an account name is the unique identifier), so you can't really have people changing them constantly, or even with a cooldown, you need something even more serious.
Letting people name-change freely would cause other issues as well - for example, any topical or political issue would immediately cause a bunch of idiots and jerks to rename their characters about it (and be "creative" if Blizzard saw it coming and blocked them). It's bad enough with people creating new characters to do this, but every jerk who loves to troll /1 and /2 would be all over this. So that would be a ton of extra work for Blizzard, as people report the names, CSRs change them, the idiots in question change them again (even if there's a cooldown, as soon as it's over) to whatever "clever" new thing they can come with, and the same idiots also make tickets and official forum threads about how terribly unfair was that Blizzard renamed Covidinurnose and so on. And if being bad with this locked you out of it, the people would whine literally for the rest of eternity about how "unfair" it was that "just" for repeatedly changing their name to racial slurs, they got banned from changing their name and now their immersion is RUINED forever. Whereas if it costs them money, very few are going to bother with this. You'd basically be making a mildly annoying situation into an incredibly irritating one which required significantly more resources from Blizzard.
So I think name-change being paid makes sense. Even if the money didn't go to Blizzard (i.e. to a charity or something), I think it makes sense for it to be paid, because you need a deterrent against people changing them constantly. It's $10 so not bank-breaking if you're serious about a character, but enough to make trolls and most idiots go "Uh, nope". It's essentially only an issue because Blizzard made something else free.
Now someone may suggest well maybe every character should get a free name-change, but I've seen what happens when games give those out in other games, and it isn't pretty. Loads of characters change their names - then they brutally regret it a few days later - and their one free name change (or change per character) is gone/done, and people tend to get upset. Some even quit rather than buying a name-change. And obviously you get the same topical-troll idiots who all think Covidinurnose is the best name ever, and don't even consider that six months later they're going to be feeling like a moron, even if Blizzard don't force-change them. Indeed, you see this even in WoW. Some moron decides to create a topical-name gimmick character, but then they enjoy playing them, end up at max level, and are really regretting the choice - and instead of re-rolling, they just beg people to report their name. Free name-changes would just massively multiply that problem.
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