The Mittani is again chair of the CSM. To celebrate he encouraged people to harass a player – whom is allegedly suffering from depression issues – to kill himself. No, really. These depression issues were leveraged against the player before in an attempt to exploit him over in-game resources. Playing a player’s real-life feelings in order to get ahead in a game. The article explains that CCP is taking it seriously and watching over said player.

To that player, whomever he is, I have only friendly advice: choose to be happy. There are those who would take it away from you, but it’s not within their power unless you give it to them. Choose to be happy. Seek shelter in friendship, bright lights, and cheerful music; maybe work a therapist in there and get into a physical activity. Something like hiking or intramural soccer. I hope you’re doing okay. If it’s EVE you really enjoy, I  hope CCP gives you a life-time free subscription for two accounts and like a hundred free giant ships. You know, in a game-breaking way that allows you to pub-stomp Goonswarm out of the game.

CCP supports a player-elected body of player-representatives which has some influence on the direction the game’s design is taken. I say again, CCP supports this body of players; they wouldn’t exist or be speaking in a public, CCP-funded forum if CCP did not condone it.

Now let’s go on a snowballing slippery slope here. Assume the worst happens. A tragedy occurs and this player finally cracks. Now CCP gets its own headline on the New York Times about how their poster-boy, the Mittani, used their game and their support, to kill somebody. This isn’t like people killing themselves and each other over WoW because Blizzard isn’t putting those people on microphones at Blizzcon. This is not the kind of publicity you even want to think about; and, with CCP considering an IPO, I guarantee you they are thinking about worst-case scenarios like that one.

There is this other possibility; that the Mittani made it all up. Wouldn’t that be funny?

No, I didn’t find it funny either.

Bury this Mittani clown. Hang him out to dry.

And now, a public service announcement.

Suicide is tragic and a real thing. It’s not a demonstration of weakness; not if the victim is actually serious about it. Best case, it’s a cry for help; worst case, the individual may actually take an irreversible and regrettable action.

http://www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org/

If the person has a plan on how to end it and wants to be alone DO NOT LEAVE THEM ALONE. Use the Internet and find a suicide hotline local to you. Honestly, even if they don’t seem to have a plan, it’s still a good idea. Get them talking to a professional; do not engage this issue alone.

May you never need this advice.

NOTE: I DO NOT ENDORSE STRANGLING KIDS. Just in case anybody wants to jump on the hate train, let me make that abundantly clear. The guy was wrong to attack a kid. He knows it himself and feels bad for it. (I also don’t endorse spanking or injury-based punishers of any nature in child-rearing, but that’s not really for this blog.)

Well, as there will be no limit to the number of people speaking up for the poor and defenseless brat who thinks he’s all that while taunting people over one of the worst Wolfenstein “successors” to date, allow me to try and see the silver lining here. Perhaps this stressed out-of-work father learned something about himself with this tragic breakdown and will be better for it. Given his plea, it seems that may be true. Perhaps the child learned that being a jerk on the Internet is not okay. Even one child learning this would be a god damned welcome miracle.

A man can dream.

I also do not endorse passive parenting that results in kids playing video games for hours and hours, learning that it’s acceptable to lay harsh effrontery upon those that they don’t even know.

However, if I may be so bold, I will re-link a comic that I think both encompasses the current console gamer culture and the appropriate way to respond to it as an adult. (Note again: it is a non-violent response.)

The threads on the Tribunal forums have a beautiful pattern to them that is very easy to see.

NotSoNicePlayer posts:

“This system is broken” and “I can be a jerk if I want to be; it’s my right.”

The universal response from the developers, maintainers, community managers, and players is this:

“No, you cannot. Go play some other game. Let our community be.”

I  love it. A particularly good read on that board (no account necessary to lurk) is this post, which gathered up the majority of Riot personnel answering questions about the Tribunal.

Take note, every other game company. The bar is set.

• This old post on Elder Gamer regarding forum ragers, pretend quitters, and their kin in MMO-land.
• Rowan’s justified rant and a half regarding forum ragers, pretend quitters, and their kin in MMO-land.

We see this all the time: like a child throwing his controller when the game doesn’t go his way, or a two-year old throwing a tantrum as it struggles desperately to harness some amount of control over its environment and its own body. It’s hopeless. Without function or reason. You can’t improve your game experience by telling the devs they’re stupid anymore than you can improve it by throwing your controller.

On the same token, decrying people for the games they like – no matter how simplistic or unlikable you consider those games to be – doesn’t do anything for the genre or the community. All it really does is earn you ire. Because, honestly, no amount of slander will convince people to stop playing games you don’t like, nor will it changes those games. Developers and players are on to you, would-be forum ragers. They are onto you and they are not falling for it.

Meanwhile, I’ve spent the past several days burning away my free-time reading about EVE Online…and I am honestly getting poised to try it. I won’t cut SW:TOR out because 1. my friends are in it and 2. I am very much enjoying it. However, I play it far more than my friends and enjoy it most with them. I don’t want to risk burning it out of me…and the best way to mitigate that risk is to inject some variety. Now, I’m not convinced I have enough time to get enough out of EVE to warrant playing it, but far be it from me to not subject my beliefs to experiment.

More on this as it develops.

“If players feel compelled to buy gold, it’s because somewhere along the line, the design has failed at being fun.”

That is the second most concise and unfounded assumption I’ve seen today. It has merit, make no mistake, but I’m not sold on it. It fails to consider how lazy players can be, slash the entire reason the F2P market exists at all. What I am definitely not sold on is the first most concise and unfounded assumption I’ve seen today. This bit of contemptuous anti-player rage-crap right here:

“Player animosity toward gold-buying and selling is a bit harder to understand. Ultimately, I think it boils down to the fact that some people like to meddle.”

Let’s set aside this wide-sweeping slanderous generalization for a second here and really cut to the chase. You are omitting one very fundamental component to gold-selling, sir; one so fundamental that I’m wondering if you’ve every played an MMO with gold sellers in it in your life. I mean, I thought it was a safe assumption that virtually every MMO-writer these days has World of Warcraft on their resumes between the dates of 2004 and “two-thousand-and-now”…but maybe this writer played on a derelict RP-server with General Chat turned off or something.

(Forgive me if I seem a bit crass or pejorative, but this little riff of his got mah dander up. Also, forgive my wide-sweeping use of italics in this post.)

If you’ve played an MMO since the advent of gold sales, you know precisely why gold sellers emit so much fury in players. It is simply this:

“BUYGOLD4WOWNOW GO TO THIS OBVIOUSLY BOGUS URL DUBBAUDUBBAUDUBBUDOTRIPOFF AND BUY GOLD FORM US” x 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,…,001

Did you miss that message in General chat? No worries, they’ll spam it one bazillion times. Did you actually leave general chat? No worries, they’ll spam you with PMs one bazillion times. Sure, you can Right Click-Report, but even doing that gets aggravating after you’ve done it the twelfth time in a day. Possibly the writer is a paramount of patience, but I believe he’s actually a gold farmer.

Of course, these are possibly oversights on his part? (SARCASM: Who can rightly expect a professional columnist to do his homework these days?) Nevertheless, I’ve come to expect far better legwork from Massively writers over the past few years now, so when presented with a “HAHA PLAYERS R STUPID” post, I responded in kind.

That author asserts that game design and meddling players are the problems.

I assert that there are likely factors he has not considered. Like who his target demographic is.

Before I really lay into this long and drawn out thought on the Tribunal, here’s the conclusion: try this game. Please use this link to do it. I would really like to have more Recruiter badges and perks, and –  unabashedly – I want to see Riot succeed as a gaming company. If they do, this Tribunal idea may gain traction. It has the potential to reshape online gaming as – finally – there is a way to hold anonymous jerk-bags accountable for being jerk-bags. (Also, the game is pretty cool; it has a bit of a learning curve and may be an acquired taste…I know I hated it when I started…but it’s worth it. I love it now.)

The community has a voice.

It’s not an unusual assumption to run across in any article regaridng player opinion on MMO game balance: you enjoy Example Game, but some people complain very loudly on forums about Example Class/Ability/Whatever and threaten to pull their subs. Possibly as a result, the devs make a change to Example Class/Ability/Whatever and the game seems fundamentally changed  - perhaps for the worse – and all because of those very, very loud people.

People who get unreasonably vulgar in MMOs – in ways that filters can’t filter so they can still hurt your eyes – also seem the loudest, don’t they? It is perhaps not surprising that people who fit this obnoxious and loud stereotype are currently decrying the Tribunal on the LoL forums (and in other places).

Yes, the League of Legends Tribunal: something I’ve mentioned on this blog before. If a player is unusually vulgar, angry, allows his champion to be killed easily (throwing the balance of the game off), or does anything else that may despoil the game experience for players, you can Report them at the end of the game.

How it works.

These reports are gathered and examined by Riot’s staff; they consider “do we want these people playing our game?” They may decide “No” or “We’re not sure” and either way they stick the case in the Tribunal.

I log into the Tribunal once a day. Each case is presented to me with some number of matches, as follows for a given match:

• the champion they played;
• the items they bought throughout the match;
• their account level, game stat line (kills/deaths/assists);
• the reports from whatever players reported them for a given game;
• the game’s chat log.

Sometimes case will have as many as a dozen games attached to it (each with stats and logs as above); other times only a handful (one to three). I’ve played the game enough to know that when a player’s account is at least in the teens, they know enough not to, for instance, buy multiple versions of an item that has no benefit for the champion they’re playing; and that, for instance, a 0/30/0 stat line is blatant evidence that the player purposefully “fed” (ran up and allowed the enemy team to easily kill them).

Feeding is a MOBA concept: every time you kill an enemy champion (player), you get a tiny little windfall of gold that you wouldn’t otherwise have at that point from simply killing minions and dropping towers. Anybody that assisted you with the kill also gets a little gold for their trouble. More gold early means you can buy items faster (and also, level faster, as kills give you a chunk of experience) and this gives your champion (and thus your team) an advantage. Feeding is a process where one player allows the enemy team to kill him freely, giving them massive amounts of gold and a huge advantage. It makes them unbeatable, and is understandably frustrating for everybody involved. (Nobody likes a feeder; they ruin the experience of the game.)

This kind of thing isn’t entirely unique to MOBAs; if you are in a 10v10 match in Halo, for instance, or Blood Gulch, if a significant number of your teammates do nothing useful on purpose it’s massively frustrating. Not to mention if they spend much of their energies harassing you (or your opponents) verbally, with or without vulgarity, it can leave a bad taste in  your mouth. Might frustrate you and make you play a different game.

Well, news flash: this is bad for business, and Riot understands that. So the Tribunal is their way of asking the community “What kind of people do you want to play with” or, put another way, “What kind of crap are you willing to put up with?” When some player thinks it’s amusing to spam racist epithets in chat and basically do nothing else, that’s not enjoyable for me, so I click the PUNISH button (electing that I believe the player deserves a warning, suspension, or a ban).

What happens to the jerks.

You might think “But, Thade, the game is Free-to-Play, so what the real issue with a ban?” Well, as you play, you gain points for your play-time which you use to unlock either champions (so you can play them whether they’re on the free rotation or not) or runes (items that bolster your champion’s ability early in a match…which can help you get or avoid being that early kill). A ban means you lost all of that time; not to mention any real cash you may have put into the game to unlock the latest champion or a cool skin you like.

Bottom-line is that it does have a real impact to be banned, and this is directly evidenced by how loud those banned are on the LoL boards. “The Tribunal is broken” or “is bullshit” or “is bad for business”…etc. etc. The truth of the matter is that it’s obviously good for business, because it’s the community that’s clicking the ban button. Riot’s gone on record saying they believe the player base is actually “too lenient” but it is their decision. Personally, I’m not sure what they’re talking about; I feel that I click the PUNISH button almost every time. It’s not hard; I really really have no patience for racist or homophobic epithets (both of which are popular among those that rage in LoL matches).

If those accused (and banned) were correct – that raging is acceptable and that Riot is hurting themselves – then Riot’s bottom-line would reflect this. They’re keeping it up, however, and these people keep getting banned. That tells me that – in fact – the majority of players don’t want to put up with their crap.

These players will play again, or will start new accounts just so they can rage and not worry about the account being banned. It’s a bit troublesome for business, still, as it means new players have to endure the brunt of the vulgarity, the rage, and the frustrating annoyances of people meta-ing the game because they (for some reason) enjoy ruining the experience for others. But I’ve found that – most games – the players are friendly and enjoy a good jibe, no matter who is winning or losing. This is especially true now that my account is max level (30); it’s  nice. The ragers are very, very rare. Perhaps because they’re getting banned.

One of the staffers put it best:

“[Players] that are toxic to the League of Legends are going to do one of two things… 1. Shape up and learn to play the game without causing others to have a negative experience; 2. find a new game.” (Source.)

Blizzard. Bioware. Take notes.

The best part.

Spend some time on the Tribunal forum. You’ll find among the predictable posts of “The Tribunal is stupid” and “F U Ri0t” that there are occasionally posts where someone suspended or banned will say “I’m sorry; you’re right. I’ve been inappropriate.” And that, to me, is marvelous.

I’ve been super distracted by Warhammer 40k lately (the table top game)…so distracted that I am going to now start yammering about it here in this blog. There will still be video game related posts; I’m just going to branch out a bit here so as to expose you all to new nerd things, possibly expanding your horizons in the process (edgy!), possibly rekindling my blogging drive. The drive waned in the wake of lacking contentment with my attempts at edgy posts.

I’m sorry you had to read that sentence. I didn’t like it either.

The word either there sounds better if said (aloud) “eye-ther” instead of the more canonical American fashion of saying it “eee-ther”; wouldn’t you agree? Regardless, I bet you agree that it is not edgy.

I am technically still playing (read “paying subscription fees for”) Rift and I’m still fond of it. Sadly I’ve only logged in once over the past week and a half. I could blame the weekend-long bachelor party camping trip that got rained out (in which I got to off-road through hills, tall grass, and mud with my RAV-4), the upcoming software release at work, or the sheer number of hours I’ve thrown into League of Legends, but really it’s all of those things. The camping trip was awesome, by the way.

League of Legends is also awesome. I have a handful of heroes I’ve gotten somewhat skilled with. Surprise, surprise: half of them are Support characters.

Kayle (pronounced “Kay-lee”) is an angel (literally, big pearly wings, beautiful silver armor, a dazzling array of blonde hair…yes I bought a skin for her) that has a slow/snare shot that does moderate damage, a small single-hit heal that boosts the target’s speed temporarily, an invinci-bubble I can throw on an ally, and the ability to ignite her sword and do MASSIVE ranged damage late game (with the right upgrades). Her massive damage can’t be done if she’s moving (she has to sit still and swing, she can’t move and swing): not so good against enemies, but remarkably effective at dismantling towers. What I’ll do with her is sit her near a tower we’re sacking as a team and while I sew support spells through the fight, I light up my sword and work on their tower. I end games with a lot of building kills. This character is the one I use the most.

Soraka is new on me. She does next-to-no damage but the amount of healing she will do is insane and I have to try very hard to burn her out of mana. She’s typically a goat-girl of some kind…but I skinned her as a Greek Goddess. Much cooler and worth the cash, in my opinion.

Karma is another favorite of mine. She does pretty good damage and heals the least of the bunch, but has a very good shield and a neat beam that “anchors” between her and either a friendly or a foe. Friendly anchors (including me) get speed boosts; foe anchors are slowed and take damage…and while they’re taking damage, I can rush around and hit other enemies (minions and players) with that beam between us and hurt/slow them all. She’s complicated to play but a good time. She can also push lanes like crazy all on her own.

If you don’t know League of Legends, those past three paragraphs were a waste of your time. I apologize.

You need to try it. It’s free to play. It’s the best free-to-play model I’ve yet seen. Play for free, earn Influence Points (IP). Spend IP to unlock champions that you can play whenever you want; otherwise just use whatever champions are set for free-play in the current week. IP also buys Runes (which you don’t want to buy until summoner level 20) which are a huge boon during your early game. Love the game? Spend cash-monies on it and you can buy champions and skins to decorate them with. You cannot buy Runes (or any kind of power) with cash-monies; only with IP. In otherwords, only longevity and success in the game will grant you more power.

Also, the community is uncommonly nice in the wake of the Tribunal-thing. Maybe it’s a placebo, maybe it doesn’t hold up in ranked play (I’m lv25 or so, not yet 30) but it definitely feels more friendly. People who are jerks for no reason are pretty rare.

In other news, I’m very likely going to buy several boxes of Grey Knights (models for Warhammer 40k) tomorrow evening…as well as a hardcover copy of the In Nomine rule set. I’m slated to play in the game of the latter; a system I’ve always wanted to try. It’s basically a morality play more srs version of Buffy the Vampire slayer, in which I get to be an Angel and pound the poopie out of Demons. That’s my kind of nerdery.

Playing in a pseudo judeo-christian mythos setting might count as edgy in some circles.

Yea, I failed to tie that together.

/experiment

I think we can all learn something today from a Rift forum post that was brought to my attention by Grumbleboom (doesn’t play WAR anymore, still breaks iron with his face). If you click that link, you’ll see a very typical style argument as an opener. You will glance at it and think one of two things:

1. Holy crap, he is SO right.
2. Holy crap, I can’t believe there are people like this even in Rift.
3. Holy crap, what is Rift and who is this Thade guy?

Okay, so three things. I can’t help #3, but allow me to summarize for the other two, to save you some time: the OP is telling Trion that the game is too easy. His 10-man team’s ability to complete the instance in  under an hour was unfulfilling for them. In the OP’s defense, perhaps Rift end game is too easy currently; “under-tuned” as they say in the business. This may get rectified in a way that pleases the OP. Then again, Trion may just add varying degrees of Hard Mode to it, just as they have with their other instances.

This isn’t why I’m bringing this to your attention. This is pretty typical and would otherwise have escaped my notice…except for this response:

Instead of having the desire to spend 5+ hours in a 5 man instance to feel some false sense of accomplishment, enjoy the content for what it is, fun and a little challenging… oh and when you finish your 1 hour long T2 5 man instance get out of the house for a little bit do something for that gf of yours instead of spending 5+ hours doing one dungeon.

Giving your gf attention instead of spending all that time sitting at your computer will be more rewarding in the end. Oh and if you don’t have a girlfriend GO GET ONE with all your new free time instead of spending more time complaining on forums that this game doesn’t occupy enough of your life.

just saying

A little harsh, but the message stands. I remember spending entire evenings in Molten Core and the like. Actually, I remember spending three to four evenings each week in raid instances learning the bosses, the events, and the way around, all in the name of farming for marginally better equipment. My favorite WoW raid ever was Karazhan, and only after we “got it down”, so to speak. Once my little tight-knight ten-man team could plow through in three hours, it was a *blast*. Fast-moving, fun, and HEY LOOK AT THIS FREE TIME I CAN SPEND WITH MY GIRLFRIEND. Or your children.

Yea, that’s some game design that should be more pervasive. Yahtzee relates WoW to a “natural disaster” for all of the man hours it’s killed and the effectively abandoned mothers and children it’s left in it’s wake. Let’s chalk up a point for Rift for giving us fast dungeons.

If you don’t agree with that, make sure your girlfriend doesn’t see you shaking your head.

Coming up: all the thoughts I’ve been compiling on leveling as a melee-centric healer, and notes on my new fascination: the Chloromancer.

Many gamers (note that I say “many” in an arbitrary/estimate/guess-stimate/supportive way and I have no data on this at all) are adverse to online multi-player. They don’t like it, and I have a hard time blaming them as – at times – it can take some pretty thick skin. Anonymity, coupled with what is likely an inability to stand up for oneself in real life (again, a non-data supported opinion) compels so many players to be jerks to opponents and teammates in online MP. Community is one thing that no amount of engineering or design parties can fix. You can “recommend” on as many splash screens as you wish that people be nice to one another, but without a lot of funding pumped into moderation, as well as an investor base who doesn’t mind you potentially losing subscriptions when you ban someone for being a turd, you’re not going to get rid of jerks.

Or so I thought.

This may be the most awesome thing I’ve ever seen in online gaming; I’ve certainly never seen its like.

When you have a free-to-play model that works (fun, well-designed game, make money off of player impatience and desire to decorate their heroes while not breaking the balance of your game) you have a unique option available to you that I’m glad they thought of: players are going to be able to judge other players on their being jerks in what Riot is calling the Tribunal.

The article I linked above is shorter than most of mine, but – very briefly – players will be able to review random player reports, along with chat logs and game statistics, so you can decide whether someone was falsely accused or in fact a huge jerk. There’s an incentive, which has me a touch worried, where a player will receive in-game points as a reward if their vote is cast on the “winning side”, whatever that is. Provided the votes are not displayed until the final count, that’s fine. I just worry about greed-driven landslides skewing results.

That little gripe aside, is this not amazing? I play LoL pretty frequently, which is maybe the only reason I’m privy to this…but it’s an idea I hope other companies take and run with. We all know WoW doesn’t have the gumption. (This IS supported by data. ZING.) RIFT, I’m looking at you.

Blizzard is still trying to find a way to solve the tank-shortage. The milestones in their endeavor have been (as I see them):

• Changing druids (and eventually paladins) from “strictly off-tanks” to “actually really good tanks”…much to the chagrin of warriors, who liked being one in a million.
• Adding a new class – the Death knight – which at its inception could effectively (and almost without meaning to) tank in all three of its talent trees.
• Made the game almost trivially easy, to where every dungeon could be AoE’d through in a matter of 30 minutes, and CC was forgotten, even in most “heroic” dungeons.
• Added a Dungeon Finder Queue so you could automate and officiate the process of “getting in line” over what few people were actually willing to play tanks.
• More recently, bribery…sorry, incentives in the way of extra gold, tokens, and loot.

Rohan at Blessing of Kings suggests an alteration to the “holy trinity” as it were, adding a second tank and even a second healer to the mix to  make events easier (and perhaps implicitly to make tanking and healing more appealing). Green Armadillo takes this a step further by dilating the number of DPS classes in a group. The former solution is fascinating to me, as it sort of smells like RIFT…where each group I’ve been in so far has had at least two classes capable of healing or off-healing, some which do so without meaning to. The latter I don’t see working for the same reason that it was still hard to fill a run for Karazhan or ZG back in the day…the DPS to support ratio was more skewed towards DPS but still there weren’t enough tanks.

Well, here is my dark and evil solution, as posted on Green’s article: drop the holy trinity. No more tanks. No more healers.

Stick with me here.

Each class is now strictly a DPS role. Players no longer have hit points; instead, every battle has an explicit timer – a countdown – and they must slay the beast before time expires. It is, literally, a DPS race. If your party cannot do enough damage in the given time, you lose.

…

I hope you think this sounds dumb. Well, think about this: it’s precisely how most players I ever talked to in WoW seem to view the game. Every fight in ICC was a ‘dps race’ with some dancing around. What did people complain about the most? The dancing around, followed closely by healers and tanks taking a lot of blame. What was the least complained about thing? Face-rolling and doing massive numbers on the third-party DPS meters (which were, by and large, inaccurate anyway).

You may not like this. I certainly don’t. I enjoy healing. The numbers are bigger, I consistently have more targets to deal with, and the success of the party hinges upon how well I fill my role. I like putting HPs back. It’s fun. It’s an on-the-fly economy as over-healing is a waste in a way no DPS-class understands…there’s seldom a time where you do too much damage. (Ironically, any event I could think of where too much damage was a problem, it was a MASSIVE problem. How about you?)

In all honesty, I would prefer to see healers and tanks to be made SUPER POWERFUL so that dungeon groups could be one tank, one healer, and like seven to eight DPSers. That is, however, my least-wanted fix. It’s what I view as the bottom-of-the-barrel-but-still-acceptable way of fixing this. What I really want to see is healing (and tanking) made so fun that players want to do it. How to do that is a mystery to me.

Making tanking easy means classes like Paladins and Druids take a lot of heat and eventually get nerfed. Making tanking complicated means people don’t do it well at first and get heckled out of trying further. Making tanks too powerful means people QQ and Ironbreakers get a huge nerf and are no longer viable. (DON’T THINK I FORGOT ABOUT THAT, MYTHIC. Ironbreakers were effective PVP tanks because you could not afford to ignore them. No amount of CC or collision detection can replace simply being dangerous.) Now, step back and consider what all of these issues seem to have in common.

If you guessed social management, you are correct! People screaming in all caps on forums and then getting their way is what I think the real issue is. People yelling at new tanks in chat, or saying derogatory things like “lrn2play” are why we are so short on support classes. In my mind, Blizzard should allocate a tremendous amount of its resources towards moderators who kick and ban jerks. Will they do this? Hell no. What will they do?

Bye, tanks.

At least we’ll be able to blame Blizzard.

Reading through Syp’s AFK for this week I found more than a few goldmines, but one in particular really rang true with me: Harry Hol’s article on Naming Characters. This is a favorite rant topic among bloggers (one I’m pretty sure I’ve ranted on myself at least once) and Mr. Hol is pretty spot on. As I read it, nodding my head, I started wondering why anybody would ever name the (literally) millionth orc hunter Xxninjaboix or Epichuntr. I mean, it’s pretty easy to generate a short list of unique names from which to draw a candidate. Then it occurred to me: maybe they’re convinced that making a unique name is more difficult than it really is. Also, many younger gamers consider the word ninja to be intrinsically cool, so having it as a name would be SO AWESOME to them. Then they find that the word ninja is reserved or already taken. After they recover from the shock, they stick to their guns and try variations on their chosen theme. Well, fret not. I’m here to help.

“So, how can we create a unique name?” you say. “All the names from the generator on the character create screen are dumb or even already taken!!1″

Someone will chew me out for saying this, but I’m going to anyway.

It’s easy.

Note that I’m not saying it’s trivial, but it’s also not too difficult. It’s as hard as you make it, and – this may sound weird – the harder you make it, the better your name is going to be. Our goal here is to make a short list of names that are as unique as possible and to – hopefully – find one that you like in the process. I was going to list some common pitfalls to avoid, but that’s been done very thoroughly: here’s a really thorough write-up by Syp from way back that has a lot of good ideas on both what to avoid and what to try. As a matter of fact, that article should be required reading for any new MMO player, anywhere. (If only.)

What I’m going to do here is tell you my name creation scheme. If I want a unique name, here is what I do. Brace yourself for this mysterious and complex formula: I concatenate random syllables until I find something I like.

Step 1 – Random Syllables?

Here are some examples: har, bon, nine, rate, rant, bic, sew, cale, pyre. Note that, at this point, the spelling doesn’t matter at all…we’re really looking for sounds. If you can’t come up with a handful of random syllables that you like, or you just want to ensure more diversity, google for “character name generator” and use a few of those. Cannibalize those names for their parts!!

Step 2 – Build some candidates.

Now we combine them until we find at least one or two that don’t sound like we’re burbling (unless that’s our goal…are we an orc?) thus: Ninehar, Calerant, Pyrecale, Pyrecail, Bonbic, Sewbic, Sewhar, Harsew…sometimes doing this may lead you to other sounds. This is actually an improvisation technique. If you’ve ever taken an acting class or even an acting workshop, you’ve very likely done this. One person says a word and you say whatever word first occurs to you. There is no wrong answer in acting. For our purposes, there are some wrong answers. If a forbidden word pops up (you know, like, ninja) it’s okay as a generator for this process…but not as a solution. So, Harsew makes me think of horse shoe, then Lornhue, um I’m not sure so I glance back at my short list of syllables and Gromnew, Pyrehew, Caleshoe, Calehue. Pyrehuebic, Calerantnine, Calelornbic, Harsewcale, Sewharcale….Sewharcale! Actually, that sounds like Sewer Kale, which probably tastes gross. Drop the ‘e’ and it’s Sewharcal.

Step 3 – How do you pronounce it?

This may sound trivial, but it’s huge as it can impact how you spell it. This is more than half the value of your character’s name since almost everybody that wants to address you in a game will have to type it (or a part of it). So, how do you pronounce it? Where does the emphasis go? Sew-HAR-kal? Sew-har-KAL? There may not always be a way to use spelling to get people to pronounce it correctly on their first try, but that’s okay. This step is more about finding a spelling you like than spelling it in a convenient way. Also, as you try different pronunciations of your proto-names, you may find that one you didn’t like before is actually cool. Say it aloud. Like, with your mouth and vocal folds. Try it.

Step 4 – The sanity check.

Alright, so after this process we’ll have a few names. Sewharkal, Lornhue, and Pyrehuebic are the ones I’ve made here. The sanity check serves one purpose: are any of these names possibly misconstrued as something else? Let me illustrate by example. My blogger tag is “thade”. Generated by this very process…and NOT sanity checked (I had no idea that the monkey-general from a certain movie shared this same name). During that process I had some other options. One of which was “Shi-thaed.” Now, that did get caught by my sanity check. I won’t explain why. Anyway, that’s what this step is for. Google your name. If it comes up empty or with nonsensical stuff, you’re golden. My current winner so far is Sewharkal. When people abbreviate that name, it’s going to be Sew. Sue. People are going to call me Sue. Back to Step 1.

Step 5 – Do you like one (or more) of them?

Now, I know. Most names you generate in this way aren’t going to hit you with love-at-first-sight. Here is my advice: if you don’t HATE it, it’s a candidate. If you’re on the fence, give it a whirl. Why? Because if you enjoy the game and your character’s class, the name will grow on you. Also, feel free to jump back one or more steps and keep those gears turning.

This isn’t easily broken into steps and I bet you see that now. While concatenating or thinking of ways to pronounce the name, new syllables and new concatenations can come to you. Play with them. I recommend jotting down the ones you like. You can do this while waiting 30 minutes to an hour in a head-start queue, but I recommend doing it long before. I will spend my idle time riding on public transit or waiting in lines chugging through different combinations. If I really like one, it will very likely stick with me and I don’t have to look creepy jotting down random syllables in line at the grocer. You know, unless I want to.

I use this method to generate names for all sorts of games. Virtually all of my tabletop RPG character names were birthed from this formula. It’s worked out well for me. I really hope this helps someone else. If even one more person decides to try this method instead of naming himself Xxipunchurface, I will have a party.