lusty smelt
So we know Mabinogi is getting a massive update with UE5 and all, and it's bound to attract a ton of new players, but.... what's the first thing players encounter when they start playing the game? Choosing a name. And dear god, naming things is awful right now.
Seriously, think about it:
A single account can claim up to 300 unique names through their characters and pets.
Both players and pets use the same "pool" of names- if you name a pet Steve, that means that no one else can use that name- not even for an actual human character.
We currently only have one server in NA- Erinn.
The game has been out in NA for 16 years.
All those factors combined make for a painfully large pool of "taken" names. Sometimes I find a name I like, but it's taken, so I try variations of it, those are taken too, and then I try variations of the variations and maybe one might be available. Maybe. Usually they're taken too. >>
Since the game's getting the Eternity update down the line, I really hope that maybe the name system could be updated along with it, if not sooner, to at least separate pet names from player names and remove some of the restrictions around things like capitalization and certain special characters like spaces, ', and -.
More ideally, though, I'd love to see a system where people no longer need to worry about 'taken' names when it comes to their characters/pets at all.
For example, another game called Phantasy Star Online 2 uses a system where you have a unique account name/ID, but then all your character names are non-unique so you can use whatever you like for the characters themselves. Something like that would honestly be really nice here, but there's a lot of other possible solutions and IMHO anything would be an improvement over what we have now.
leaden gyro
sharp mauve