An Investigation of World of Warcraft Character Names | Hacker News Reader

An Investigation of World of Warcraft Character Names

gamasutra.com

36 pointsicehawk24 comments

I get guild invites pretty much every time I play one of my unaffiliated toons. What I do is look at the names of the other player characters in the guild: \who guildname, and see how many of them have accented or unicode names. I ignore the guilds with more than one or two, as those players are typically more immature than someone who took the effort to come up with a more "normal" name -- one that can be typed on a US keyboard.

Personally, I tend to name my female characters with a vowel on the end. So sort of like Russian names. ;)

This reminds me, playing WoW has been so much about names for me. Together with a friend we poked fun out of other people with stupid names or gave credit to creative ones.

Usually I had a strong opinion about somebody's playstyle and age, even educational and social background upon reading a name (Not that I was ever right in these opinions, but what's interesting is that I had them).

What's even more interesting is that we even "discriminated" characters with bad names when the game mechanic allowed us to do so (ganking, kicking out of groups,..)

So I'm not sure whether there is a correlation between playstyles and names, but it certainly makes a difference in players behaviour towards each other.

I've checked names on battle.net (previously, wowarmory) for uniqueness. So far, my 5 year old mage is still unique across all realms, all zones. It's even marginally pronounceable (bonus!)

I do discriminate against names I don't like by just not grouping with them, but I won't go as far as kicking them. Play style difference between PvE and PvP players, I guess. :)

I don't play WoW, but elsewhere on the internet where handles are used I've found myself becoming very prejudiced against people who's usernames both begin and end in an "x". So like "xYourMomx", or worse "xxYourMomxx", or even worse "xxxYourMomxxx".

For some reason '(x+).*\1' correlates rather strongly with finding anti-social behaviour (for example, intentional shitposting) incredibly amusing.

Or god forbid xXxYoUrMoMxXx

Very true, variation in capitalization is some sort of multiplier.

What I don't understand is the shear prevalence of this. Is there perhaps a popular system (email provider or game network or something) that is recommending these sort of usernames?

Isn't it also a Straight Edge thing? Not that that's much better. Though I'd still rather play with xXpetetheblobXx than MasterOfPainDeath or KoldCiller or whatever... if I had any doubts about the toxicity of gaming (and I say this as a former gamer), one look at the average scoreboard would remind me again. Though I think they're products of society, rather than acting against it. Garbage in, garbage out..

Hmmm, I know "x"s in general are (like X tattoos on the back of your hands) but I didn't think that was a popular trend/movement/whatever anymore.

Typically the option is less "xXpetetheblobXx or MasterOfPainDeath" and more "petetheblob or xXMasterOfPainDeathXx". The "x"s usually seem to go hand in hand with the more 'absurd' names.

(I don't have any data for any of this though, I'm just going by what I have noticed which could be colored by various biases I have.)

When I play RPG games, I usually spend a very long time on the character creation screen trying to decide on a good name. If the game in question is an online RPG, then the process can take several hours. I'm not even kidding.

After all, you can be the same character class as someone, be the same level, have the same items, and even be in the same guild, but at the end of the day the name is what really distinguishes you from everyone else.

Frostitute, hilarious. Although this sounds like an inside-joke. I don't play WoW though.

Mages have three different specializations, which affect their play style: Arcane, Fire and, of course, Frost

My tauren druid is named Moolander.

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned so far that the 3rd most popular name in the US is "Shamwow"

Similar to this article I found it interesting that similar research was done on ones presentation of names and how they feel about themselves.

http://www.behindthename.com/articles/2.php

> For reasons unknown, Mages have a much higher variety of names than any other class. Any speculations as to why is welcome (are people who play Mages more creative? More independent-minded?).

My first guess is that the mage class is one of the most popular classes in the game (alongside the other archetypes like warrior and rogue) and so has more players to come up with names. I have no official data to back that up. I can only offer the personal experience that the mages I group with in public groups are the most likely to be assholes who wipe the group, which I suppose is another way of saying "independent-minded".

"one of the most popular classes in the game (alongside the other archetypes like warrior and rogue)"

Not counting Monks which are new, Rogue is the least played main class by a good margin, after which are Locks and Shaman and then the other classes are pretty clustered now.

http://cynwise.wordpress.com/2013/06/01/class-distribution-d...

One thing mages have going for them is a large number of viable race combinations. Druids and Paladins only have 2 choices and one optimal one for any spec (per faction).

As an alt mages are popular because melee/tanks/healers often want to get the furthest away from that playstyle and mages are the purest dps caster with the fewest moving parts.

They've also always been a top tier pve and pvp class that has drawn in a lot of original players.

Very nice. Another interesting avenue would be to correlate word roots in 'leet speak' so for example the word 'insane', 'chaos', 'rules', or 'evil' Etc. and there influence in the names.

Probably not possible, but doing a temporal slice would also be good for WoW since V1/2 WoW Paladins and Druids were pushed to be healers, but in V4/5 WoW both Paladins and Druids are effective DPS units. So names of someone creating a Paladin in a later expansion might choose differently than someone in an early character.

I actually reserved my most creative names for Mages. I am not sure why. Some left over love from my Diablo 2 mage? I would always just pick hard to obtain names on other characters.

A use case for this data is creating a game and reserving the most popular 100 names. A few years down the road sell them for in-game currency or real life currency. Auction em to help support newer updates, etc.

I've got a system where I try to go for eterm but then fall back to aterm, zterm, gterm, cterm, nterm, etc.

Bizarrely though eterm is nearly always free despite being a fairly pretty word and being a real thing. (The enlightenment terminal).

Years ago in the whirlwind battle group there was this one guy multiboxing shamans (basically one player using multiple accounts at the same time, Blizzard willingly overlooked such things). He named his characters Atox, Btox, and Ctox. Whenever someone asked "Where's Dtox?" They'd all shout "REHAB!"

Being able to ascertain how an unknown player operates by analysis of their name could conceivably aid players in competitive team FPSs like CS:GO. Or could it? I don't play competitive FPSs, but have followed the CS:GO scene somewhat and so many pre-game elements can help a team get just enough of an edge to pull the rounds for a match win.

Sorry but this is too easy to explain.

The high number of unique names comes from the fact that two players can't have the same name on the same server.

As for mages, they are probably the most popular as most players have at least one as an alt for various reasons. By having more of them, and the limit of no same names on the same server, you get more variation.

It boggles the mind that somebody could perform a study like this and overlook one of the most important details.

The article explicitly says "Characters with the same name can exist on different servers, so the mind-boggling 3.8 million unique names found in the dataset was not expected."

People don't choose a server so they can use the name they want.They play on the server their friends on (or chose a random one).

If the name isn't available they come up with a new name.

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