Use all the silly names you want. Just leave me FAR away from it. I DON'T WANT TO SEE OTHER PLAYERS'S NAMES. I DON'T WANT TO SEE ANY OF THEM. If there would be some weird ability of knowing who you just killed by their username, I WILL STOP KILLING AND TRY TO SUPPORT MY FACTION SOME OTHER WAY. Yup. Keep all the D_o_W99's and CaptainJack's and L00o0L's away from me. Uh, so... I sure hope the game UI hides the names.
As much as I like to give players as much freedom as possible. I do think there should be some limitations to names. Especially in a game like this. I think they should be able to name their account whatever the heck they want. But the actual name of their character should be subject to control.
I'd like to have an option to disable any part of the UI I deem obstructive. The game wouldn't break without those options, but they'd be appreciated nonetheless.
It looks like there are now two subjects being discussed on this thread: 1) Are player names subject to control? 2) Should player names be visible or not? I have already stated my opinion on the first point and was rather neutral about it. However, I do believe that enemy names should never be on, and that friendly player names should have a toggle option on/off. Lore aside I don't like the idea of enemy players having a neon name tag hovering above their character models; bad for game play balance.
It would be cool if your visible name had to be earned based on your play style. For example, if you got a certain number of close combat kills you would be able to select a visible name from a list of murderous up close and personal killer type names. Maybe it gets added to a banner or etched into your armor or something like that.
Player names are inconsequential to me, you are all walking corpses. Besides, fancy pants names just makes it easier to pick you out of a crowd for when some revenge needs to be happening.
as for namevisibility, it should at least be optional so when you form a squad you know which friend is where. outside of squad i dont care that much as long as you can press tab and befriend a new player etc. btw what about friendly fire?
Give people the option to disable nametags if they want but I personally think they absolutely need to have nametags in the game. Both for friendlies and enemies. I like to find rivals in games like this and if all the enemies are just nameless nobodies then it'll be a lot harder to recognize old foes in the battlefield. Thinking on this, it's actually pretty important to me that they have the nametags available in the game. Part of the fun in competitive PvP games is to find that specific clanleader of the rival opposition or that one rival player who keeps killing you and you keep getting revenge on. Or recognize that friendly ally who helped you out last week and save his butt in return. That's the kind of stuff that forges memories in games... Those relationships are ESSENTIAL for the metagame of EC and it all starts with the recognition of the players. For this, nametags and individuality is pretty important.
