A long time ago, on a character selection screen far, far away...
Out of curiosity I did add the other Shintar to my friends list, and it turned out to be a level fifty Sith Sorcerer. I wanted to keep an eye on whether they remained active or even deleted their character, but they seemed to be online reasonably often.
One morning a couple of months ago I found that a guildie had posted a screenshot on our guild website of him running into a male Sith pureblood called Shintar on Ilum. It was funny to finally be able to put a face to the name. I was asked whether it was an alt of mine, and I said no and explained the situation.
Recently the other Shintar has made a couple more appearances in level 55 warzones, and again I've had guildies querying whether it was me. I joked that the other Shintar is an evil name thief and that they should gank him lots.
With name changes in the game now, I've been starting to think though. At least two guildies who had to change their names after the transfers were able to get their original names back recently, presumably because the other characters were deleted or renamed too. Shintar doesn't seem to be going anywhere any time soon, but... maybe I should ask him how he'd feel about a name change. I could even pay for it! For all I know it could have been a random throwaway name to him and he might not mind changing it, while I'm definitely quite attached to it. (If I put "Shintar" into Google, the first three results plus a couple more on the first page are all references to me.)
On the other hand though, I don't want to look like a weird stalker or anything. I don't know, how would you feel if a random stranger asked you to change one of your character names?
It's an MMO, what's the worse that can happen, (s)he'll say no?
ReplyDeleteHah, I had a similar situation in my old EU DDO guild. I applied via their website, did a trial run with them and they invited me to join. Everyone was very friendly except for one guy who was rather sarcastic over my main characters name 'Tobyas'. Turns out all his characters are named some variant of Tobi/Tobias etc. He was only joking but there was a lot of confusion for a while as everyone assumed my character was a new alt, and doubly confused when one of his characters was on at the same time...
Hehe, we have a guy in our guild whom we call "Aim" as all of his characters are called some variation of Aimée. Then another guildie brought in an alt called Aeimi. It was a similar situation. :)
DeleteI'm not sure what I'd think. The names I typically end up with (except for my Age of Conan name, a typically simple barbarian name of Kavan) weren't shared with a lot of people. For example, AFAIK I'm the only player in WoW who has a toon with the name of Nevelanthana.*
ReplyDeleteMaybe I'd be flattered, but maybe I'd get annoyed that some Whovian wanted my Gunslinger's name of "Dalaak" because "Dalek" was taken. (For the record, the Daleks had nothing to do with his naming; I was just running out of names to try at the time.)
*Blame the Dragonlance series, because that name was an echo of Elven naming conventions there.
Would depend on the name. I have a few that I am very attachted to, and no bribery would make me give them up. Others? Depends on the bribe... ;)
ReplyDeleteI think there's no harm in trying. If you're polite and really nice about it (which I'm sure you'll be) there's nothing that can go wrong. After all, all that you're 'guilty of' is sending a whisper to another person in the game, what is sort of the whole point of the msg system.
ReplyDeleteI'd say, give it a try. Don't be too disappointed if they don't want to change though, that person did play using that name for quite a time now.
If it were me being asked, I'd be annoyed in various degrees depending on the frequency with which I played the toon, even if I wasn't particularly attached to the name. My friends would have to get used to my new name and it would generally be a hassle in the guild.
ReplyDeleteBut then, I'd feel like a total asshole if I said no unless I had a compelling reason to keep the name, so I'd probably take the rename and just be highly annoyed about it.
Warning: I am far more ill-tempered than your general population. I'm sure the person with your name won't be a curmudgeon like me.
http://www.shintar.com
ReplyDeleteDon't mean to troll or anything but this is the first thing that came up when I searched for Shintar on our Czech portal (google equivalent) - and I find it quite funny :-D
Lol! That's why I said "if I put it into Google" because I guessed that other people might get different results. :P (Not that though, lol.)
DeleteIt's a competitor to the ShamWOW!
Deletehttp://www.shamwow.com
(Warning, the ShamWOW Guy is VERY annoying!)