What be thy name?

[Altharion]

Originally posted by derwoodly
Blah, I don\'t like it.

You need names either above the heads or when you wave the mouse over them.  Having a bunch of numbers over your head is not \"realistic\" either.
The are a number of things that are not realistic in a MMORPG.  Being telepathically connected to all of your guildmates is not realistic, but it is essential in a MMORPG.  

The other alternative, making everyone anynomus untill you greet them, invites abuses beyond toleration.  Even with no PvP and names above everyones heads there will still be griefers.

What do you think you will see on the screen?

player 001234 say\'s: Do you want to hunt skellys?
player 004567 say\'s: I don\'t even know you why would I hunt with you?
player 001234 say\'s: My name is Dathmall, what is yours?
player 004567 say\'s: My name is Derwood, glad to meet you Dathmall

This will get very old very fast!

but the non realistis part can be cut down by the realisitic part if you can do something but you need to take a little while longer to make it happen but its more realisic then i would want it to be more realistic.

[Moogie]

I\'d rather have a game that is more enjoyable to play. Screw realism if it means having to do all this.

[Altharion]

but this topic isnt about ruining playabilty its adding realism and that could mean for most people more fun.

[paxx]

Originally posted by Altharion
but this topic isnt about ruining playabilty its adding realism and that could mean for most people more fun.

This is the one area that I have to completely disagree; realism in game play is not what people really want. What people want is not always the same as what seems cool.
I am not going to go through the countless examples of ?realism that we don?t want in games.

Plus the ?someone says: bla bla bla? is not cool, in fact in reality we know many people we have never been introduced to before.

Being anonymous is not part of playing a game where the players are to be heroic. I am not saying good or evil, just larger then life.  

To have anything like you want. People would have to have a reputation marker?and tracking who knows what about whom would be a pain. And remember it is estimated that almost everyone knows almost everyone else 6-8 times removed. Imagine an isolated place of 20,000 people or so. 2 or 3 times removed?

What you are wanting is the ability to be jerk and not be held accountable by the players for a bad reputation.

It is possible to do, but I don?t think it is worth doing, and it takes away far more then it adds to the game. Now to do it right (simulate real life?s social knowledge) would be far harder to do.

[Altharion]

yes but this has nothing to do with what seems cool

[Xandria]

Originally posted by derwoodly

I don\'t think that is quite right.
If you have 65,000 players on a server then you could have one byte of data for each player and it would take 65,000 bytes (64K in computer speak).  However one byte is not enough.  What you want to store is the name of the player and wheather or not you know them.
If I allow for a name to be 31 characters long and one byte for a flag, then I will need 2048K, or 2MB.

I\'m not sure you see the programming aspect; each character is assigned a 4-byte number to uniquely identify them, in addition to their name.  Your character doesn\'t need to store the ID\'s of all the characters you don\'t know.  All that will be stored is the ID numbers of charcters that you \"know.\"  When you sight/talk to a person, the game checks their ID against your list of \"known\" characters, and if it matches, their name is displayed.  If it\'s not, well, then something else happens... (\"man with grey beard says: hi!\" )  

[Sarios]

Yeah this is a great idea for like if your an assasin or a known pickpocket.