Special characters... why not??

[FlippySeal]

Why can\'t people use special characters? Well, actually I haven\'t checked for the specific characters I want to use
(?, ?). But why not, there are several Anglo-Saxon names i would like to use, for example ??elhun, Ber?un, and ??elfrid. Why can\'t I use those characters?

[AendarCallenlasse]

Well for one...you would get people creating leet names and all with the special characters.  Which would counter-act the roleplaying atmosphere.

But since the game has no anglo-saxon roots, feel free to pick a fantasy name with regular characters

[Kiva]

This is mainly to prevent l33t-speak names and that those names aren\'t really fantasy, they\'re just copied from history books, etc. Besides, it would create problems with people using /tell ingame as I doubt many people know how to write all those ascii characters, and it would most likely also mess up the character database as I doubt that those two, and at least a few other special characters, are supported by MySQL.

You spend too much time on the boards Aendar. -_-

[FlippySeal]

I can never think of good names though, oh well i can always get names off other ppl Oh BTW this game has such a great community, everyone here is so helpful and clean

[Mivus]

I don\'t to see the point of a name that\'s hard pronounce. =) Yet if you feel the need to, you should make whatever kind of name you wish.

[dfryer]

You could always substitute ordinary-character combinations for special characters - \"e\" or \"ae\" often works for the \"AE\" ligature, and the crossed-d  - well, I dunno, dh, dth, th? I don\'t really know what sound it makes.  Umlauts can usually be represented by appending an e - oe, ue etc.

This also makes names more easily converted to a mental \"sound\" if people know what sounds the characters make.

[FlippySeal]

I agree with you in theory.... although in theory communism works  ??!!

[Moogie]

Personally I\'m glad special characters are not allowed... I don\'t even know how to type them.

[dfryer]

 Communism works in theory if you start with the assumption that communism works.  My econ prof said - if it doesn\'t work in practice, then it\'s probably bad theory.  

I\'ve never learned how to type special characters under windows.. Macs have the \"option\" key which can be used for many special characters.

Using ordinary ASCII characters makes it easier to anticipate the kind of input used, and ensures cross platform compatibility (unless everything is moved to Unicode strings, not sure how difficult that would be).

[Mage of Darkness]

lol mogura its not hard you hold alt and type in usually a three digit code on your number pad a couple of them are at this site if you wanna know firehotquotes.bolt.com/altcodes/fhqalt.html  

[Moogie]

I don\'t want to have to learn a bunch of codes just to type a few people\'s names... besides, there\'s still the problem of \"how the hell do you pronounce that?\"

[DepthBlade]

Yah I wouldn\'t mind having a special character for the first letter of my characters name just to give it that touch! But I have to agree with mogura it would be hard to contact people like buddy chat and stuff and trying to figure out the right characters in their name. Also it does take away from the whole role playing atmosphere like Aendar says!

Personally I could care less, to me special characters are always found in FPS game names especially delta force for some reason :]

[Cirque]

I think leet speak names or names with a jumble of both numbers and letters can get annoying and ruin the games RPG atmosphere, but names that incorperate alt codes should be able to sneak in. While there is the argument that people would abuse this it would be nice to see French or German names for example. By this I mean names that require those symbols above letters (I cant remember what theyre called so feel free to remind me). This would add some diversity to the names and give it a more cultural feel.

[FlippySeal]

For the french, it\'s accent aigue, accent circonflex, and the other on i can\'t remember i\'m bilingual (and my German is coming along !

[zinder]

AFAIK the the two dots of german umlauts dont have a name. The umlauts are their own characters, like an a or a b.