
An Investigation of World of Warcraft Character Names - icehawk
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/AndersDrachen/20130911/200000/An_Investigation_of_World_of_Warcraft_Character_Names.php
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chiph
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. ;)

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jlgreco
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.

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PavlovsCat
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..

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jlgreco
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.)

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enraged_camel
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.

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

~~~
packetslave
My tauren druid is named Moolander.

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

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lettergram
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](http://www.behindthename.com/articles/2.php)

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vor_
> 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".

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Steko
"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...](http://cynwise.wordpress.com/2013/06/01/class-distribution-
data-for-patch-5-3/)

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.

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ChuckMcM
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.

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ambiate
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.

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eterm
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).

~~~
uchi
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!"

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The_Rizzle
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.

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MarkTanamil
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.

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pnachbaur
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."

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MarkTanamil
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.

