Guild Wars 2

Hi guys,
first of all I want to point out that I know ANet’s policy towards guild name changes so please don’t give me any Cpt. Obvious answers (“they don’t change guild names”).
Thank you. ^^

I wrote a support ticket requesting a guild name change, not for aesthetic reasons, but because my guild receives harassment and rude comments for it (Don’t bother asking, I won’t mention the name).
The reply I got was (translated from German): “Unfortunately it’s not possible for us to change guild names right now, because it could cause technical problems for the guild.”
My question to you is what you think about this or if you have any idea why this could cause technical problems.
When a guild name violates the naming policy it can be changed without any problems, right? Maybe I missed something, but I feel kinda neglected as a paying customer.

Looking forward to hear someone else’s thoughts about this. :/

Guilds that violate naming policies get deleted, not changed

ANet doesn’t want guilds to be able to change name and wipe the slate clean when it comes to reputation.

Not to mention it’s another area of guild politics that would cause problems for support. “A majority of our guild voted for Name A, but the guild leader put in Name B.”

Probably the same technical issues that arise with a Display Name change. You can read the Dev responses about that in the Dev Tracker.

When something like a name change can’t be done, it’s probably due to poor programming practices.

I think it probably can be done but I can see why they would want to discourage it.

Of course, it wasn’t a problem until the new guild hall thing. You could just make another guild and invite the existing members to the new one. You can still do that but the guild upgrades stay with the old one. I guess you could rep the new guild and just switch to the old one when you need to, thus reducing the harassment (yep, I’m curious about that!)

Thanks for the feedback, guys. I have to admit I was wrong about the possibility to change inappropriate names. On the website it says they delete them.
I guess it could indeed be problematic right now but I think all that could easily be fixed if they actually wanted to. With the option to invest so much gold into your guild I think it’s downright unfair that they aren’t doing that. I’m definitely very disappointed. :/

A lot of times, programmers use the name of something as a “key field” for managing relationships across different databases. For example, “Raysson.2079” would link to your account achievements (database AP), your friends list (database FL), and your forum history (database FH). Changing the name would require making sure that all code in the game is set up to recognize the new name and ignore the old.

Programmers usually preempt the issue by using an extra database field (a ‘key’), using an ‘arbitrary’ ID, so that things always point to the ID rather than the name — changing the name is as simple as changing one field and no other code has to be touched.

There are some traditional reasons for sticking with the name as the identifying field:

• It’s cheaper — storage isn’t an issue, but data transfer is (especially if you’re in Sydney playing a game with servers in Texas). One more field isn’t much, unless you consider all the different lookup transactions going on.
• It’s “less confusing” — it’s easier to troubleshoot when you know you can rely on easily-understood names.

I don’t know if this is what’s going on with guild names, but it wouldn’t surprise me — GW1 was originally programmed to handle character names in this way (and it took a lot of work to make it possible to change character names in that game). If it is, that would explain why ANet says they can’t easily change guild names.

I know for a fact that some guilds have changed their names and tags (I was in one of them at the time of the change) so what you are being told is incorrect.

This sounds strange. Recently an Anet employe said on reddit, that you can contact customer support for guild name changes if you are guild leader. He even says that it has no known bugs.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/46338k/wheres_the_guild_name_change_contract/

I’m fairly certain we asked about the possibility if could we get one and they said yes, just let them no. It was a while ago…I could be misremembering, but I’m sure that’s what was said.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

There are some traditional reasons for sticking with the name as the identifying field:

• It’s cheaper — storage isn’t an issue, but data transfer is (especially if you’re in Sydney playing a game with servers in Texas). One more field isn’t much, unless you consider all the different lookup transactions going on.

Are you sure that multiple utf8/utf16 values vs one int32/int64 value is cheaper?

Lyp Sao.1375:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

There are some traditional reasons for sticking with the name as the identifying field:

• It’s cheaper — storage isn’t an issue, but data transfer is (especially if you’re in Sydney playing a game with servers in Texas). One more field isn’t much, unless you consider all the different lookup transactions going on.

Are you sure that multiple utf8/utf16 values vs one int32/int64 value is cheaper?

We already know guilds have a separate ID field from the official API anyway.