Guild Wars 2

Tarnished Coast happens to be one of the only if not the only server designated by the community to be an unofficial role play server. However, based on our rank in overall world vs world vs world, many guilds and players alike are there specifically to pvp. Now, that isn’t a bad thing at all other than the fact that they plague the land with bad names and could care less about the development teams hard work or respect to the lore.

Continually I see more and more lack of creativity in character names. Such as Stifflers Mom, Wtf Man Lol and Bill Cosby….

What is worse recently are the names I have seen that are a direct play on the already existing or previously existing characters from Guildwars. Yesterday I saw two names that were directly taken from the lore, used by players.

Caitthe
Treehearn
Rytlock Ebonhawk

My question is, does this in some way offend the development team that worked so hard to create the world we play in and the heroes or other npc’s that exist in the game lore? It annoys the heck out of me personally. I can’t stand it when people are that lazy that they can’t even come up with their own heroic name unique to themselves and would rather slap the face of the design team by stealing a name from the game.

Etiquette it seems is a dying quality. It’s started to get worse and worse on our server with people that could care less about role play and any respect to lore overall. I wish people would at least try to have more creativity.

How do you folks feel about this in game? Have you seen other names directly stolen from npc’s past and present?

Wrong forum, I’d say it belongs more in general discussion, but I’ll bite.

Regarding the names that don’t match lore – so what? People make names they want to make. If you don’t like it, well, you don’t like it. Them being on the unofficial roleplay server with bad names doesn’t mean diddlysquat, since for all you know, they don’t know it was community-deemed to be the RP server; and guess what, it wasn’t unanimously agreed by the entirety of the Guild Wars 2 community. If it were the official rp server, then you’d have room to argue – but it’s not.

I don’t think it’s offending to make characters play off of NPCs – it’s just the players’ lack of creativity. Yes, it’s annoying, also annoying when people make their characters look just like their race’s DE member (that’s partially a fault of Anet not giving them all unique appearances like they have done with Braham and Rox though). It’s hardly a slap in the face to the design team, however. I don’t see it as disrespecting lore either.

I’m in agreement that this is only tentatively considered ‘Lore’ because technically speaking nothing that happens in the RP community is considered Canon in the Guild Wars Universe.

Further, as you and Konig pointed out, Tarnished Coast is the unofficial RP server. There is no official RP server, and when Anet made that decision they made the decision not to worry about Character names being reflective of the Universe they made. They did however give the information to those interested to make character names to fit the cultures they’re in (Norn, Charr, and Asura all have an easy to learn naming methodology).

So basically I guess what I’m saying is the ‘Etiquette’ you’re implying does not exist, because the rules for it were never hammered in Stone. Not to bash the RP community, but the rules you guys have created for yourselves are, for better or worse, not the rules of the server at large. Until such a time as Anet decide to make an official RP server, these problems you’re having won’t be going away. The main topic at hand that I think you should honestly be tackling is a thread in the suggestion forum for Official RP servers.

Best of luck to ya.

I play on Tarnished Coast. All my characters have roleplay-appropriate names. I create and lead roleplay events for my guild.

I don’t care about people on the server who don’t roleplay. I don’t care with when they have silly names or ape the name of some other fictional character, whether it’s part of the Guild Wars lore or some other popular story. In fact, I was amused to discover that the Tarnished Coast server is home to a female character with the name David Bowie.

So long as they don’t bother me when I’m roleplaying (which, surprisingly, has not yet happened), it really doesn’t matter that there are people on the server that don’t care about roleplay and anything it entails.

Really, I’d hate if there was some kind of all roleplay all the time rule for the server. Most of the time I’m just runnin around bashin stuff like any non-roleplay player would.

It’s the unofficial roleplay server, deal with it. This is such a ridiculous statement, you call yourself roleplayer yet you are unable to ignore some other players names. Do you have no imagination?
It’s pretty obvious those people are not interested in roleplay, so you don’t even have use their names in your act. And even if they wanted to roleplay with you, you could still agree on a name that can be used instead. It’s not that hard.

All my characters have lore-appropriate names, and I certainly act and respond appropriately in roleplays, but I don’t get bothered if I see another player with a ridiculous or inappropriate name. It’s part and parcel of being in an MMO; you can’t expect 100% compliance with the lore. Pure immersion can only be found in a single-player game; you take what you can get in a multiplayer setting.

That said, players who deliberately harass roleplayers by repeatedly casting spells on where roleplayers are sitting, jumping up and down around them, or engaging in similar disruptive behaviour are immature idiots who don’t show others the respect that they are given in turn. I first tell them to go away and stop bothering us, or report them if they refuse to stop.

I get your point, but… Tarnished Coast is not an official RP server, and ArenaNet does not even acknowledge it as such unofficially. Similarly, many players neither know nor care about this decision that a small subset of the game’s total population has made.

While the designers put a lot of work into the lore of Tyria, their goal was not to create an RP sandbox. GW2 was designed to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. I’m grateful ArenaNet included as many subtle nods and concessions to the RP community as they did.

On some level, I don’t mind people using completely out of character names. It makes it easy to see they’re obviously not role players. If they try to interfere with others role playing by actually claiming they’re Bill Cosby, who was sent to Tyria to defeat the elder dragons with their Jello cannons and to teach the other races to supplement their combat abilities with some bippin’ and a boppin’, and the hippin’ and the hoppin’ — yeah, then we’ve got a problem. Otherwise just turn off overhead names and stay away from the statue of Dwayna in Divinity’s Reach, and you hardly notice them.

One could make the counter argument that we, a small subset of the total player base, are showing disrespect to them by imposing an unofficial decision to “respect the lore when you’re on Tarnished Coast.”

It takes a special kind of arrogance to get irritated at something this ridiculous. Etiquette? Seriously? My characters do have lore-appropriate names, but if I wanted to name something “Giggles Nostril Hair” or “RRRRytlock Brimstone” or even “38273Y8372QYR32Y723”, that’s my business alone. Who cares if the names aren’t lore-appropriate? Guild Wars 2 was made to cater to all sorts of people and play-styles, not just to lore buffs and roleplayers. I’m sure the designers are delighted to know that “Giggles Nostril Hair” is enjoying the world they created, just as much as “Nyoka Gorefell” or “Blaine Jacobson”.

Looking at things from a roleplay perspective, your character isn’t going to know the names of complete strangers anyway. So if “Giggles Nostril Hair” goes running by in his underwear, instead of getting annoyed, just assume—as your character would—that the person had too much to drink, or is going for a swim, ect.

I suspect that the majority of people on TC aren’t aware it’s a roleplay server anyway. The average GW2 player is just going to log into the game and play, without any attention to the forums or established server norms.