Guild Wars 2

For example,
A Ranger named Blue Lord and also names his/her pet Blue Lord.
A Mesmer named Illusionary Mage/Duelist etc.

With different accents of course(since many of these are probably already taken)

Are names that give you an advantage fair in PvP?

Most of them aren’t actually effective. You should certainly know what a phantom looks like over a player/clone. Not sure how blue lord helps.

Only name I’ve ever seen/made that was at all effective is Bone Minion as an appropriately colored Asura Minion Master made as small as they can be, and even that is kind of pushing it.

Tbh…
I’ve always laughed at NothingE.

He goes to a point and they yell in TS “Nothing is at home”

LOL.

Your complaint speaks volume about your observational skills.

the only thing i have issues with, and not even much an issue, is the people who queue kitten and have names like illlillil with all 5 almost looking the exact same.

The only advantage I’ve ever seen with names is when people who spam emotes in HotM have names with a bunch of weird characters and it’s a pain to report them since ANet still doesn’t have a right click select feature to report for names shown through emote. =(

(and yes, to the inevitable person who probably won’t read this anyways, I know you can hide emotes, but that’s not the point)

Only advantage i ever saw was something like 5 of the same class with same name like IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII. Even that is not an issue as usually i am too concentrated on staying alive thus watching their characters than reading their names. Most of the time i am not even aware of names tbh. If it is team fight, i just call class (necro at home) or something like that.
As far as pet/player names go, i do only ranked with standard models on and never had issue with distinguishing real player from pets/clones etc.

Turtle Dragon.9241:

For example,
A Ranger named Blue Lord and also names his/her pet Blue Lord.

Do you honestly have difficulty telling a player apart from the lord?

Charr rangers too op , cant difference who is the pet

Conaywea.5062:

Charr rangers too op , cant difference who is the pet

Just imagine if they named their character “Juvenile Lynx” And their pet “Player”. Mind = blown.

Last year, I remember an encounter with 2 pure shatter, signet and mantra-free Mesmers named something like 1110101011011 and 1011011011101. Maybe their names contributed to how much of a pain in the neck they were.

But names (in this case, with weird accents and letters) only have a real advantage if you are one of dirttbags that spam emotes

Turtle Dragon.9241:

For example,
A Ranger named Blue Lord and also names his/her pet Blue Lord.
A Mesmer named Illusionary Mage/Duelist etc.

With different accents of course(since many of these are probably already taken)

Are names that give you an advantage fair in PvP?

If your opponents have some serious brain damage they would probably give you some sort of advantage i guess…

I once ran in to a Warrior named Dagger Pistol Thief.

SpellOfIniquity.1780:

I once ran in to a Warrior named Dagger Pistol Thief.

Mesmers running away from you all game

I go through entire matches, coming out the other side with absolutely no idea of who I just played with/against.

I pick up notable names. Like those who are either too tough for me or an easy mark.

and ofc this sort of thing:

-edit- but this was funny rather than a real advantage.

Lmao! thanks guys this threads has given me a good laugh.

The definitive answer: no, but yes, The reason is on a fair and level playing field the answer is always gonna be no, but due to how human psychology works, we are naturally going to be at a technically unfair advantage at various times, a great example of this is female characters (for heterosexual males specifically) due to the female characters in revealing armor there is some minor degree of subconscious sexual arousal, which can actually almost triple reaction times (explained fairly well here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpUs8oNjuV8)
So in conclusion, no in a perfect world it’s not fair, but there are so many other physiological and psychological factors that it’d be hard to make anything perfectly fair. It’d additionally be kitten near impossible to correct this issue meaning that… “it’s close enough” is by necessity a valid answer. Which makes it A-OK! (though I would shun you)

Further reading:
https://scholar.google.ca/scholar?q=sexual+arousal+and+reaction+time&btnG=&hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&as_vis=1
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1015366324325#page-1