Guild Wars 2

Good morning all, a few days ago I was booted from the game with a popup saying “You have been banned from the game, please return when the block has ended” That was extreme news to me, so I got booted, relogged in, and found that my character by the name of “You Schmuck” was deemed an offensive name and I had to rename my character. This seemed pretty absurd to me, I use the name everywhere and this is my first time it’s ever been deemed offensive. I even used the exact same name in the betas.

So my first course of action was of course to ask support, after only a few hours wait, I got a reply saying NCSoft does not get into lengthy debates about why a name is deemed offensive, and that I should not pick an offensive name in the future, to which I replied to the ticket explaining pretty much everything about the name as possible, to prove it’s a normal name, not copyrighted, not offensive in a foreign language etc, has no alterior meaning behind it etc. Schmuck literally means, fool/doofus etc. I quite literally use it for the purpose of people replying to me calling me “You Schmuck” I like the quirkiness of it :P

I then got my final reply saying it was not Anet/NCSoft, but a USER reporting it as offensive, so if this is all it takes to get your name banned without any possible review, what’s stopping me from reporting any other player’s name and having a GM skim my report and banning their name?

This is pretty much my last ditch attempt at trying to recover this name for my character, which is currently called Schmuckie (Schmucky) was taken.

Can a GM please see some common sense and look up the definition of Schmuck without pointing me to the naming rules, with which my original name did not fall under any restrictions. I was known on Desolation as “You Schmuck” and I would very much like to stay that way, pretty much everyone I know liked the name and it’s weirdness. For it to be so suddenly taken away by one player who probably wasn’t even offended by it in the first place seems ridiculous.

So in concluding. GMs, please have a heart

PS: Origin of my name: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=Hbt8gbZlTeU#t=60s

Ticket Number: [Incident: 130322-000912]

Im not a GM, but I disagree with your conclusion that it is not offensive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schmuck_

The name originates in Yiddish and is a name used to describe a kitten. It is in jewish family’s considered to be offensive.

The video you linked truly outdates the origin of the name and shows it is used as a word to compare someone with a kitten as well. So in my point of view I can understand someone takes it as offensive (though I personally wouldn’t mind it).

My intent with the original use of the name has always been it’s modern American/English definition of the word of course, to define fool/stupid etc. Funnily enough it has never been brought up as such a subject ever in yiddish in all of my years of using it.

And it has never been the subject of being banned on any other game/mmo/forum etc I’ve ever used, hence why I considered it fine to use here, and for all the months I have used it in GW2, in beta and release of course, nobody has ever taken offence to it, Hell, some people even found it funny, but personally the naming rules in this game seem all over the place right now. I’ve seen far worse than mine running around without fear of renaming.

Collective.9206:

…it has never been the subject of being banned on any other game/mmo/forum etc I’ve ever used…

You can’t really compare GW2 to other games in ToS enforcement. Nearly every MMO has the same standards, there’s nothing unusual about GW2, but other titles just don’t enforce theirs. That’s what a lot of us respect about ArenaNet.

I’ve also had to refrain from using character names I’ve used before, and some that I really liked. But I know they have attributes that violate the ToS and I want to play the game more than I want to sneak in a name, even if I did get away with it in other games. Nothing bad, but against the rules none the less.