Name Changes

[A. Pippenger]

So I clicked a link on the Minecraft launcher today and it took me to this web page:

https://mojang.com/2014/04/minecraft-1-7-6-pre-release/

This is saying that some time after the 1.8 update, Mojang will make it possible to change your account's name without difficulty as many times as you want. If they actually do this I think it could absolutely ruin this server. All social interaction on this server (which is kinda the point of even playing online) is trying to decide what players to trust, and managing your own reputation and relationships with other players. If anyone can change names whenever they want, all of that is completely gone. Any new person you haven't met and is friendly to you could be an enemy trying to grief you. To a smart player, this will seem like it's too big of a risk to take, so nobody will ever team with anyone new.

This is my prediction. If this goes into effect, the server will be split into two groups: people who were on before the name change, and people who joined after. People who joined after will always be suspected of being old players in disguise, especially if they play competently and seems to understand how the server works. So this means that new players, especially the small amount you might actually want to team with, will be locked out from seriously interacting with regulars.

A lot of things have changed on this server over the years, often for the worse. People have moved incredibly far from spawn, the player base has gotten much smaller and younger, and people have generally lost enthusiasm. People like to say the server is "dead". It's not dead yet though. We still get new people, and they still work their way into teams. Exciting stuff still happens. My empire kept things active around spawn for a long time, Morl0ck is still doing his giant team castle, and players are still setting up little towns and group bases. The server isn't dead, it's just in a lull. But if this happens, it will absolutely, permanently kill the growth of the server.

I really don't want this to happen and I think everyone can understand why. Is there any way we can make sure this doesn't happen? We could all head over the official minecraft forums and complain about this. If we can't stop it from happening, is there a way we could stop it from affecting our server? The page says server mods can still see IP addresses and see who is who, is there any way we could make it bannable? Or have a list on the wiki of who has changed their name?

I'm hoping people already got angry about this and stopped it. I noticed comments on that FAQ are closed, so maybe that's why. It would be a huge relief to me if it turned out they aren't going through with it, but if there's any chance that they will, I think we need to deal with this somehow.

[severate]

I meant... I will vote for your opinion if you set up a poll.
I really think its a good way to see who is gonna be honest.

[SilasOfBorg]

I'm with Pip. I think that would be the last straw for me. Especially if they allow (as I expect they will) the full UTF-16 codeset. I survived broken boats, broken shift semantics, broken acid-trip rendering, and numerous other less annoying bugs, but this might do it.

[Yukar9]

People have never trusted new players, why would they start now?

[mitte90]

there is still a way for servers to see the player id.. so its possible to make a plugin that change the username back to the original name... but i dont think it gona be that bad.. mush in this server is reputation built so if u a trusted player u will not change without telling. and if u a player with bad reputation u have to start over as new players have bad reputation by default. i just hope this dont allow for name theift

[SilasOfBorg]

It's not new players I'm worried about. Its older players switching names to something very close to someone else's and doing a lot of damage before they're noticed -- at which point they just switch to another name. It lowers the barrier of name spoofing from "need a new account" to "change name". There are existing players on this server who absolutely would not hesitate to use this "feature" constantly.

[LoneSoldier55]

If mojang can get off their sweaty asses and make it happen it will suck.

[SilasOfBorg]

SílasOfBorg
SilasΟfBorg
SiІasOfBorg

.. and that's not even going past the first few goddamn code pages. These look even more similar to "SilasOfBorg" in the font MC uses.

Yeah. Wonderful.

[LoneSoldier55]

This update makes possible for me to be more evil than ever

When miniwimi chnages his name to Miniwimi, I just take miniwimi and ruin his reputation. After that i can take Yukaríon or something else like mitte9O and get diamonds from noobs.

This will be best update ever.