Epic Removes Player Name Feature (Again)

So one of the awful decisions that came with the release of UT3 was the inability to set your in-game name. You were forced to use whatever name you selected for your GameSpy account which usually meant someone else took your name years ago and now you can't use it.

It looks like Epic has just made the same mistake again in the latest patch https://wiki.unrealengine.com/Version_Notes_2017_02_22.



Basically this means I'm going to have to build some sort of custom aliasing system. Otherwise you will only ever get to create one character and it probably wont be the name you want.

My theory is that they are actively trying to chase away players.

That seems to be the leading theory in the discussion thread: https://www.epicgames.com/unrealtournament/forums/showthread.php?26279-0-1-8-Update-posted-2-22-2017

There's a new warm-up system that prevents a match from starting until the server is full or 8 minutes pass. It's essential made public servers unplayable now. Hopefully with all the backlash, Epic will revert these changes before long.

Epic appears to be doubling down on this decision so I'm not anticipating they'll reverse it any time soon. For now and the immediate future, players who are actually interested in checking this out when it launches should probably make sure they've registered their preferred names at Epic ASAP to ensure they can actually use them on launch.

I'm thinking up some ideas for a new framework for how we save characters. I'd like to still support the ability for all your characters to have unique names that cannot be impersonated. The problem of course is that with this new restriction players will have special rights to their Epic names over other players. This is because the first name you would ever use on the server would be your Epic ID. This creates an awkward situation where I may use an alias like Pez.D.Spenser for 5 years but then someone decides to make that their Epic ID and joins the server. By this rule, this new player gets my name and I'm forced to change my name to something else.

This obviously sucks so I'm still in the brainstorming phase. At this rate, we may only support one character per player on the initial release and just loosen the restrictions on resetting your stats. I'm open to ideas on how people think this should work.