due to people's desire of being called something else every month, it's hard to keep track of their identity. you get introduced to people, a month later? boom. you don't know half of them. I think people should be given a fixed user-name which should be used for login credencials and should be visible on their profile. and in the friend's list if we choose to customize it. I think we need a nickname feature to fulfill their desires which should also have some limitations, e.g, to change every month or so.

A previous nickname list on the profile like steam, is all we need.
Fully agree the reason.

Absolutely agreeing with #2. Wanted to suggest it since a long time ago, a log with the name changes would be just enough.

Completely agreed.

yeah we sure need this

its a perfect suggestion, +1

that is nice +1

Fully agreed with this suggestion. It happened to me a lot that I no longer was able to identify a person after their name change.

I would be along for this as long as we have an option of hiding previous names for privacy.

No, your name is public. You can't hide it, nor it's history.

yes I agree. +1

@Mrityunjay, I don't agree with you here. As long as your name was public, even though you changed it, people should still know who you were. So the ability to hide it is not a good idea.

Yeah, i am often lost in my friends list, due to the changes, so i totally agree with this suggestion.

It is quite simple and that is a message on that user's friends list to say x was y for a week. I don't need to keep checking a list of say 50 or more to see what names have changed. Most on my list don't change too much but if one person changes so frequently I don't know who they are then should they be on my list at all?

Totally for nicknames

I agree here, a log or something would be useful. Unfortunately many people when changing their nicknames don't always say who they were previously. I usually end up having to ask them. And it does happen rather often.

actually, if your friend changes his/her Name, will send you old one. it doesn't make any sense

I agree

As of writing this post, the topic has a score of +43 and none of the staff have responded to the suggestion yet

Yeah agree. Some people are annoyingly obsessed with name changing. This made me myself less social with my friends list as I see plenty of name changing every now and then.

Bumping this up. Hopefully Aminiel will see and respond to this.

Hello,

I'm kind of screwed with this change nickname feature, that's why I wasn't very quick to reply.

Many people change their nickname because they want to start everything again from scratch, sort of. For those people, showing their previous name is exactly what they don't want, obviously.

And there is also the question of not only showing the previous name, but the last X, or the whole history. This isn't so easy to decide where to stop.
To keep things simple, no history at all will ever be shown, and I probably won't ever change this, because it isn't so simple technically, and the information is currently not recorded basically.

However, we should certainly discuss about nicknames.

Personally, if it was only me, I would disallow completely changing your nickname, except for special circunstances (in case of harassements, for example)

Maybe it would be interesting to introduce the concept of user name vs. display name.
You would be allowed to change your display name regularely, while your user name would stay fixed forever after registration.
You would need to use the user name to send PM, invitations, etc.
Problems: how to find out the user name of someone who isn't in your friend list ? and of course stay as quick as currently.
Are people capable of making the difference between the two, and know which to use when ?
It isn't so simple either. There are a lot of non-especially technically savy people who would be lost, I think.

Let's make a poll to see what do you think.

Another alternative approach could be something similar to what Skype allows, that is, renaming people in your friends list. I see it more as adding personalized nicknames rather than renaming, but basically, for the people you know, you could add your display names and those would persist regardless of nickname changes. You would still use @OriginalNickname for messaging and any other interactions, but since you have performed the rename operation yourself, I think this will be completely clear, or at least with a warning given before doing so.

Of course, in Skype, you only have your contacts to communicate with and can't access the entire online list for obvious reasons, but on the Playroom, I suppose that this could be allowed for people outside of friends list as well.

About the display name in the original idea, this isn't bad as well and I don't think it will be too complicated, here's why:
Basically, the display name can be explained in a very simple way. It is read only, you never use that one as a user, it's there only as user B telling user A who they are.
The username however is their handle, and that is the one you always use. Invitations, private messages, permanent messages.

By the way, Twitter has the same concept, so it's not completely unknown. You have your handle, @qcsalon for example, and your display name, or screen name, which is the one displayed for all users. Of course, Twitter allows you to change both of them, but in this case I indeed prefer the username to be static.

Finally, we could simplify this even further, even if it may require a lot of redesigning. If my username is Nikola, and my display name is Example, if you type @example by mistake, the Playroom could automatically convert that to Nikola, perhaps with a warning given so people get used to it faster. In any case I think nobody should be allowed to have a display name that is the same as somebody else's username to prevent abuse. The display name should be an optional parameter, if it's not specified, either during the account creation or in settings, it's the same as your username.

About finding somebody's username quickly, I think this one is pretty simple too. In the online users list, if you find somebody and press ctrl+m to send them a PM, this will do @username instead of @displayName.

I guess the only problem I see with this idea is that we have basically completely eliminated the original possibility you talked about, that is, if somebody wants to change their identity by changing their nickname.

Nikola,

Renaming your friends is more complicated than adding a display name which would be the same for everybody.
This is due to how messages are delivered to all players at a table, and it's going to be not so simple to change.

In any case it would be limited to your friends only.
It doesn't make much sense to allow rename anyone in general. IN this case I rename everybody and then the entire concept of changing your name from time to time become totally useless.

Otherwise, the idea isn't so bad. I'll add it to the poll.

If we go for the display name concept, of course, it would be totally optional, and in fact most people probably won't ever change it.
You get a good point concerning the interface, it won't maybe be as hard as I'm afraid of. Most interactions with menus as you describe will obviously display the screen name and put the user name in the input field. That's maybe not a so big problem.

Concerning name abuses, you are raising another important point: it looks like that we will need to keep the same control on display names that we already have now for user names. It means that you will still be limited on how often you can change your display name, and that it won't ever be instantaneous. It's too dangerous.
So I must make it clear for everybody now that display names wouldn't bring you much more freedom than currently, except maybe that we could allow accented characters, cyrillic on the russian playroom, and other alphabets if appropriate.

Changing your nickname to restart incognito isn't a problem, since it's in fact a legend.
Many naive people believe that it's possible, but in reality you are recognized rather quickly, because of your behavior, the people you talk or play with, or your writing style.
People also easily forget that changing your nickname don't reset your friend and blocked lists. If only one person finds out who you are, he/she will tell others and the game is over.
Believe me, the people you wanted to hide yourself the most from will catch you much sooner than you think. It's sad, but it's so. It's also the case when you create another account.

The more I'm thinking about display name, the more I'm wondering that advantages wouldn't be so big.
This doesn't appear to be the best solution.

I don't see why you have to limit person's changing display names though. Perhaps add a cooldown for a bit, but not like 30 days or something. Just give them a warning if what they are setting it to is same as someone else already. It may have to go through helpers or whatever to see whether it's abusive or something, but doesn't have to be spread so thin as of being 30 days.
Another idea is to maybe instead of holding every name for approval, let people change their names(display names), then log it to staff and when they look at the name, if they find the name inappropriate they request a rechange right then and there.
Of course this might mean people will get away with that username for a bit, but it's better than holding every single one for a long time, and the amount of people who will see that username in the 1-2 days is insignificant I think compared to the amount of people requesting display name changes and then being held up for a long time even though their name may be perfectly fine.
Plus, if we want to limit the display name changes, and not let people set same display names as others anyway, then I agree with you, there really isn't much point to the new system.

Here's something I don't understand. I don't get why someone would want to change their name in order to hide their identity. if they want to get rid of certain people they have the option to block them and get rid of them. so if someone have a valid reason for getting their name changed under specific circumstances, they should have the right to raise their concern to the staff and the staff should be able to change it? below is my spin on the display name /user name idea.
give everyone fixed usernames which are unchangeable unless they have a specific situation in hand and they need to get rid of their identity or whatever.
allow everyone to have a display name, if they do not set the display name their username would be the default display name.
add a clickable in the context menu of the user to show their username. or may be even copy the username to clipboard.
apply the same procedure for changing display names, you could change it periodically, and it would have to go through the moderation team for approval.
may be add some sort of aliases feature where the server could automatically asign nickname aliases to the usernames so if I'm trying to message bob the display name it would convert bob the display name to bobby2323 the username to process the input.

I was thinking about maybe changing your user name once every 90 days.

It is only a small percentage of people who change their usernames regularly. Why not keep a person's old username in brackets for 7 days?

I highly doubt that. half of my friends list keeps on changing. + some of them might not like the old username in the brackets, that's why they probably changed it.

May are doing it just because they have nothing else to do.
It's better if this would not be allowed then if they want to change their username, they have to disable their account and create another one.
I guess, this would make them get tired of it and would no longer do it.
If someone would be harrassed then that person can block those that are doing it.
And the story is over.
Too much tolerance causes the undiscipline that creates many troubles.
Maybe I am too radicalistic, but it's absolutelly annoying to see that many players keep changing their username.
They are doing this several times.