A character with this name already exists

We are in 2025, and I still can't name my character because some dude before me already did this.
I know that "It was in Diablo II so PoE needs to have this" argument, but this is one of the things that should be left there.
You had the opportunity to correct this with PoE2 finally but for some reason you ignored it.
Seriously GGG?

I think it's more or less a divided issue.

I like unique names so when i come across players and traders I can recall who they are.

Why would you want to steal someone's name?

Imagine thinking I am so entitled that I should be able to have more than one unique name. This is what I did to solve this type of issue. Create your own name, for example mine is Exodus. There are other Exoduses even another KingExodus but there are no other KingExodusGG's I am the only one, and my characters named starrt with Exo_WhatEverIWAnt; you stop seeing Exo after awhile.

It's not that serious of an issue that warrants a global change.

I guess I look at this a couple different ways.

In D4 I just pick one of my stable of names and then associate them with a class. So I might have 4 different characters of one class that all use the same name. So to me that is kind of cool.

On another level I have names I've used since 1997 in Ultima Online. Across the spectrum of mostly MMO's and in a "new game" people that I had played other games with would connect with me. Over time of course you might find some of your names being hard to obtain. Yet for the most part after a few decades and years of change I have had the same names. So I certainly understand having names you associate with characters you play.

I never played PoE and one day I was kind of bored and jumped into POE2. Around 98% of every name I have ever used was taken. Names I have never had an issue obtaining. So that did make me really /ponder how that happens in this game... but no other game. Even in WoW as I jumped around to various "classic" versions etc I have never had an issue getting these names.

I still managed to get a few of them. Just how it goes and as per a previous post I guess I'll just get used to using the underscore and some extra id in the name.

It really is quite ridiculous at this point not to have a system that allows duplicate names.
And the larger the playerbase gets the worse it is.
The most difficult boss in this game is the name selection box, with it's over powered, one shot, "someone else typed this faster than you" attack.

Look, devs, if 1000 people want to name their character Fred, then let the game have 1000 Freds, and just use a behind the scenes identifier that doesn't mess with peoples names, like every modern multiplayer game ever.

And it will be even worse with more players and more characters indeed. None of my names were taken (as they're essentialy a bunch of stupid French Canadian puns that won't mean anything to 99.99% of the playerbase), but my nephew had to go through 20+ names and we finally gave up and wrote a bunch of underscore to get done with it... and we were only a week or two in the Early Access.

It would be so much easier to simply communicate with the account name like most modern games do (especially since we now have a number after our account name, meaning it's unique), and leave character names out of every communication.

In the end, I think I would be kind of pissed if one of my dumb names was taken. It would mean someone else did beat me to it or even stole my name after seeing it during a previous league if names are tied to leagues and not server-wide.

If you want, you can likely still call yourself Roquefort721xTreme. That should be enough.

First thing I did upon logging in was register like 20 different names so no one could steal them (most were already stolen of course.

Totally idiotic waste of my time.

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AliquamGames#5952 wrote:

Why would you want to steal someone's name?

It's a name, not a user id.