Changing user names?

[pandairo]

 

By Colin Moriarty

A couple of months ago, I wrote an editorial begging Sony to let us change our PSN names. The PlayStation Network launched in 2006 alongside PlayStation 3, and there's no way to change your name short of creating a new account, therefore losing all of your purchases, Trophies, friends, and more. (Sony has been known to manually change select users' names for various reasons, though you'll lose your Trophies if this happens.)

I brought this topic up in an interview with Sony Computer Entertainment America's President and CEO Shawn Layden. After all, changing PSN names is one of the single most-asked about features not yet on the Network. His answer surprised me, since he seemed to indicate that technical issues may not be standing in the way, as previously assumed by myself and others.

"The road map for feature extension is very long. It goes from here to Hangzhou in China," Layden remarked when I asked about not only changing one's PSN name, but about other oft-requested features like deleting unwanted Trophies. "And all of those things are on there. Yeah, we want to give you more control across your experience and your profile and your presence on the network."

"At the same time, as you'll understand, we don't want to make it so that you can go in, grief a bunch of people in Far Cry, change your avatar, change your username, go into CoD and grief everybody over there. We want to stop that."

When I asked if that issue specifically -- the risk of abuse -- is what's holding up the feature being implemented, Layden answered in the affirmative. Transparency in changing your name seems to be the issue at hand.

"[We want to do name changing] in a way that's transparent, but also don't let people morph themselves, either. And yeah, it's terrible that you have to make decisions on a service sometimes by optimizing around the bad actor. I hate that we have to do that. So we're trying to balance that between… the 99 percent of users going to have a good experience, how can we help make that happen without giving one more tool to the bad actor to go in and ruin the experience for others?"

Here's hoping Sony figures out this issue so that the many PlayStation Network users waiting to change their names -- to pay for the right to do so, even -- can get what they've been waiting for, many of them for years on end.

Source: IGN

Edited November 15, 2014 by pandairo

[Light_Infinite_]

sony got a good point "At the same time, as you'll understand, we don't want to make it so that you can go in, grief a bunch of people in Far Cry, change your avatar, change your username, go into CoD and grief everybody over there. We want to stop that." that i can see to happen a lot of dick well abuse it 

Edited November 15, 2014 by El_C4RLOS-OPS

[ZeroXOF]

sony got a good point "At the same time, as you'll understand, we don't want to make it so that you can go in, grief a bunch of people in Far Cry, change your avatar, change your username, go into CoD and grief everybody over there. We want to stop that." that i can see to happen a lot of dick well abuse it 

 

This is why it's free for the first time then the next you have to pay with MS. I think Sony don't want to look like copy cats, which is weird because they could let us have nicknames and all that stuff. 

[Kashiyuka]

Never actually thought of that, but it makes surprisingly good sense as to why they haven't added it.  Hope they figured it out eventually for all those who want their names changed.

[spacemonkey3k]

This really should be a no brainer for Sony. Right off the top of my head I can think of several ways to limit griefing. How about only allowing a change once a year? Or make it cost preventative for those who would want to do it repeatedly, like $15-20 per change. I know people would still pay that much, maybe myself included.

[Xxleonardo97xX]

C'mon let me deleted trophies and change id!! Paying should be necessary to do this to avoid that type of abuse.

[Daigashadokuro]

Even better, why not just keep a publicly accessible log of a user's previous IDs? Seems fairly simple to me...

[ExHaseo]

I smell BS.

 

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that you can just limit name changes to once every 6 months to a year, or whatever. Also, making it a pay service, with a somewhat high price point, will keep people from doing that as well. No one is going to be jumping from name to name if it cost $50 to do a name change. Only those that really want to change their name are going to do it.

 

I can understand not letting people delete trophies though. It would kind of make trophies a bit pointless, in a community sense, if you can just delete the games you don't want on there. I think the way they have it, where you can hide trophies, is the best way to do it. Since sites like this can still see that you have hidden trophies, but they're still gone.

[PREDRAG-K]

Making it cost $10 per name change would solve that abuse problem pretty easily. Someone wants to do what they described? They have to pay $10 each time.

Also, if someone is being a dick on a game, can't you just report them? Changing your ID doesn't change your profile completely. If I were to report someone named Jim, and they go to another game and change their name to Bob, it wouldn't matter. It's the same person, same profile. They can be tracked down through the network and banned. It can't be some complicated system, to have name changes, Microsoft seems to have it figured out.