World of Warcraft's Most Popular Names Include Arthas, Sephiroth

[Steven Bogos]

World of Warcraft's Most Popular Names Include Arthas, Sephiroth

An analysis of 120,000 World of Warcraft player names across multiple realms reveals how creatively dead we all are.

Researchers Christian Thurau and Anders Drachen at the Copenhagen Business School have published an in-depth analysis of 120,000 World of Warcraft player names in order to help establish how players identify themselves online.

If you think you've seen an inordinate amount of Blood Elves named some variation of "Sephiroth," don't worry, you're not going crazy, as the name is one of the most popular on EU realms. When we get down to specific races and classes, we see that "Arthas" is the most popular name for Human characters, while the druids of World of Warcraft officially win the "creativity of a rock" award, as the most popular druid player name is simply "druid".

Overall, "Nemesis" is the most popular name for players on EU realms, while US players prefer "Athena". Other names in the top ten include "Death", "Nightmare", "Pain", and "Chaos". If you're thinking that these all sound pretty macabre, you'd be right, as Thurau and Drachen discovered that "negative" names outnumbered "positive" names six-to-one.

Other data discovered by the pair was that RP servers were more likely to have unique player names, while US realms were proven to be ever so slightly more creative than EU counterparts, containing a slightly higher percentage of unique names. There also seems to be a separation in character names between the more human-like (Human, Blood Elf, Night Elf, Draenei) and less human-like ("bestial")/human-proportioned (Troll, Undead, Orc, Tauren, Dwarf, Gnome) races.

To prove that the internet just won't let a joke die, Thurau and Drachen discovered 131 counts of some variation on "Chuck Norris". *sigh*.

Soruce: Naming Virtual Identities: Patterns and Inspirations for Character Names in World of Warcraft [http://andersdrachen.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/namingvirtualidentities_icec2011.pdf]

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[BrotherRool]

Athena? That's a big surprise. Is there a big cultural show/book in the US that I don't know about? It seems weird that they'd settle on that one goddess (especially since it's a single-gender female name)

EDIT:

Of the 39 references to fantasy literature, only
four do not stem from the works of J. R. R. Tolkien.

=D You can say that about fantasy literature in general

 

[DugMachine]

Not surprising, even I fell into that "Gotta have an edgy and dark name" camp. Glad I moved past that.

 

[Smooth Operator]

No this reveals that the masses are creatively dead, also that most create 10+ characters and stop giving a shit what they are called... that's how it went for me anyway.

 

[walrusaurus]

I stopped caring about my characters names after my hunter, Chumshot, got flagged for rename twice.

 

[Seventh Actuality]

No mention of all the frost mages calling themselves Frostitute?

 

[Zeren]

My gnome mage was called Shoebite. Sometimes I miss that little guy.

 

[Captain Quetzal]

I never really got in to WoW, but the one character I made to try it out was a tauren druid called Oak Hoof. Probably a pretty common tauren/druid name.

I just like to keep my character names within the confines of each race's naming structure, so I take my time to think of something. Same goes for the Elder Scrolls games, where the names are completely meaningless. I have 20 Skyrim characters with unique, realistic-in-world names. A little overboard, I know, I just really like creating characters.

 

[Monsterfurby]

As someone who always goes for RP-compatible names, I feel very lonely.

 

[Poetic Nova]

"Sephiroth" is no surprise to me, those people most likely played FF7.

 

[teqrevisited]

And how many of those names are "xarthasdkswe"? I always used to die a little inside every time I saw one.

 

[Eleuthera]

My main, huntress, "Eleutheria" has 84 more namesakes in the EU realms, not quite as original as I'd hoped I'd be.
My least original name is my druid "Athanasios", one of 129.

My most original character name is my Monk "Elunike" with only one namesake.

I've yet to come up with a truly original name apparently.

 

[Loethlin]

I always named my characters after sweets. Had a bunch of Cookies, Candies, Marzipans. And one Migraine. Better than Llegollass1066.

 

[Rblade]

I was pretty surprised there was a big bunch of "Asharian" s, 48. I'm pretty sure I never heard that before. Sure it sounds kinda fantasy like so it's bound to come up but the volume suprised me. But what do you expect with 10 million accounts.

Elunazar, my primary alt, was pretty rare. Me and 1 other guy

Magnarias, the dreanie mage is apparantly also 1 of 2.

Sharakesh the undead rogue has 3 buddies

The rest is either common or a mule.

But hey, my main's an original name, so that makes me happy. Raemoras ol' pal, we don't qualify for the 'Creativity of a rock' award! Success!

Thats a pretty awesome name. Was that a Warlock, sounds warlocky to me.

 

[Micah Weil]

Heh...I kinda fall on both ends of that line between "Oooh, points for creativity" and "you're just being lazy".
For every Joombah (my troll hunter) and Quesel (my blood elf mage) that I had, I had at least one Charsi (who also happened to be a blacksmith)

I kinda miss that batch of characters...

 

[Adultism]

My names are super creative and inspiring to others.

One time my username was x0xSlytherinx0X on a forum, yeah how embarrassing .

 

[AuronFtw]

Athena? That's a big surprise. Is there a big cultural show/book in the US that I don't know about? It seems weird that they'd settle on that one goddess

It's actually the name of a really famous player, Athene (commonly misspelled/mistyped Athena, who he probably named himself after). He's had massive streams, set numerous world first leveling records, was in a slew of good raiding and PvP guilds. I assume the people named Athena are either trolling him by using the name ironically or naming themselves in honor of him (considering how big of a douchebag he is, I'm leaning more towards the former).