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

[Canadamus Prime]

Back when I still played Star Trek Online my primary character was a Federation Klingon named G'ku and had ships named the USS Kamehameha, USS Four Star, USS Shenron, USS Nyoibo, and the USS Flying Nimbus.

Creative aren't I? :Þ

 

[ThunderCavalier]

And the MMO community doesn't surprise me yet again. They're known for quite a couple things, but creative names aren't exactly one of them.

 

[shadowstriker86]

My DK's name is ActionBastard. Because why not? Seriously how could you ever go wrong with a tank that goes by that name?

 

[Kahani]

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

The conclusion from the actual paper:

The research presented here provides evidence for a staggering variety in the names
chosen by players of WOW- 3.8 million unique names in a sample of 7.93 million,
which is notably remarkable given the restrictions imposed. It highlights the imagina-
tiveness employed in naming characters, indirectly supporting earlier work such as [6,
19] in concluding that the choices made during the character creation process are im-
portant to the players.

Pretty much the exact opposite of what this article claims.

 

[Broderick]

Back in my days with WoW, I never bothered with coming up with a name on my own. Instead I'd just click on the built-in random name generator until I found one that I liked. That's how I ended up with a Warlock named "Rope", a Mage named "Chair", a Paladin named "Walk", a Priest named "Food" (think that would have been more appropriate for my mage *insert drum rimshot* ), and various other classes with various other random words as their names. Seriously, I'd say at least 10% of the random name generator is just filled with random words.

Sounds like you read that old penny arcade comic about WoW names heh.

As for me? I always put a stupid amount of time into naming my characters, well most of them. My first wow characters name was just my name with "pk" at the end; creative no? After a couple years, burning crusade was released, so I started up a new character and named him after the main character of a book series I read a while back. He was my belf mage, and I stuck with him till today. I dont play WoW much anymore, but I get an inkling to play from time to time.

Anyways, I tended to look up old gods of specific religions and cultures to help name the specific character I was playing. Same thing with words that correlated with the characters race and class. If it was a tauren, I would try to make it sound "taureny". My tauren paladin was named after an native american tribe's word for "sun" or "the dawn". I did stuff like that with a lot of my characters names.