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When do you think they'll have new last names?


Cackle Amore
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I been rather curious when they plan to cycle out some more again, at the time I figured it might be like every two months or so since that's what they did earlier in the year just a bit after they added the feature in. But yet there's not been a hint of any new last names since all year. They just tossed out a small handful after just one or two months to cycle in a few new ones for the yearly anniversary and not any others since.

So when do y'all think they might cycle in new names? Atm all I got to go by is maybe once a year during the SL birthdays.

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From the FAQ:

Q: I don't like the available last names. When will there be different names available? How often will the list of names change?

A: Much as we did with the original legacy surnames, we plan to update and change the available last names regularly. That way, a good variety of first and last name combinations are available at any given moment. Because we determine when to retire a last name by the number of times it's been used, it's hard to say exactly when the list might change. If you're interested in changing your name, but don't see a name that fits just yet, please check back every so often to see what names have become available.

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16 hours ago, Sassy Kenin said:

Agreeing with Wulfie and Gingerbread Man but at same time feel now that it's a paid feature and a decade later they need to start considering the feedback and adjusting to give people more option's.

No, I don't think so.

Remember, they never wanted to do this, and really they still don't. They want to discourage as many people as possible from changing their name, so they have deliberately set it to make it as difficult and expensive as possible, to ensure that as few people as possible will actually do it. They need to have the option there because we (the consumers) complained about it so much, but as far as Linden Lab is concerned, the perfect number of sales for this product is zero.

That's why it's expensive, with such a poor choice of names, and is difficult to obtain. 

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55 minutes ago, Lewis Luminos said:

No, I don't think so.

Remember, they never wanted to do this, and really they still don't. They want to discourage as many people as possible from changing their name, so they have deliberately set it to make it as difficult and expensive as possible, to ensure that as few people as possible will actually do it. They need to have the option there because we (the consumers) complained about it so much, but as far as Linden Lab is concerned, the perfect number of sales for this product is zero.

That's why it's expensive, with such a poor choice of names, and is difficult to obtain. 

They didn't want to because it was difficult and time consuming to do given the old code they had to work with and all. But after they finally added it, and put such a price tag... the rest of the "but we don't want our customers to pay for the service" is just an excuse to charge 40$ for it, vs 5-10$ for vast majority other online games/platforms do.

Or do you really believe they don't like all those money made from renames (and there's a lot of them. you can check through legacy search for all those Novas, Clouds and other popular ones) ? Especially considering that it's all is already finished development wise, so it makes perfect sense to make profit on it.

And no, they didn't "need to have that option", customers complain about things all the time. And from what I read people complained about last names removal way more back when it happened and was free to reverse the decision. It's a service they decided to (finally) offer and put a price tag on it, the rest is marketing rubbish. And seems like people actually fell for it.

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6 minutes ago, steeljane42 said:

They didn't want to because it was difficult and time consuming to do given the old code they had to work with and all. But after they finally added it, and put such a price tag... the rest of the "but we don't want our customers to pay for the service" is just an excuse to charge 40$ for it, vs 5-10$ for vast majority other online games/platforms do.

Or do you really believe they don't like all those money made from renames (and there's a lot of them. you can check through legacy search for all those Novas, Clouds and other popular ones) ? Especially considering that it's all is already finished development wise, so it makes perfect sense to make profit on it.

And no, they didn't "need to have that option", customers complain about things all the time. And from what I read people complained about last names removal way more back when it happened and was free to reverse the decision. It's a service they decided to (finally) offer and put a price tag on it, the rest is marketing rubbish. And seems like people actually fell for it.

We have display names, which is free to change but has a 7 day cooldown. What good reason do you think there is for that?

Oz Linden in June of 2019:

Quote

It was asked why was the Lab planning to charge residents to change their names. Oz answered, "It has a social cost within the world, and a complexity. Not something you want people to do too frequently. It creates trouble. One of the ways to slow down things we don't want to go too fast is charging people for it." As of now, there were no plans to have any other limits. Oz stated though if too many residents changed names too often, they could impose time limits such as no more than once a week.

 

Edited by Wulfie Reanimator
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1 hour ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

We have display names, which is free to change but has a 7 day cooldown. What good reason do you think there is for that?

One is being free, other is not (and rather expensive). People would change display name every minute if they could, at least some of them, like they already change group tags and those floating titles. Given how long it takes for the system to update it everywhere that would mean that it's always out of date for such people, which is not ideal. And would actually cause some confusion here and there considering that display names are also not unique, while usernames are.

But even a 5$ tag already would stop 99% of people from doing it with the username, 10$ for sure, plus forced premium membersip for a month on top of that. There are more fun things to spend 2.5k L$ in SL, than a little fun with the name.

So yes, I still stand by my point. It's a marketing and justification of a rather heavy (for such service) price tag. It's more in line with other very expensive things in SL like land, too. But other services, which also took forever to implement a username change, for example PSN (exists since 2006, name change option added last year) has first change free, then 10$ for each next one and 5$ for PSPlus subscribers. And yes, old names also can't be reused there, like in SL, and there's a lot of social stuff like leaderboards, groups etc tied to those names as well. And it's more of a mass product given over 100m montly users and 45m+ PSPlus subscribers, so I'm sure that it "creates" lots of confusion if go by Oz's words, but I never heard or read a single complaint about it so far.

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad they finally added them, and changed it on the very first day on my "main", but I really do find silly the thought of a company investing time and money into adding a service in hopes that "no one will ever use it". They simply wouldn't do it, if they saw an actual issue with it.

Edited by steeljane42
typos
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3 hours ago, steeljane42 said:

They didn't want to because it was difficult and time consuming to do given the old code they had to work with and all. But after they finally added it, and put such a price tag... the rest of the "but we don't want our customers to pay for the service" is just an excuse to charge 40$ for it, vs 5-10$ for vast majority other online games/platforms do.

Or do you really believe they don't like all those money made from renames (and there's a lot of them. you can check through legacy search for all those Novas, Clouds and other popular ones) ? Especially considering that it's all is already finished development wise, so it makes perfect sense to make profit on it.

 

It's nothing to do with the money or the code to install the feature. @Oz Linden already explained why they don't want people to change their names if there's any possibility for it to be avoided. @Wulfie Reanimator has quoted that reason already. It's nothing to do with profit or back-coding, it's about the hassles and complexities that arise with every single name change request.

In short - no, they really don't want your money for name-changing. They'd really rather you didn't change your name at all.  The price they set was the price at which enough people would be dissuaded from bothering and if it gets too popular even at the current price, they'll have to raise it again to ensure that the number of name change requests remains below that which the system can cope with, without breaking.

Because I'm sure you would be unhappy if suddenly name changes were priced low enough for you (and 80% of the SL population) and instead of 4,000 people getting one, it's suddenly 400,000, but the grid can't cope and everything is broken. 

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6 hours ago, steeljane42 said:

One is being free, other is not (and rather expensive). People would change display name every minute if they could, at least some of them, like they already change group tags and those floating titles. Given how long it takes for the system to update it everywhere that would mean that it's always out of date for such people, which is not ideal. And would actually cause some confusion here and there considering that display names are also not unique, while usernames are.

But even a 5$ tag already would stop 99% of people from doing it with the username, 10$ for sure, plus forced premium membersip for a month on top of that. There are more fun things to spend 2.5k L$ in SL, than a little fun with the name.

So yes, I still stand by my point. It's a marketing and justification of a rather heavy (for such service) price tag. It's more in line with other very expensive things in SL like land, too. But other services, which also took forever to implement a username change, for example PSN (exists since 2006, name change option added last year) has first change free, then 10$ for each next one and 5$ for PSPlus subscribers. And yes, old names also can't be reused there, like in SL, and there's a lot of social stuff like leaderboards, groups etc tied to those names as well. And it's more of a mass product given over 100m montly users and 45m+ PSPlus subscribers, so I'm sure that it "creates" lots of confusion if go by Oz's words, but I never heard or read a single complaint about it so far.

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad they finally added them, and changed it on the very first day on my "main", but I really do find silly the thought of a company investing time and money into adding a service in hopes that "no one will ever use it". They simply wouldn't do it, if they saw an actual issue with it.

If you can't show that changing names would happen four times as often (at $10) or eight times as often (at $5) it would be foolish for Linden Lab to reduce a fee that you're saying a significant number of people are willing to pay.

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7 hours ago, Lewis Luminos said:

already explained why they don't want people to change their names

Mhm, "explained" and "reasons". Good for you if you blindly trust every explanation from corporations. They also "explained" back in the day their reasons to remove the old names, or more recent (they did backpedal on that decision in the matter of days) the reason why is that non premium accounts had to get less groups. The rest is just you repeating what they told everyone, nothing to see there.

4 hours ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

If you can't show that changing names would happen four times as often (at $10) or eight times as often (at $5) it would be foolish for Linden Lab to reduce a fee that you're saying a significant number of people are willing to pay.

That's true. Business' going to try and sqeeze every last penny from customers in most cases. Why charge less if you can charge more? Plus the whole "whale oriented" F2P model in general, which gets most revenue from only a few % of paying customers, while "the fish" that pays either none or close to none is only there for population purposes. It's why some digital "goods" in mmos (outfits/skins/perks etc) that are pretty much infinite value after initial development costs are sold for certain prices, and not given away for free or nearly free. Same deal as with name change here, no reason to sell them for 1$ if people are willing to buy them for 20$.

So I don't even blame LL for that, and never did. In fact from the recent 'features" it was one I was waiting for myself. Not to mention that 40$ is not much compared to 229$/month for the region (which I pay for, yet I still find it terribly overpriced). They can have it, after all I also enjoy SL and want it to be around for a long time. I'm sure someone at LL's marketing department did the research and the 40+premium for a month tag was calculated. I just find those "reasons"-excuses and people actually thinking it's true rather silly.

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Oh for ....

It is quite simple: Despite the work to decouple the Account name from the UUID in their database it is still not something that can/should be easily changed out. Unlike the Display Names - which also suffer(ed) from similar problems - there is/was a lot more tied up to the Account Name.

No matter what is officially said, the above is all you really need to know and is the only part that matters in the decision regarding charging for Account Name change and the cooldown on Display Name changes.

... It is as if no one at all paid attention when the Display Name feature was rolled out and it was made quite clear at the time that it took time for the change to filter through their database system .... or that no one is capable of understanding/extrapolating what had to be done to allow for you to change your Account Name ...

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