Old CoH Nostalgia for Name Release

[Completist]

I played in the CoH beta and I played on and off for the life of the game. Never a full-time MMO player, or maybe just a short attention span, I would take months-long breaks from the game before coming back to it (while NCSoft happily took my 8 bucks a month or whatever it was).

 

Anyway. Early on I made a self-insertion character of myself. I made a normal guy (Dark/Regen scrapper), in jeans and a T-shirt, named EP, which is what I go by in real life. 

On one of those long hiatuses the devs instituted a name release feature, so a bunch of the characters I hadn't logged in for a while had to be re-named to other things. Which was mostly no big deal. The name "EP" didn't get taken by anyone, but because they changed the name policy for new heroes requiring at least 3 characters (letters or punctuation) and I was no longer grandfathered in, I still had to change it.

 

It bugged me, because at the time there was a Lore character named M1--does anyone know what happened to that guy? Did they rename him to Blue Steel maybe?--but my character had to run around with the name "EP?" until the end of time. 

Edited September 1, 2022 by Completist
c/by/but

[ZorkNemesis]

I took a quick look through the old Paragon Wiki (the one that's archived as of the shutdown) and it turns out there was a hero by the name of M1 in the game's backstory.  He served during World War II as part of the First Hero Brigade and is honored in Galaxy City with a statue, the same one where the Tank badge is located (he is also mentioned by name in the badge description itself).  There's nothing that says he was ever renamed and he's definitely not Blue Steel.  Why he gets a pass to have a two-character name and you don't however isn't really known but I think super short names might cause backend problems or something, I wouldn't know.

[Greycat]

9 hours ago, ZorkNemesis said:

  Why he gets a pass to have a two-character name and you don't however isn't really known but I think super short names might cause backend problems or something, I wouldn't know.

 

... because he's an NPC character only mentioned in lore, perhaps?

[TalynDerre]

You could go with E.P. (with the periods).  That's 4 letters.

[High_Beam]

I guess they were worried about someone creating an FU character.

[Mopery]

I knew an EP from an old game called Subspace, but that was a quarter-century ago...

Edited September 13, 2022 by Mopery

[biostem]

On 9/12/2022 at 1:53 PM, TalynDerre said:

You could go with E.P. (with the periods).  That's 4 letters.

You're only allowed 1 special character, IIRC.  That being said, you could do E-P, EP., etc...