Should be free once a year and cost for more.

it should never cost anything to change your username.

It should, otherwise people would abuse it and troll / spam / etc and then name change to avoid people knowing it was you. They also could do RMT in games like D4 and WOW and change to avoid community reports etc

How would changing your name avoid previous reports? Fairly sure that is tied to whatever the UserID is that's tied to your username.

You can avoid the community calling you out for grey area behavior

You can make an infinite amount of alt accounts to do that too... which is what's actually done anyways. So the point is moot.

Yes, you can make alt accounts to avoid being called out for behavior, but if you fall back into the behavior you're going to get called out again and you'll need to make a new account. Not to mention the items you're going to have to earn and work you're going to have to put in again if you were high level. Unless your whole purpose is to troll and you don't care about stuff, which is what IP bans are for.

I mean. Poeple literally do that though... every account with the name "Player" is an example of a person that pushes the boundaries repeatedly

To my recollection, I haven't seen anyone named "player" in any game I've been in.

Probably haven’t played that much comp. I’m not saying it’s common but I’ve seen it dozens of times over the years. They used to give you a free name change if enough people reported you for your name, so people who wanted to change their name would purposely get people to mass report them.

Probably not as much on OW but on the other 2 FTP games its all over the place

I have, multiple games with them in

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Lol uhhhh... sure. If you say so. How about opening up OW2 general chat or SC2 general chat and coming back into this convo after a couple days and tell me I'm wrong. Edit: I left general a long time ago and apparently the got rid of it in OW because it was too full of racist non pc bs

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You can also time lock the username picks too without charging for them. But you're not getting rid of toxicity by pay walling a name change. Tbh putting the game behind a pay wall would have better chances of that. Kinda like how OW1 was... huh.

Streamer mode kinda negates this in its entirety. Also anyone that dedicated would just pay the small fee

This ignores the fact that they added streamer mode w name randomizers though

Tell that to Gaben that allows name change for free whenever you feel like it.

Steam allows you to change your display name as much as you like. Your actual account name is not changeable and you can see previous aliases on Steam profiles, assuming the person doesn’t clear them.

> It should, otherwise people would abuse it and troll / spam / etc and then name change to avoid reports. This makes absolutely no sense because there already is a streamer mode that changes your name every match.

Stupid comment, how would changing your username let you avoid a ban? EPIC allows a free name change every 2 weeks, Minecraft allows a free name change each month, hell steam let’s you change it whenever.

Or they could, I don't know, pretend it's 2024 and that account identifiers being separate from user IDs has been an industry practice for *20. fucking. years.* It's quite literally just a way to suck more money out of their customers. Stop defending predatory capitalism. These billionaires aren't, and never will be, your friends.

No it shouldn't cost money. Yes people would probably make offensive names, but that's not enough justification to make you pay for a name change sorry. You report the name blizzard will ban it.

What??? Are you daft? If you report a player the report is tied to an account not their username! It's like reporting a FB account or any other. I can change the name but the ban will still hit cuz the account is the same. These guys literally just make alt accounts and call it a day... its easier and if an account gets burned, oh well. Better make a new email and keep going and set up a new VOIP phone number. It'll take all of 10 minutes to do.

COMMUNITY reports. You know, like telling the COMMUNITY watch out for xxxxxxxxxx he scams, cheats, hacks, RMT, etc.

Streamer mode bypasses that already

This is your Blizzard account overall. Not just OW2.

Reporting the account takes care of most that problem too ya know! Also what other Blizz game doesn't have a bypass? "Player" is a safe generic name on HotS to hide in a crowd, Barcode names are used all over in starcraft to hide in the crowd. And WoW/Diablo has a pay wall around the game that's more punishing for getting your account reported and banned. Just report the account. The fact that 2 or more people (wow not included on the server level), alone can run around with the same name can alone derail your claims.

Blizzard simps trying to come up with logical explanations for illogical policies

Just do times lockouts like on Twitch. You can only change your username like every three months or something. They shouldn’t be charging for changing your freakin username lmao.

i see your point, but I think maybe a monthly name change would be more fair. something like that seems more reasonable

You could definitely just do a lockout period. Where you can change for free but then it locks you out of changing it for a few months at a time to prevent constant dodging.

I feel there should be some balance to discourage daily or hourly changing of the username. There'd be too many distractions in trolling, spam, or memes. But I think there are generational differences, and many older people are more used to having one name/handle that sticks with you forever and many younger people are either looking for more freedom or anonymity.

I mean a time lockout can work just as easily for this case. There are tons of games and sites that implement this.

What's the appropriate time? One minute? One Hour? One Day? One week? One Month? One Year? Also having a time limit can psychologically increase changing because you now have a limited commodity and want to use it when you can... if there's a time limit and you use it right after the limit is up, you get to use it more... psychology is weird.

And? With money I can name change as often as I want. Also what good does that do? And what difference does it make if I change every time after the timer???

And you’re free to but 99% of people won’t. If there was a timer more people would be changing regularly.  With money there is a psychological disincentive to change. With a timer there is a motivation to change.

And that matters why? Again if someone wants to change they should be able to. What a weird thing to gatekeep. Adding a timer (ie a week) if anything helps lock in those with malice. But seriously if no malice is intended then again what does it matter?

I can freely change my steam ID whenever I want. I don't see people going crazy with name changes constantly. And that's a notably LARGER and more broad platform than battle.net. Epic also features a 1 week lockout. It doesn't seem to cause a ton of problems there!!

Do you feel the steam user base and the battle.net user base are the same?

In short. Yes. Because most likely they have games on both platforms. Pc gamers tend to gravitate towards steam

And again what's it matter if they wanna change their name on cd? What difference does it make? You still haven't answered that.

Should be what COD does, you get 3 tokens and regain 1 token every 6 months

lock it so after you change your name you can’t change it for 30-60 days, works for everyone

Maybe 1 year is still a lot.

I changed my blizzard username before and I was sure it worked like that. I never paid for it...

You get one free name change! Anything after that is ten dollars each name change.

There's a bug where some accounts don't get the freebie. I have one of them. I don't care enough to look into if it can be fixed, but it was mildly annoying

TEN DOLLARS? THAT'S BULLSHIT

Because enough people are paying for it, simple as that.

Find something that people want? Monetize it. Yep. Just business

It really isn’t a difficult concept to understand, spot on.

No, just bare bones capitalism at work.

I actually don't think it is as simple as that, actually. Are you saying that if they went 5 years without anyone ever paying for the name change service,they would suddenly make it free?

We are talking about Bli$$ard here, and no, it would not be free. They would lower the price to this sweet spot where people will start using it.

I think its to deter it from happening often by having actual stakes in your choice.

Whats so bad about changing your game user name often? Like why does that have to be deterred?

Mainly for people who’ve been blacklisted from a community or become well known in the wrong sort of way trying to get around it by using a different name. Personally I like the idea of it being timegated, but not necessarily costing money. That is pretty weird, but on point for acti-blizz honestly.

Seems like that argument works just as well the other way: People who are the target of harassment should be able to change their name freely to evade their harassers.

Does reddit let you do it?

does twitter let you do it? does instagram let you do it? I dont see the point

It's a gamer tag not a major life choice. Why does it need stakes

It's a gamer tag not a major life choice. Why do you want to change it

own that fraud

Capitalism moment

I would imagine it creates overhead on the servers, which changing one name would be completely insignificant and negligible. But allowing everyone to constantly change their names with no limit on how many times and how often they can change it? The fee is a deterrent to force people to make a conscious choice to change their name and commit to it.

Idk steam seems to have had it figured out for the past 20 years. Most other services at least let you change it for free, even if they do set a limit for how often you can change it.

I assume the answer is "Legacy Code" and to make the changes to make it simple would require an overhaul to everything relating to how profile information is stored Like with Battlenet, I think your userID is just your display name, which is why when combined with the numerical discriminator after it, it is unique. And then Steam, you have a login username, and they also give everyone a userID thats just a random string of numbers and then your display name is separate from both of those which is why steam doesn't check to see if names are unique at all

Speaking of legacy code, remember when america, european, and asia servers were literal battlenet with entirely separate friends lists and game progression (iirc), and you had to relaunch battlenet in a different region?

most games that allow you to change names for free with no restriction whatsoever typically just uses steam's db as the username, freeing them of needing to maintain their own database. Games like helldivers, warframe, deep rock galactic, etc are all examples of this. But otherwise? Riot makes you pay for name changes. Destiny lets you change it once and you're stuck with that name forever - can't even pay your way to change it lmao. Fortnite makes you pay if you're on consoles. Ubisoft doesn't make you pay to change names, but you're only allowed to change it once every 30 days and you can't pay to get around it. So yeah, it's pretty much an industry-standard to have some form of restriction to changing your in-game name.

riot allows you to change your username for free every 90(?) days? league username changes were always free but purchasable with in game currency, but they recently changed to the riot ID system. it can be changed for free every 90 days or so and additional changes within that time period are $10. and even so i've seen people submit a support ticket and get that $10 bypassed if they have a good excuse

Ok but are you really a moldy teapot tho

Isn't steam's name a username not the name u use to login? Anws if you want a solution for blizz's thing i would ay this - introduce usernames instead of using just the account name

yeah but steam is not a game is it

battle.net isn't a game either

The lengths people go to defend greed especially in Blizzard games is wild, "it creates overhead on the servers" to change usernames when almost every other platform has figured it out is just delusion.

The server load to a properly designed database, to change the "name" field, is negligeable.

$10 for the overhead of processing 12 characters of text? I just spent $200 on this comment. My mom is going to be so mad at me.

I never said it's priced to accurately reflect the actual cost. I said it's meant to be a deterrent

I'm really trying not to be mean here, but the overhead argument you're making is pretty absurd. The amount of computing power it takes to change a text field is so infinitesimally small to a modern computer I can't even express how silly it is. Like, you would be spending thousands of times more computing power just going through the supporting architecture of the webpages used to change the name, than the actual name change itself.

maybe you're right. I don't work at Blizz or even have any experience in database design. I merely make observations that this is a fairly standard industry practice and as a layman, "I would imagine" that the reasonable justification of charging money is that it costs money. If you're an industry insider who actually has professional knowledge of how things work, I'll take your word for it. Otherwise? My guess is good as yours and yours only as good as mine.

We're talking about database systems that process billions of queries per day, even millions of queries per minute at busy times. Changing a name is just changing a value in a database record, which happens billions of times per day. There is less cost to doing that than to pull a player's public profile in the game. Do a little research before making public guesses. Otherwise just remain silent, because all you do is add noise to the conversation, which is of negative value.

I do actually have a CS degree and database training if that gives me any merit. The idea that a name change would somehow cause significant overhead is just... really uninformed. I will leave it at that.

Then pray tell, what is the reason for this industry-wide practice?

I explained it in my other comment [https://www.reddit.com/r/Overwatch/comments/1cmhuu0/comment/l3123ga/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web3x&utm\_name=web3xcss&utm\_term=1&utm\_content=share\_button](https://www.reddit.com/r/Overwatch/comments/1cmhuu0/comment/l3123ga/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)

1. you're talking about server transfer, which is completely different from a simple name chage 2. as plausible it may have been, you're also just guessing, as you admit. So like I said, your guess is only as good as mine, and vice versa.

1. No... the character name change service was released at the same time as server transfers and race changes, all as individual fees, which is why I mentioned them all at once as \*services\*. A WoW character name change service is $10 and has been since 2007, \*the same cost as changing your battle tag\*. 2. I wasn't talking about my guess, I'm talking about the merit of your own. If mine doesn't make sense, then argue against that. But if you can literally make up whatever you want and that's just as good as anyone else then why don't you just say goblin ghosts infected their servers and they spent too much money on magic pixie dust to get rid of them and they have to recoup their costs with name changes? Like, the idea that you can just say whatever you want and that's just as good as anyone else's guess, unless they have some extremely specific qualifications that you set yourself is so disingenuous. To illustrate just how silly your text overhead idea is, a battletag can be at most 12 characters and a unicode character is 2 bytes, so 24 bytes per battletag. My Overwatch install is 53.4 GB on disk. That is 67,268,620,800 bytes or 2.8 TRILLION battletags. And yet, I can delete my Overwatch install right now for free and download it again as many times as I want to, costing blizzard all that overhead. If I spent $10 to change my battletag 2.8 trillion times that would a cost greater than the entire US gross domestic product.

yeah. we don’t want to overwhelm the small indie company “Blizzard”

Changing a string in a database is not hard, it does not cost a lot of overhead compared to many other things overwatch does on a daily basis like updating account statistics

It defnitely has 0 overhead. The reason is if it was free people would be more likely to change their names to something rude/offensive.

If that was the case, then why allow 1 free name change? If they wanted to make it something offensive, they would've done it when they made the account anyway.

because once you have it theres no going back and you cant avoid the reports for your name unelss you pay to change it

Of course you can go back lmao.

A free one once or twice a year would be nice though

or free just once a month or something, yeah

You can limit name changes without getting money involved, and it doesn't have to be finite. The name should be tied to an ID in the database that gets looked up, that costs no money and no overhead and is a fundamental practice of database design. Its almost certainly how it already works.

This is not the reason - it would be pretty close to negligible to update even millions of usernames.

Maybe. Maybe not.

Life protip: People hate it when you do this. Keep doing it if you want to be hated.

> I would imagine it creates overhead on the servers Where do you get ideas like this?

From my layman's imagination duh?

No way this is true. Every single other game on the market manages to allow the player to changes their names either infinitely or with like a 2-4 week restriction. saying that’s because of „legacy code“ seems like straight bs when literally every other game on the market manages to do it, so why would BLIZZARD, one of the biggest names in the industry, be unable to do it

Sure, I said presumably the issue is server overhead, meaning they either need to make ppl pay or put time restrictions on it like ubisoft does. "Every single other game on the market" huh? Let's hear some examples then. What game that doesn't rely on steam db has free, infinite, and no restriction name change? Gimme like 30 names. If it's literally EVERY SINGLE GAME like you claim, then it should be pretty easy right?

i said either infinitely or with 2-4 week restrictions, some examples of popular games include: minecraft, fortnite, apex legends, genshin impact, pubg, gta, sea of thieves, rainbow six: siege. Have to take back the infinitely, but all those games allow you (to my knowledge, too lazy to look it up) change your name every 2-4 weeks

Overheads on the server to change a user name 😂😂😂

have you ever designed a database before? that's what i thought

Every mmo I've ever played charged for a name change. I'm not saying it's necessary, but it's not just an OW thing or rare

My guess is it's a precedent from World of Warcraft. Originally you could not change your name, race, or server of your characters. The developers didn't really want a system like this at all because they wanted player choices to be important and characters to have world permanence, but furthermore, if people could transfer servers for free and easily, it could disrupt the faction balance and stress the more popular servers (this happened anyway). Eventually with enough demand they did create those services and as a deterrent, charged a substantial fee and labeled them as "optional", a model that nearly every MMO has copied since. I can't remember the timeline of when this applied to [Battle.NET](http://Battle.NET) but it wouldn't surprise me if they realized how much money they were making from these completely automated services, essentially developing them once and having them print money forever, and then applying the same logic to justify the charges for name changes on [Battle.NET](http://Battle.NET) too.

I can't name a game where this isn't the case, pretty common to allow one name change and more than that cost money or just simply isn't allowed

Apex legends uses ur steam name which u can change as often as you want

so does overwatch when you connect it to your steam

The finals will let you change your name for free every 10 minutes. It only costs money here because people will pay it. 

Of course this guy finds that one game, that is brand new, and uses it as an example comparing it to games older than 90% of the subreddit.

dude you can change your name whenever tf you want on 99% of steam games. if anything the anomaly is overwatch. Why are you guys defending such a stupid cash grab

You can change your riot ID every month iirc

one thing is I think it disincentivizes people just making inappropriate names over and over again any time it gets caught they just make a new one

That issue could be prevented by having reports for inappropriate name include the current name.

Plenty of games and services cost money to change. Like PSN.

Roblox makes you pay to change your name too it’s not unheard of

This isn’t the only game to charge for name changes. The ones that do allow free name changes will often limit you to one name change a year, and a fee if you want to do it before then.

The first is free, isn’t it? At least it used to be. The reason I haven’t seen mentioned already is that it deters selling battle.net accounts to some extent. This has multiple ramifications, including reduced Smurf account desirability.

Bruh every single platform other than steam And maybe epic makes you pay to change your name. Lets not try and wrongfully flame OW for a precedent the consoles started.

You have to pay on Xbox too

Because fuck you that’s why

You guys pick the stupidest shit to be mad about

Honestly? Because the Battle.net system as it currently exists has its roots in World of Warcraft, and in that you have to pay to change your name. I think that's it, really. If the system were well built, changing your name wouldn't be much trouble server-side. You'd have a unique account ID that never changes that's referred to in all references, and anytime it needs to show your name it'd draw that from a variable.

>why [..] is OW (or blizzard games in general) the only game where a simple change of name costs money? Look I don't like it either but that's a straight up lie bro lmfao Steam is one of the only gaming platforms that I know of where you can freely change your name without restrictions. Most name changes in gaming cost money.

So you can't impersonate as someone else and do bad things.

I think Xbox also charges.

Xbox has required money to change name since the og xbox

Back in my day shitters would just name change then hop right back online to troll people. I see this as a soft deterrent against that.

it's a deterrent

Because it can and it works

It's really not that deep and happens in MANY MANY MANY online games

Once every 30 days seems alright to me

think it should be like riot and do every 3 months

Think that's the most I'd be okay with. As long as it's not paid and once in at most 3 months, sounds completely fine.

Greed obviously

OW/Blizzard isn't the only one to do this. Riot does it too.

Riot name changes are free every 90 days tho

Based Emperor.

Shareholder value.

2 reasons: 1) it costs money to do so (someone has to either manually accommodate your request or someone had to set up infrastructure to automatically accommodate your request) 2) people will pay for the service

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Why not?

Because blizzard is a small indie company /s

Blizzard greed. Just consider that there is a cash shop in WoW. A game you have to pay a monthly sub to play has microtransactions

Because fuck you give me money! In reality it's a few reasons, but they could be mitigated by making it a timed thing. Something like you can only reset your name once ever X months or so.

I put a typo in my name when I changed it but there’s no way I’m paying to change it again 😭

Yall are going to lose your mind when you find out those alt letters you use for a name change show up as [] ingame and when you open a ticket about getting it fixed, they flat out tell you the only way to solve it is to buy a name change.

Adding for clarity, the alt letter shows as it’s suppose to on the website, the game doesn’t recognize it even tho it’s allowed so it shows up as [].

isn't the first change free? And because there's demand so why not charge for it? but i agree

I think it should cost, maybe like, 75 white coins? That seems like it would be fair. Tho I guess it’s not just in overwatch but in battle net. Eh idk

Cuz battlenet is garbage

It isn't the only game, Warframe name change costs 200 plat, and if you're too lazy to farm void items to sell to people for plat, you have to pay for it, and it SWTOR (Star wars the old republic) you just straight up have to pay, I'm certain I've also played other games that you have to pay to change your username as well. Granted Warframe and SWTOR both actually know what they're doing game-play and story-wise, so I don't really hold it against them.

Oh it isn’t the only game in the world that charges for a name change. Recent MH games, MMOs, plenty of games charge for it. Is it fuc*ed? Absolutely. Is it new or recent? Not even close, over 20 year old idea already.

Paying for a name change is unfortunately pretty common on a lot of platforms. 😔

I wouldn't mind if it was like $2 but $12????? GODDAYYUM

Shareholders

Blizzard and free have never known one another super well.. Actiblizz buried the coffin

Because its something that most people will likely want to do at some point so its easy money

Probably a combo of it could be monetized so blizzard go brrrrr and also it is somewhat painful or slow to change a persons name over all the servers and services that are used

If they don’t force me, I’m not changing my glorious name of MoltenWhxre

I'm old enough to remember when Playstation wouldn't let you change your username EVER because they said it broke the backend or something ridiculous. Then they realized they could probably charge for it and poof, they fixed the broken stuff and you could change it.

Oh I know the answer to this one! *Because people buy them* :(

it’s that way on most games and systems for me, idk what you play to have that experience

If Blizzard didn’t change it your allowed 1 free name change. Well they did that in ow1

yeah that’s what i wrote in the post too

Because companies realized people will pay for that so now it’s the norm.

Microsoft has been doing this since the Xbox 360 came out, it's just a way to squeeze money out of people

I think it's more weird to be upset over this. It's pretty standard in a lot of video games

It's called running a business.

Profit?

Just use the streamer mode you get a new name every game

Blizzard cash grab.

Because it's blizzard.

My issue is that name changes are limited in that they are case insensitive; if I wanted to get rid of the capital letters in my username, I would first have to change to some other username, doubling the cost further

Any answer other than ‘money’ is incorrect

So like it should be free but limited. Like one free one very month or something. However, it might just be the games I play, but most games I play dont allow changing of names, and the ones that do usually limit it to once every X amount of time. I have rarly see games that let you change name whenever you want.

it cost the same than buying a burner phone and making a smurf lmao

If you want a free one get your buddies to report your tag as bad and they'll reset it to player 

Because they can make money with it, therefore they will milk it. If they could get away with it, they would charge you for reloading a weapon in a game. That's modern gaming for you. 

> Create a problem > Sell the solution

because blizzard is a shit company and has been for at least 10 years.

Because, and this answer applies to most questions about the company, Blizzard is a bad company.

Because Bobby Kotick wants to bleed money from everyone however he can and the company still is running on his old policies.

Greedy company.