suggestions

Should be able to change bot names, for selling. I'm not gonna buy any other bot if it's got a stupid name, for example:

• Small neps/little neps (obvious who built it and can't really make it my own)
• Zionic 2 (any bot with numbers in, I would class as a dumper/whore bot)

Sorry to pick on you two :p

It would kinda suck if people changed their name every other week though.. Confusing.

Maybe in exchange for $$? Pay $10, you get to change the name.

Here are my thoughts/history on this:

• I've shot down pretty much every private name change request since sometime in alpha or maybe beta. I made exceptions early on but stopped in the interest of fairness when I realized this wasn't a good practice because it's important to me that the same options are available to all players.
• I don't want to just allow everyone to change names because it's supposed to be a permanent marker of identity. If lots of names are changing, things would get confusing.
• Providing name changes for a small fee could potentially solve this by putting the barrier just high enough so that not everyone does it (yet low enough to make it viable for those that really want it), but I'm a little afraid of being perceived as being even more money-hungry than some already make me out to be. :)

why don't you get one name change!! so when you buy bots! e.g small neps you can change their name :/

then what happens if the bots name has already been changed?

As the owner of small neps, I don't feel the need to change its name. That bot has an image (reputation) in this game that will be lost by changing the name. So, I prefer to keep it that way :)

Real men don't buy bots anyway, they make their own. Why implement something for pussies.

ha ha

Well I personally wouldn't want a bot with someone else's name in it. Add a small $ fee for name changes :)

He wouldn't even let me switch my names between Gpof & Gpof2 :'(

Like Coco said, having numbers in your name sucks. You should definitely offer that service in exchange for money though Ender. It's a very trivial, non game-influencing choice for people to make on their own. If people call you greedy for something like that, screw em.

All right, I'll consider some sort of paid name change policy, but right now PvE energy and tournaments are higher priority, so it'll be some time before I get to this.

Nice to hear that Ender :) thank you for your commitment.

the bot could have a name change history, like with the reset history

+1

any idea on a time for this? and would it be automated like buying stars?

Not for awhile because there are higher priority things to do in the meantime. Once added, yes, it would be automatic.

Speaking of other things... what you got in store for us? Shortly? :)

Still working on PvE, slowly but surely.

surely a small time could be spent on minor changes whilst the major changes are developed, keep things moving abit, freshen things up

Yep, I do fit in smaller, one-off features alongside larger, ongoing efforts. Git (source code version control system) has wonderful branch management features for working on simultaneous tasks.

The catch with this particular feature is that bot renaming actually isn't necessarily as simple a change as it sounds. Bot ids are stored in most places, not names, so in general this isn't a problem, but there are exceptions where a piece of code assumed a name would never change. The two cases off the top of my head are (1) bot profiles, which contain the bot name in the url and reject the request if it doesn't match, so that requirement would either need to be relaxed or worked around to not break existing URLs, and (2) historical results store bot names and would require updates upon change (I believe I designed it like this in anticipation of bot deletion, but I actually have a different solution I'm working on for that now, so maybe that stuff can go away altogether). There might be other instances too - the point is that a core assumption is being violated, so all code has to be checked to not assume names will always be the same. Another issue is that star deletion of course needs to work perfectly because people pay real money for those.

Anyway, probably more info than you or anyone else wanted. :)

More info is better than none at all.

making me bump this...grumble grumble grumble

personally think if this introduced should only be available at the point of resetting your bot

Might be an idea. But! I think the main reason for changing names on a bot is, when you've bought a bot from another user.

Might be an idea. But! I think the main reason for changing names on a bot is, when you've bought a bot from another user.

I think along with this the "old" name should be stashed in the bots history (like when you reset) so not to have new players or what-not assuming because you own a level 375 bot you are the king (simply due to the fact you bought it). So I think old names clarify the status of the bot and where it came from.

Changing names for me is more on a basis of creating a bot and fucking up on accident. Like lower case letter when you meant upper case, etc.

I think changing the capitalization should be a change at will type of thing.

Personally I do not like the idea of people able too change their names.

Hm.... this would increase the value of top performing bots. For a small fee, you could change Neps to whatever you want or some other hall of champion bot. We could remove neps from bots history forever