1.
You may not use names of copyrighted or trademarked characters, materials or products.
Max, to defend this rule, you said the following ...
MaxHayman wrote: ↑Thu Feb 08, 2024 1:19 pm
If someone who has a claim on a trademark thinks a character name is infringing, they are welcome to contact us. This rule is common on a lot of video games or MMOs. Additionally, trademark claims usually have different classes.
https://www.lawbite.co.uk/resources/blog/trademark-classes wrote:The principle behind trademark protection is to prevent confusion in the marketplace. If two businesses operate in different industries or offer unrelated products or services, they can both register the same or similar trademarks without infringing on each other's rights.
... and cited an article on LinkedIn about a trademark dispute between two businesses. Why is any of this relevant to the names of characters or guilds on an MMORPG private server? Why do we need such a rule today, on this server? Surely, player names are not equivalent to the brand names of private businesses?
2.
You may not use names from popular culture or media.
I also don't quite understand the need for this rule. What does it matter if someone names their character 'Gimli' or 'Legolas'? This rule in conjunction with the last one
You may not use misspellings or alternative spellings of names that violate any of the above rules.
leads to heaps of names that qualify for forced renames. Why is this necessary?
3.
You may not use names that are religiously or historically significant.
You may not use proper names of areas within the game for character names. Guild names MAY use the proper names of specific areas, to help promote role-playing and realm pride.
You may not use proper names of NPCs within the game.
You may not use names containing titles or ranks within them.
You may not use names that contain a phrase, sentence or any fragment of a sentence.
For the sake of brevity, I'll just bundle all the other weird naming rules together. Again, none of these make sense to me. What does it matter if a name is religiously or historically significant? Peter, Thomas, Joshua - all religiously significant names. Richard Lionheart, Xerxes, Nero, ... what is the issue with any of these names? I understand that there are certain historical figures you wouldn't want to see used as names in game. But then instead of "historically significant" maybe something along the lines of "no names of controversial real-world individuals or organizations or referring to sensitive events, both current and historical" would be better. This is basically the phrasing that you used a few lines earlier in the CoC and I think it fits the intended purpose far better as it is less broad and more specific in what it covers.
The same goes for using the proper names of areas/NPCs in game or names containing titles or ranks - why is any of this problematic? For example, there are many different dwarf NPCs in game that have last names derived from one of the many dawi clans. If a player would like to 'join' one of these clans by taking the clan's name as their surname - what would be the issue with that?
You keep saying that these naming rules were part of Mythic's Code of Conduct. That's great, but this alone does not justify their continued existence. Why do we need them today?
Edit: Also, you mention that intent matters. But this is not directly stated in the section on the character and guild naming policy. It just says that
The guidelines listed below outline the types of names that you can NOT use
This makes me think that those rules have to be applied as written, no? In which case, they seem way too broad to me.