Xbox Live Gamertag Switch Causes Nickname Anguish

Posted by simoniker on Thursday July 8, 2004 @04:01PM from the l33t-is-leet-no-more dept.

Thanks to TeamXbox for its story discussing issues requiring some Xbox Live players to switch their GamerTag name IDs, since, according to Microsoft: "There are many names on the Xbox Live service that are extremely similar to other Gamertags (in most cases differentiated by only a single space.)" Some gamers who have had the same nickname for almost 2 years are understandably upset, though Microsoft is offering "a free game... [and] 1 year subscription to Xbox Live" by way of compensation. An official Microsoft spokesperson on the Xbox.com messageboards indicated: "This problem has nothing to do with the way we code...it's what we need to do to normalize data as we connect to other partners that need to work w/ [Xbox] Live... We are very upset that we had to do this" - some commenters claim (though it's not been specifically stated) that EA's upcoming Xbox Live debut has helped precipitate the name switch.

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Be More Creative by agraupe · 2004-07-09 02:34 · Score: 1, Interesting

One of the posts on the linked forum was someone called "MasterJedi" or some such. It's cool, but... kinda boring and uncreative. No one will steal a creative nickname, in my experience. For example, in City of Heroes, I have seen: Sp1d3rM@n, Hulk/, hulk2, Tick, Tick returns Get my point? On the other end of the spectrum, my friend called his hero Taraxippos. No one's gonna steal that!