When I started playing WoW, I created my first character and was looking for a name. And I did what I usually do with characters in fantasy settings. I picked a letter and then merged a bunch of consonants and vowels until I came up with something that would plausibly be a name. Thus came my hunter Keyalnon. If you do a search on that name, you pretty much only find references to my character. Likewise, he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the only character in the WoW armory with that name. It was unique. It helped define my character.
\nFor my WoW characters, I have three patterns. One is mentioned above, which I used for Night Elves, Draenei and Gnomes. For Humans, I used a second pattern, which was to use Japanese to create names. Not quite sure why since most of the models are European based, but it gave the character a name that wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t English but still \u00e2\u20ac\u0153real world\u00e2\u20ac\u009d to me. The third pattern is the one used for Dwarves. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the odd one in that I have two dwarves. The male dwarf I gave a name based on what sounds more like a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153clan\u00e2\u20ac\u009d name to me. The female dwarf got a name based off norse mythology. Both the Dwarves got a more European feel to their names as a result. Now those in my first pattern still sometimes end up with real-world names as a result. My warrior was Aleania and my warlock was Grendar, both with real-world counterparts and as such, a search on them in armory shows quite a few. While it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not as cool as a unique name, it still gave them a feel.<\/p>\n
I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t play on an RPG server, so I often see names that are either puns, reference real-world memes or other such things. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s just not my style. For me, my characters have a real \u00e2\u20ac\u0153identity\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and if I can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t picture or imagine people using their name in regular conversation, it bothers me. But if you really, really want to call your druid \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Eatslotsofpizza\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, who am I to argue?<\/p>\n
Of course, if you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re going to call your rogue \u00e2\u20ac\u0153(something)-healer\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, well you better expect some confusion when you get invited into groups. In fact, one of my guildmates has a rogue with the word \u00e2\u20ac\u0153axe\u00e2\u20ac\u009d in it, and it wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t until much later he realized that rogue\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s can wield axes! Does that make it \u00e2\u20ac\u0153wrong\u00e2\u20ac\u009d? Not in the slightest.<\/p>\n
We name things in everyday life. Pets. Boats. Children. When you give something a name, you create a small bond with it, however minor. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s something personal to you. Granted, naming your kid \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Xybot\u00e2\u20ac\u009d is bound to cause some sort of issue in the future, but for the present, it is part of the bond you share with each other. It has to be a name that has some sort of meaning to you, no matter how ridiculous. And the same should go for the name for your characters in WoW.<\/p>\n
Now the beauty of my hunter\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s name is the fact that since it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s completely made up, it has no particular meaning to it other than what I imbue it with. Not that it matters in most cases. For Americans, most of us have no idea of the entomology of our names. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the label our parents put on us. Now would have my parent\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s still given me my name if they knew it translated to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Strength of a boar\u00e2\u20ac\u009d in Old English? Who knows? But I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m pretty sure that wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t what was on their minds when they picked it.<\/p>\n
So what is the purpose of this? Whether you are making up a name, making a pun, or declaring your love of mice, give some thought to your character\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s name. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll be a part of that character and a part of you. And if someday, I ever meet a kid named \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Xybot Lee\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll know my classmate got his wish.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I started playing WoW, I created my first character and was looking for a name. And I did what I usually do with characters in fantasy settings. I picked a letter and then merged a bunch of consonants and vowels until I came up with something that would plausibly be a name. Thus came […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[65],"class_list":["post-25","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/loqualityproducts.com\/blogs\/lqwow\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/loqualityproducts.com\/blogs\/lqwow\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/loqualityproducts.com\/blogs\/lqwow\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/loqualityproducts.com\/blogs\/lqwow\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/loqualityproducts.com\/blogs\/lqwow\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/loqualityproducts.com\/blogs\/lqwow\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/loqualityproducts.com\/blogs\/lqwow\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/loqualityproducts.com\/blogs\/lqwow\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/loqualityproducts.com\/blogs\/lqwow\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}