Name [neym] noun, verb
1. A word or a combination of words by which a person, place, or thing, a body or class, or any object of thought is designated, called, or known.
5. A distinguished, famous, or great reputation; fame: to make a name for oneself.
Obviously the name of something or someone is important, wouldn't you agree? Naming something makes it easier for us to communicate what we are referring to. So changing the name of something must have a good reason.
I understand that certain name changes are necessary. Making sure every item in a category is either "Ale(m)" or "Ale (m)" simply makes sense. I can even understand the renaming of things like Black Dragonhide and Adamant, even though they have yet to finish with that (Adamantite Ore? Mature WMB?).
Changing the designation of an item to indicate the strength of a certain poison makes sense, but does not always accomplish the goal. Some items are so old that they will never lose their original name. I will still call it a DDS rather than a dee-dee-pee-plus-plus.
And again they must have glanced over this obvious mistake. Look at the list below of the names of poison cures found on the Knowledge Base, in ascending order of effectiveness;
Anti-poison
Super anti-poison
Super anti-poison+ potion
Anti-poison++ potion
There are more controversial name changes, though. Remember the Climbing Boots update? Ignore the added GP alch value that got added to them for a second. What was wrong with just keeping the name Climbing Boots, and removing the strength bonus? As far as I know, the new alternative is only used by PK-ers, and most of them have moved on to metal boots instead.
And what about the changing of the name of the Hitpoints skill? I still call it HP, and I'm betting you do too. Besides the obvious flood of bad puns that would follow, what was wrong with calling the skill Life, and leaving the name of hitpoints as it was?
And you can call the "ancient" stuff Zaros now. After untold "mistakes" followed by quickly changing Zaros back to Ancient on many different objects, we got the picture. If people want to know who Zaros is, they should do some of the quests related to him.
But there is one name change that continues to annoy me to this day. And that's yours. Ever since we have had the ability to change our names, I've found myself asking more and more people on my friends list who the hell they are. Not because I have not logged in for a while, but because people change their names time and again without changing back, that it has become impossible for me to keep track of it.
This has a wider implication than just your friends, though. Think for example about the Highscores. Killerred005 already touched on it with his article in the Clan Chronicle, where it became obvious for clans to either solve the problem themselves, or cancel and lose the war.
Letting people change their name almost at will is easily the most annoying update ever, if not the worst. Tip.it Forums now also have that feature (only three times a year, though), but with a very important one added to it. The ability to go into history and see all the name changes the person has ever made.
In my opinion, Jagex should never have allowed more than three name changes per account in RuneScape; One to make jokes with, one to change for real, and one to change back to the original. That's it.
