BuzzerBeater Forums

Good!!!

LOL the fact of teh matter is that the names currenlty generated are way fake and unrealistic.

For some countries that's the case. For some others the name databases are excellent.

You know the problem with surveys in this game. There are 50,000 players and 50 would answer the survey. In our recent NT elections there were 33 voters out of 600 players and I hear some country had 0. Probably one of the carribean nations, I should have gone for that job.

Fact: The current names are a bit unrealisic and a bit funny. But that is generally liked.
Fact: If we let people choose their own names there would be more silly names.
Fact: That would make the people choosing those names happy.
Fact: I forgot where I was going with this..I guess I am just trying to say happy players are good for player retention.

Might be worth a survey of native speakers/residents of each respective country how appropriate their name database is and hwo important/appreciated fixing it would be.

Well, from my point of view, maintaining the name database is an ongoing process. We are in a lucky position, since our database is very good (we don't have unrealistic/fake names at all, we have of course highly uncommon names, but that I consider a richness). This means there is very little work needed, mostly checking for some uncommon names every now and then. However, any sort of "name your player freely" or "let's include the names managers give when applying into the database" feature would result in quality drop of our name database. That would really be a slap in the face for those of us who have worked on the database.

So, no harm in a survey, but the tools are already there. They are unfortunately very slow to use, but as an LA you anyway have the power to start the work on the current database as soon as you want. If a completely new database is needed, the best way would be to work on that offline with a group of dedicated people and then ask for the BB's to consider adding it/replacing the old one. We have almost 9000 first names and more than 20000 last names in our database, so the task is many cases is huge.

I wouldn't mind a name-your-player feature where you choose the name from the BB names database. As a one-off thing (like for winning a competition), there can be more freedom - but please do not mess with the databases, not the good ones anyway.

Which database are you talking about, for all langauges?

I'm talking about my nation's database, Finnish first names and last names. It is a very good database, which will only get much worse if we let people randomize it with all sort of "funny" entries.

Uncommon names that appear very commonly, to me, is odd.

This is due to the way the database works, and of course due to the fact that it's not necessarily an easy task to get the weights right anyway. The first point is however more important in our case (Finnish names). You cannot put weights for the names as such, you need to duplicate entries to make each name more common. What this means is that the database either needs to be enormous (millions of lines instead of thousands) or uncommon names will always be more common than in reality. For example, you may have a last name that is used by 20 people and another one which is used by 2000 people. They will both most likely have the same weight (1) in this game, perhaps there is a duplicate entry or even two for the more common name (so, weight of 1 vs. 2-3 instead of 1 vs. 1 - not quite 1 vs. 100). The very common names will have weights much higher than that, but the same idea applies. Like I said, I consider the result a richness for the game. It's nice to see more (real) names in the game than you see in every day life. It's especially nice for those who have an uncommon name, they have almost an equal chance of finding their own name in the game as those who have a common name.

The real problem in my opinion, as has been pointed out by some, is that there are countries that have poor databases. It is up to the communities to improve them, the BB's cannot really be experts in this field.

is there a way for me to get access to look at the Japanese name database? I might just suggest adding a few more common names, deleting the impossible ones and lower the rate of occurance of the strange ones.

Yes, just take a look at your tools, you should be able to find it quite easily. Shoot me a BB mail, if you can't find it.

Last edited by GM-WallyOop at 2/5/2011 4:48:48 AM

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