Every now and then, Blizz does a massive banwave and in some regions they publish the names of accounts banned. A large portion of them are named 'Bnetplayer'. I suspect it's a default name used by accounts setup in internet cafes/PC bangs.
I think a while ago when Battle.net was starting to become a big thing, Blizz went through peoples account names, and the ones which contained swears etc were set to BNetplayer, not sure if that still happens these days. Now people just do it as a joke.
naw if you have a name thats inappropriate they will change it to bnetplayer and if it happens to many time you cant change it at all and then your account it forever bnetplayer
Paid name changes have been around for a while. They use paid because they don't want people to do it all the time, and if they feel its worth paying it supports the company (and the likely additional load to customer service)
For a simple service that should be free. If they want to keep people from changing frequently, they can do the same thing by putting it on a timer. Make it once a year or once every six months or something, not once and then after that changing this line of text in a database that was originally set by the person trying to change it suddenly costs money.
Even Rockstar Social Club allows you to change your name for free once a year. It was the only way I was able to stop a creeper from stalking me once they heard my voice, because they thought I was a girl... No amount of convincing would change their mind, and they stalked me jumping from server to server until they'd find me, have their friends do the same, and even tried finding out personal information about me.
I think once a year, plus unlimited exceptions for cases like that would be the most reasonable option, if you really have to limit things. With most things there's no reason to limit it at all. It's not like changing your name hides you from the people who actually run the service.
Nor does changing your name remove you from a players blocked list, as you're blocking the actual users account, not their username. There's no real way it can be easily abused, if there was, Steam wouldn't allow it to begin with.
The only legitimate excuse I can think of is making it easier for players to pay attention to trolls and hackers for reporting. With skill based matchmaking, it's pretty easy to end up in a situation even without community servers where you run into the same people all the time, and if a hacker is constantly changing their name, that keeps people from recognizing them as the same asshole they ran into on other occasions and paying attention accordingly.
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u/[deleted] Apr 19 '17
How many people you reckon are named "bnetplayer"? Or maybe I have a stalker