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family name, legacy system, naming, Star Wars: The Old Republic, SWTOR, what should I name my SWTOR character
What is the Legacy System?
The Legacy System is a sort of server-wide achievement and activities tracking system for your characters. Currently a work in progress, the SWTOR Devs have recently released some details on how they plan to evolve the system. Some highlights:
- ability to identify the family relationships between your characters on any given server. (i.e. you can make your characters the sons, daughters, brothers, cousins, friends of your main character.)
- points will eventually unlock abilities, perks and “bind on Legacy” items.
- legacy perks will range from attacks to the ability to customize your next character’s in-game experience.
- an example of the game experience customization is spending legacy points to buy a speeder bike at a much earlier level than your first character, thus allowing you to traverse the world more quickly (a perk I would definitely splash out on.)
After you complete the first Chapter of your class story, you will be alerted that you have an opportunity to choose your Legacy Surname. Choose carefully and consult spell-check or Wookieepedia before hitting enter on that name– it will stay with you across all your characters on that server and can not be changed (though it can be hidden if you discover you’ve made a mistake.)
When Do I get My Legacy Bar?
As soon as you have access to your Legacy surname, a second tracking bar will appear below your experience bar. That is the bar that will show you your legacy progress.
What Gives me Legacy Points?
Pretty much any activity that has you out and about in the world exploring and killing mobs will award you with legacy points. You will start to notice that every time you are awarded with XP for a new codec discovery, completing a quest or killing a mob that you will receive a small amount of Legacy experience as well. As you start rolling alts, everything they do from the moment they are rolled onward will grant you legacy points after you have unlocked the Legacy on your primary character. This includes alts of the opposite faction but rolled on the same server as your first legacy character.
Thoughts on Your Legacy Name
When you roll new alts, you will want their names to work well with your Legacy name, provided you plan to show it. That’s why you may want to skip the comedy legacy name or one that works only with your main, and think a little more broadly about what you plan to do within your SWTOR family of characters. Are you *really* going to want all of your characters running around with that other MMORPG reference as a Surname? In a year ? Two years? I pose the same question to all the folks who have rolled characters using the Game of Thrones universe as their naming platform. Similarly, I’ve seen a number of folks running around with a surname that is exactly the same as their primary character’s name. I can see that working for your alts, but I have to say, especially with jokey names, it looks a little off to see a toon running around the Imperial fleet with their first name repeated.
Naming Resources
Hands down, the best place to get ideas for your SWTOR characters’ names is Wookieepedia. You can browse through the pages and see hundreds, perhaps even thousands of great first and last names you can tweak and make your own. Other good places to research names:
- babynames.com (browse through alphabetically)
- thinkbabynames.com has a fun random name generator and allows you to browse names by gender
- historicalnames.com has a great list of surnames, complete with coat-of-arms
- mythindex.com has both Greek and Roman names from mythology that can be great building blocks for creating a new name
- SWG Stratics Random name generator
Naming Restrictions
Contrary to what you might think from some of the names you see running around or trolling general chat, SWTOR does actually have a naming policy, as found in the Terms of Service. As of this writing, they include:
- You may not use any names that violate the General Rules. This includes the use of names that are hateful, defamatory, racist, ethnically offensive, obscene, vulgar, sexually explicit, or any other language that is offensive in nature.
- You may not use names that are harassing or defamatory to other players or employees of EA, BioWare or LucasArts, e.g. EASUX, Timsretarded, and Biowaresux.
- You may not use names of any EA, BioWare, or LucasArts employee or service related to Star Wars: The Old Republic.
- You may not use names of copyrighted or trademarked characters, materials or products, e.g. Coca-Cola or Dr. Pepper.
- You may not use names from popular culture or media, e.g. Lady Gaga or George Lucas.
- You may not use names that are religiously or historically significant, e.g. Jesus, Winston Churchill.
- You may not use proper names of areas within Star Wars for character names. Guild names, however, MAY use the proper names of specific areas to help promote role-playing and realm pride, e.g. Defenders of Tython or Protectors of Hutta.
- You may not use proper names of non-player characters within Star Wars: The Old Republic, e.g. Darth Malgus, Satele Shan, Yoda, Darth Vader or Luke Skywalker.
- You may not use names containing titles or ranks within them, e.g. General Supertrooper, Captain Tim, Darth Timmy, Knight Wakey.
- You may not use names that refer to drugs or that are drug related.
- You may not use names that contain an inappropriate phrase, sentence or any fragment of a sentence or Leet speak, e.g. uberhaxer, xxspeederxx, lolface, rofl, Noobwhacker, TimmyF**k, kock, fuk.
- You may not use misspellings or alternative spellings of names that violate any of the above rules, e.g. Hamsolo, Yooda, DorthVader.
- You may not use gibberish names when creating character, e.g. ajsdu, rifndsw, qweszs.
It appears that as with many other MMOs, enforcing the name policy is done both within the character creation interface (for obvious items such as popular character’s names), and enforced through other players reporting your name. The latter is most likely to happen when someone has an offensive name. Penalties for villating the naming rules can include being assigned a new name, being asked to rename your character or, in extreme cases, account closure.
I expect we’ll be hearing a lot more about the Legacy System, as the Devs get closer to rolling out these updates and more in a future patch.
UPDATE 4/12/12 With Patch 1.2 going live today, there are now a number of legacy unlocks available to you. See a few in my PTR post, and there will be a new post on Legacy incoming from me soon.
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Nice article. Answered two questions I had on my mind.
Glad to be timely!
He may note this himself, but Psynister tested and found out that once you’ve unlocked your Legacy name on a character, you keep that Legacy name and progression even if you delete the original character and do not otherwise have a character high enough in their story to obtain it on their own.
Basically, once established, it is not lost, regardless of what you do with the original character. I mention this because I saw a lot of people push through on the character they started with so that they could enter the Legacy system, even though they quickly found that they didn’t enjoy the character they had rolled as their “main”. This ties into Psyn’s recent guest post here. If you want to push through on a character you don’t enjoy as much as you’d thought to obtain Legacy, it’s worth doing. You just don’t need to feel tied to that character once you’ve achieved it. Don’t be afraid to delete and re-roll a character you’ll enjoy. 🙂
That’s excellent news– thanks for sharing it Fyn!
Why am I not surprised that Psynister found this out?
“I wonder what happens if I delete my max-level main?”
🙂
Hahaha yes, he is our canary in the coal mine for such things always… 🙂
I am very excited about the legacy system and cannot wait to see what new things it will offer. I knew the surname was coming and spent a lot of days stressing out over what to choose. I do see a lot of silliness with names and to each their own, but I’m glad I took a serious approach. And my future alts are thankful too.
The Legacy name is the gift that keeps on giving…I think folks often don’t think about how a name will family with all their alts…
My name was pretty easy to choose, simply because the original Fynralyl’s last name was Raydona. It works for several of my characters, like Aelsynia and K’turra, but I’ve found myself using it as a title on Veriantha, not because it wouldn’t sound nice, but because she’s my dark JK and the others don’t want to claim her as family….
Every family needs the black sheep…maybe we will even get to single out a character as such when we get our legacy family trees?
I know they mean well, and they even say that this enables you to have a family tree. Yay for people who want a family tree. My husband is one of those people. All his characters are human or cyborg, all related. Mine are all different… a cyborg, twi, and 2 zabraks so far. It wouldn’t make sense for them to have the same last name, unless it’s like the “Smith” of the Star Wars universe. As someone who never opted for a last name in games, I’m pretty content with the legacy doodad under my name, or hidden completely.
As with ANYTHING in an mmo, I’m pretty uncomfortable with things that cannot ever be changed (whether it’s hair, etc). I’m not a fan of this perma-legacy, but some people are thrilled.
I wonder if there may be a future paid name change service? I hope so for the sake of the folks who misspelled their legacy name if nothing else.
And I do believe they are going to have friend of the family type designations to help work around race types that could not be directly related. Maybe we can even think of them all being part of a specific co-op?
Eep misspellings, seriously. I alt tabbed out and googled and double and triple checked, I was SO paranoid about being stuck with a misspelled name.
I wish they had a guild name spellchecker, even if for only one word: wookiee
I totally agree with this. I have 1 Twi’lek, 1 cyborg, 1 Zabrak, 1 Miralukan, and 1 Mirialan. (I’m spelling something wrong there). I don’t even HAVE a plain human.
But I got tired REALLY QUICKLY of the “Choose your Legacy” popping up every time I zoned, so I finally settled on Blackthorne. The only character who is using it is my cyborg (it just doesn’t fit anyone else), because Back Blackthorne, Hired Gun, sounds too cool to not use. 🙂
I’m a dork– I chose my legacy name long before I was anywhere in range to earn it so I missed out on this pesky window of pestering.
And LOVE your legacy name!
It’s the original last name of my Glyneth character (old online RPG handle) and it was better than Claxton, which was the last name of where I stole the Califa(h) name from. (original is Califa, I added the H as Zabrak’s in the RNG seemed to have H’s at the end of names). But Califah Blackthorne? Nope. Nyxd Blackthorne? Nope. Revialmi Blackthorne? Hell no.
They can be your adopted children perhaps? or a sons wife
or daughters husband.
The fact that there’s a guy running around on Juyo with the Legacy Name “Thunderkok” tells me they’re not policing it too closely. 😦 Also, while they may be stopping you from using the names of highly popular characters, they’re certainly not stopping you from using extended universe characters – we have a smuggler named Talon Karrde.
I mean, I liked Talon Karrde as much as the next guy, but come on.
There may also be some kind of length restriction, and/or other unknown restrictions. My original legacy name was Cygma, but it was “not allowed” – as was any other variant of the word ‘sigma.’ I’m pretty sure that doesn’t appear anywhere in The Old Republic, and it doesn’t violate any of the naming rules, it’s simply disallowed for no obvious reason.
I wonder what the issue was with that name? Is it tagged as something unsavory in the urban dictionary?
As for name enforcement, I am guessing that as with WoW, they look to the community to report offensive names. I do on occasion, especially if they are a general chat troll with a name that violates the policy.
If you report Thunderkok, you should probably explain in the ticket exactly why it is offensive (I was asked for clarification on an extremely obvious violation).
Heh, thanks for the pointer. Sometimes I think some of the support people really ARE protocol droids…
My one complaint about the Legacy system right now is that once you unlock it the window pops up repeatedly until you actually put in your name, so if you’re not really ready to sit down and settle on a name yet you have a major annoyance to deal with until you decide.
I hadn’t put any thought at all into my legacy name by the time I unlocked it so I had to come up with something on the fly and what I decided it really isn’t all that great. I took two names I like to use for my characters, butchered one, tossed an apostrophe in the middle and then slapped the other on the end. Overall, I’d kind of like to change it but I can deal with it as is.
As I’ve mentioned to others, I’m not a fan of the whole familiar ties aspect of it. I like having characters that vary in race and look a lot and saying that they’re all related just doesn’t work for me at all. But, unless defining those relationships is either mandatory or provides me with some sort of benefit then I’ll just pretend that aspect doesn’t exist and carry on with my alts.
I like that this is shaping up to be a mix of WoW’s heirlooms and guild perks and that they stay with the account rather than the guild. I think we’re in for a great deal of fun with Legacy and I’m eager to see more.
I definitely think we have some interesting things in store for us with the legacy system. Personally, I like to think of my characters as part of a trade consortium, which fits in to this system just fine…
At least “family friend” is an available choices. I think all of my characters will be family friends of one another.
I wonder if “mortal enemy” is a choice for cross-faction relations?
Finally unlocked my legacy the other day (I have been having some issues with sticking with my highest level character) and then was confronted with the annoying window of annoying. Personally I’m a big fan of randomly generated names tweaked to suit my taste, and that’s what I ended up doing after my other options didn’t work out so well. (Other options being butchering character and screen names and trying to mash them together, and standing around on the fleet staring at other people’s legacy names.) So then it was off to the fantasy name generator. All in all, I think I spent about half an hour on the surname. One of my guildies spent three hours. THREE. HOURS.
I guess fortunately all of my characters so far are human or very human-like, but I’m still having some trouble with the name being shared to at least one of my imperial characters.
You can always think of that black sheep character as the evil aunt/uncle that you dread inviting to family events?
🙂
I spent a long while thinking about my legacy name as well. Of the most importance was how it would sound with my main’s name and what message it would send.
Legacy names for website branding! *cough* *cough* 😀
To elaborate, it’s not so much the three hours as it is *this particular person* spending three hours on a legacy name. This is a guy (who is a dear friend, don’t get me wrong) that named his WoW main with his first name ending in -dogg.
I guess the problem I have with this particular imp is that she supposedly was ‘born to be Sith’ and comes from a typical imperial family, otherwise she wouldn’t have ended up at the academy. But I think I can twist it around a bit; the only constant among my characters so far is that they are all freaking Light (mostly because I’m incapable of choosing Dark options). So as said Sith progresses through her storyline she finds herself pulling away from Sith philosophy, and maybe she gets ‘adopted’ by the rest of my characters.
The can also be an adopted relative!
Some of the Legacy names I’ve seen so far have been amusing… like a guy with Sauce as their legacy names and all their toons are Sauce-like names (I’ve so far seen Hollandaise and Tomato).
But then I see “The Dickpuncher Legacy” running by and then I’m like… sigh.
I thought the character Rinzler of the Tron Legacy was pretty clever. I love it when you see someone has put some thought and heart into coming up with a great name.
And let me add a /sigh to yours on the patently lame names like your example.
I’ve seen a Julius legacy, and the character was Strawberry. I’m assuming there’s an Orange somewhere as well, and of course other fruit.
Ayup
I’ve seen the Dickpuncher Legacy guy around, and it’s just… disheartening.
you know you can report someone with inappropriate names to the admins and they’ll take appropriate steps. That’s a violation of game rules
I report offensive names when I see them.
There’s a nifty Random Name Generator over at the old SWG Stratics site, too. It’s calibrated for the SWG races, rather than SWTOR ones, but it’s still definitely better than nothing.
My approach to the “family ties” issue is that the characters aren’t all blood relatives, they’re associated with each other through a mutual mentor, and they’ve all taken his name to honour him. (It’s a bit more complex than that, but that’s the gist of it.) That way I can justify having characters of all races and both factions using the same legacy. My best friend’s done a similar thing, giving his characters a shared heritage rather than direct family relationships.
Thanks for the tip– I’ll add that name generator to the resource bullets when I get home this evening.
I love your approach to the legacy name. What a perfect way to address the issue and in the spirit of the game!
It amazes me that a universe that gave us such things as Ssi-Ruuk attempts to put a restriction on names for pronounceability.
I haven’t unlocked my legacy yet, but your ideas give me something to think about. I was planning to tack my WoW identity in there somewhere, but I really don’t know that I want it to follow me forever. Bears considering anyway. Thanks.
I thought to myself that might be just to weed out the really lazy gold farmers who tend to use random letters as names.
I decided even prior to playing what the names of at least my first 4 republic characters would be and what the legacy name was for them. I followed a “meme” which was “Fizz Drinks”. http://www.drinksmixer.com/cat/79/
I then butchered the names a little (other than Chicago) to make my mains (Ra-Mos, Chicago, Slo’jin and Sor’Meln) .. Once I hit Legacy, I knew the name would be Fizz. Since then I have created Teh-Keelah also. My Empire chars are on another server and so don’t share the legacy. I haven’t decided on one for them yet, but they are named after respiratory diseases (dark side seems to destroy your lungs else why do all the sith have those masks 😛 ) – any suggestions for a Legacy for those? Doesn’t really have to be related.. Bron’Kytis, Asthma, Nu-Monya and Ynflu-enzha
ahahaha LOVE your idea for your Empire character names…maybe epidemic or pandemic or some other massive plague-like Legacy name for them?
Pandemic might be good although that’s the name of a game company.. Wonder if that would be against that list.. Good thoughts. As I get closer to needing it, I’ll have to figure it out 🙂
Fim, those are truly, truly brilliant names. 😀
My Sith Inquisitor alt is “Algesis”, which I’m quite happy with
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In theory, I like the idea of setting relationships between your characters, but it doesn’t entirely make sense to me considering all the alien races. Unless they give you an ‘adopted’ option, or maybe a ‘sworn brother/sister’ option.
On my Empire server, I went with a Mando’a word since my main there is my Mando-loving Rattataki Bounty Hunter, but now I’m not sure how that will sound for, say, a Zabrak Warrior, a pureblood Sith Inquisitor or a Chiss Agent.
I’m not quite to the Legacy point on my Republic server, but I’m going to go with the last name of one of my original characters from a story that takes place about 50 years after the KotOR games, so about 200-250 years ago in TOR-sense. Again this mainly fits my human smuggler, who I have half-an-idea is the descendant of that character, but I’m okay with other alts having it as well.
I actually would not be surprised to see an “adopted family member” or some such option.
At least if a sith pure blood is on your family tree it can fit. The pure bloods just mean that they still have recognizable features of the sith race. No sith pure blood is truly pure, because when the dark force users came to their planet, the humans mixed with them. Take me for example, my skin tone is dark and my brother’s skin tone is light. If you see us walking down the street together you will see the resemblance we share from our father. Theoretically, if your father was sith and your mother was human you could end up with two brothers where one looks like a sith and the other looks like a human. In the end it’s whatever. I like siths and humans, but I also created a twi’lek who for me is an adopted daughter :P.
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So if I were to say have 8 toons and wanted a “mixed” family of say Human and Miraluka. They would all have to have the same name?? This was my “plan” Human side Grandfather, Aunt, Father. Miraluka side Grandfather and grandmother, Mother and then the “twins” would be Cyborg.. Due to the fact that they would require implants to see as they are not full specis. This will cause some issues now I need to rethink everything… Like maybe just a full Cyborg family.. Please tell me I am not stuck with just one last name or does anyone have an idea to make this work??
If they are all on one server, then yes you are stuck with just one name. But you work up your legacy–and can choose a new name– on each server you play on.
Great so unless the Miraluka Family adoubts the “Human” name for everyone it is pointless.. or better yet just leave out the Miraluka Grandparents and only have the “Mother” that would make since.. Thanks for the help!!
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