A Discussion About Wondertrade and Nicknames (Patreon)

this topic is going exactly where you think it is.

so firstly, the positive part of this post: another quest was finished a day or two ago! at long last, that means all of the Tier 3 quests have been finished! we finished Tier 4 a while ago already, so now we just have a few outstanding bits in 5 & 6 before they're done too. 8 total tiers, as a reminder. 

anyway, the discussion.

so something that came up on the main server last night is that people have been wondertrading things with inappropriate names. because it's the internet, and of course we have. i assume this surprises no one. 

we already have a word filter in place to discourage this as of E18. however, people are just doing things like including extra letters to get around the filter. we can expand it, but i suspect that that is going to be an unending battle, and the filter is client-side so it also depends on people getting new versions if we maintain that past E19.
tl;dr, i think that despite our best practical filtering efforts, we have to accept that there is always going to be some degree of grossness in the WT system
if
we preserve nicknames once traded.

Someone in the main server suggested last night that we simply don't save nicknames, and it's true, that would be very easy, and would almost entirely fix the problem. OTs could still be an issue, but, that's harder to just get around for players. it would be an easy and efficient solution.
... but i'm not sure i want to.

because in addition to all the "Fart"s and the "Turd"s and the "Thot"s that are getting wondertraded out there, not to mention worse things that are already filtered for, there are people out there trading mons with cute, personal nicknames, and things like "Love you!" ... I'm not super fond of taking away the good along with the bad. I don't know if I want to 'punish' everyone for the misbehavior of a smaller population. 

I'm reminded of Fall Guys at the height of its popularity last year. From what I understand, they first allowed everyone to show their usernames in the games, but that feature quickly had to be removed due to people using inappropriate names. There are some things that obviously can't be abided by, and perhaps especially in a game of that scale which is meant to be child-friendly. Even so, I was pretty disappointed when we began playing that we couldn't use names. I felt like being able to see other players as anything besides "FallGuy439" would have added a lot to the experience. Of course, our whole game isn't based around Wondertrade, but it's a smaller example. 

And also, that's just me, and I'm not the one out there getting a shiinotic named "peniis" from wondertrade. The tone of the main server chat last night seemed to be generally in favor of wiping nicknames. I'm interested to know where you all stand with that. I can't promise anything based on the poll itself, and we likely won't be making any changes to online until the testing period begins anyway, but it'll at least be helpful to keep in mind where most people are with the matter. 

edit: a couple people were unclear, but Reborn already does allow traded pokemon to be renamed