The last names list. It’s not scaling well, and is probably the biggest sticking point for new users right now, prior to signing in the first time. At least, the people I’M trying to get to join. They want a good name and are willing to delay signing up till they can get one. There are a LOT of last names on the list now (over 300), and it takes a while to go through all of them. Many of them now seem to be geared towards a particular country or language – or at least, many of them are unpronounceable to me without working at it for a moment or two.
I like humorous names, myself, but was unable to find one that wasn’t taken after about 40-50 tries. It seems that some of the more generic English-style names have been on there for quite some time. Are they still being dropped after 100 or so uses?
My co-worker, one of the ones that has been waiting to find a good name, suggests using more nouns for last names. I said, “You mean like ‘Fusebox’ so I could be Rusty Fusebox?” and he said yeah, that sort of thing. It’s not a bad idea, and I know we’ve had a lot of names like that in the past. They were quite popular. I suggest that names that have been on the list for a month or three but haven’t yet reached the closeout count, should be closed anyway. If no one is using that name, it’s probably just not that popular.
Another option is to categorize the last names. I know that names often come online together as part of a pack of similar origins, just as sim names are often part of a group. Categorizing the names on the Join page would make it easy to look through only the categories that the aspiring player finds comfortable.