So I recently changed my Xbox Gamertag to select one that is closer to the online avatar/name I’ve used across the internet for over a decade at this point. I had originally chosen one that was close to it but not exactly the same because the one I wanted was already taken.
Fast forward to today and I learn that Xbox had made a change in 2019 to allow Gamertags to overlap with an additional suffix. GREAT! That’s totally fine. That’s how a lot of modern platforms handle this sort of thing and it works well.
So I change my Gamertag to the one I want, I get an automatically-applied suffix. All is great.
I hop in game with some buddies and my Gamertag looks like unoriginal garbage. The Gamertag is displayed WITH the suffix appended to it without any delineation between the font style/size of the Gamertag itself and the suffix. Moreover they just remove the ‘#’ in the suffix entirely so you can’t tell its a suffix at all. It just looks like I gave up and typed random numbers after the Gamertag I actually wanted. Its awful.
YUCK!
That’s the exact opposite of how it should work. Other platforms have figured this out just fine. Here’s how my Battle.Net name shows up in-game even though my Bnet username has a suffix:
Steam allows fully overlapping profile names but assigns a ‘Friend Code’ to your account so that others can reliably add you as a friend if your profile name overlaps with others.
Discord, as well, just recently updated to allow display name overlapping and uses a separate unique ‘username’ to distinguish between users for purposes of friend requests/server invites/etc.
To make matters worse my previous Xbox Gamertag was over 12 characters long so I can’t even switch back to it and presumably grab it without a suffix again. 12 characters… 12. WHAT YEAR IS IT? Why is that so pathetically low? Surely the database storage for a couple more characters can’t be that expensive.
Anyways. Thanks for attending my TED Talk. The Xbox Gamertag system sucks and the persons involved in maintaining that without improving the situation should be ashamed.