It's not a matter of being offensive so much as it's a matter of taking people out of the game. One of the great things about EQ, at least to me, is the immersion. There are a lot of factors that contribute to it - the difficulty, the large zones and relative lack of fast travel, the actual landscapes and sound effects, and so on. If you see someone with a cheeky name that doesn't make sense in the context of the game, it takes you out of it a bit and can be irritating. I know not everyone feels this way - a lot of people don't care - but I believe that this is the spirit behind the naming policy. For the record, I'm not into MMO roleplaying either, at least not in the sense of talking like my character is supposed to talk or something (although I try to kill things that make sense for my faction).
After the naming policy was released, I started reporting people for having names that violated the policy when I ran across them. I don't think I reported Taxi Driver, but sure, it's the kind of name I would have reported. Why did I do this? Like I said, the names took me out of the game, and there was an actual policy in place, saying "these are the rules", so I figured that the GMs and administration were interested in having a server with game-appropriate names.
At first when I did this I would get tells back from Uthgaard saying something like "fixed" shortly after; the person's name was changed. Some time later, I got a tell from a GM (don't remember which) along the lines of "we don't really care about name violations except for the really obscene ones", so I stopped reporting those and just reported names like "dickbutt" or what have you. Then finally a couple days ago after a petition about a name like that, I got a tell from Uthgaard like "we really don't give a shit about these names, there are more important things to deal with". So fair enough, I've stopped reporting entirely. Granted, this might have just been because they were dealing with the DDOS madness, but fuck it, it's clearly a minor issue and if the GMs don't really care about it then it's not my place to spam them with petitions about it.
Now, am I obsessed with these names? Do they piss me off? Not really. The obscene ones kind of do, just because it's so stupid and tasteless to name a character "suxdick" or whatever it might be, like scrawling swear words into a desk at school. It's such a middle school mentality. The non-obscene ones take me out of the game somewhat, enough that when the naming policy was put up on the forums, I took the effort to report them when I saw them. But if the GMs are saying that they don't care about the naming policy after all, I'm fine with that. It doesn't matter that much one way or the other, honestly; it's kind of a minor issue from any perspective. The reason Taxi was banned was because (apparently) he insulted the GMs, not because of his name policy-violating name; that's just what triggered it. Whether or not we have an enforced name policy? not really a big deal.
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