Was F3 character recognition a good mechanic?

[Hudson]

Many serious roleplay servers had a mechanic where you'd press F3 to reveal your character's name to nearby characters.

What were the benefits of this system? Do you feel like it was worth it? Were there any downsides? Was it unique to Gmod roleplay?

 

[Erkor]

i dont think so personally i think it makes things incredibly hard to focus on because everyone is a 5'11-6'3 tall male[sic] with brown or blue eyes and possibly dark brown hair and since everyone starts their description virtually the same way they all just start to blend together

addendum: i think seeing other people's names is simply better for players if you can trust people to have the basic common decency to not metagame 24/7, and even among gmod roleplayers i can at least say some people were competent enough not to do so

 

[Kafe]

Names to know if you've seen someone before in passing is good imo, but the F3 menu probably gave out more info than it needed to.
Personally I'd have tossed out the character model thumbnails from them though, just so you couldn't ID rebel populations at a glance, even in their silhouettes

 

[Oswald]

Names to know if you've seen someone before in passing is good imo, but the F3 menu probably gave out more info than it needed to.
Personally I'd have tossed out the character model thumbnails from them though, just so you couldn't ID rebel populations at a glance, even in their silhouettes

It would have been cool if you could do like an f3 linked with your concealed face. so they only rec you while wearing a mask or something and it'd be a fake name.

 

[Ricsow]

My personal favorite way is to do it like a few others server do, where instead of using F3 to let others recognize you, you use F3 on another character to remember their name by writing it yourself.

It's the best of both worlds from F3 and the nickname command.

 

[heaveN]

Was nice until people started forcing you to F3 over every tiny little interaction. The function that allowed you to give custom clientside nicknames was even worse because people just starter doing shit like “pk this guy on sight” and “this is admin x”

 

[boots]

My personal favorite way is to do it like a few others server do, where instead of using F3 to let others recognize you, you use F3 on another character to remember their name by writing it yourself.

It's the best of both worlds from F3 and the nickname command.

/setnickname

 

[Frosty]

Many serious roleplay servers had a mechanic where you'd press F3 to reveal your character's name to nearby characters.

What were the benefits of this system? Do you feel like it was worth it? Were there any downsides? Was it unique to Gmod roleplay?

Use to piss me off when people would get proper arsey in Looc if they heard your name and you didn’t f3 them

 

[Kafe]

Use to piss me off when people would get proper arsey in Looc if they heard your name and you didn’t f3 them

I always find it funny as I without fail, will forget peoples names even when I meet them personally and talk with them face to face, I will forget their name seconds after they introduce themselves.

 

[abcdefg]

being able to permanently remember someone's full name, including middle names and nicknames, after their friend whispered their name in the dark dank corner of the grizzly grotto should have been considered a superpower and therefore in breach of the rules.

 

[Erkor]

being able to permanently remember someone's full name, including middle names and nicknames, after their friend whispered their name in the dark dank corner of the grizzly grotto should have been considered a superpower and therefore in breach of the rules.

shouldve made a frundtech mutant with that ability honestly

 

[Alexander The Great]

when I was a kid and showed hl2rp to a friend, I was convinced that to recognize someone's name you had to say your full name in chat.
after repeating my char fullname to him ingame i realized that it was the f3 feature all along

ai gaming wasnt there yet

 

[sots]

i liked it, i dont think i could think of a better system that wouldn't be too much (hiding names completely if you have a balaclava on always seemed abit much to me? theres more to recognising someone than a face right, like build, height, voice, etc but whatever)

downside would probably be now "recognising" people you only happened to passiverp nearby, when they introduced themselves to someone nearby. people using it as justification for being able to reocgnise, and pk someone when random hitman characters were prolific. i'm pretty sure in helix there was a feature where you could only let the person you were aiming at recognise you, which would've been great, but it didn't get used very much due to being kind of janky, and hit-and-miss.

 

[boots]

imo much better to have hidden names rather than everybody sees it

 

[deathwolf]

i prefer having to add my own names for people rather than them giving me their name

 

[Achilles]

I know recently there seems to be a rise in the whole "You get to name the person you see" mechanic, but I always found it difficult to work with. This is the byproduct of multiple reasons.

-If you're in a crowd, trying to put your crosshair on people to select them for naming can be a drag. I've also named the wrong people on accident cause of this mechanic when I was using it on my own server.

-If a person gave you a long and difficult name to type out, the act of doing so is time consuming (especially if it uses special characters). I know you can put nicknames but I always preferred having accurate titles.

-Also if the person tells you the name but is in a state of movement, be that running or walking, you better remember that name or hope they can tell you it again later cause unlike being able to quickly press f3 and keep moving, naming people requires you to chill for a second while you get it situated.