(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); Shawn Layden has spoken to IGN, on a number of issues one of the biggest being reported was his comments on name changes. An option lacking on Sony's Playstation network. Shawn Layden is the current Sony Computer Entertainment America's President and CEO. European and America arms of Sony are far more public compared to the Japanese arms providing interviews far more often.

Shawn Layden own words from the IGN interview transcript. You must login or register to view this content.

"The road map for feature extension is very long. It goes from here to Hangzhou in China,"

"And all of those things are on there. Yeah, we want to give you more control across your experience and your profile and your presence on the network."

"At the same time, as you'll understand, we don't want to make it so that you can go in, grief a bunch of people in Far Cry, change your avatar, change your username, go into CoD and grief everybody over there. We want to stop that."

"[We want to do name changing] in a way that's transparent, but also don't let people morph themselves, either. And yeah, it's terrible that you have to make decisions on a service sometimes by optimizing around the bad actor. I hate that we have to do that. So we're trying to balance that between

What a pathetic excuse, there are so many solutions to that already portrayed in the article's comments. Like this one:
Sadly, they just can't change it due to the fact that it's tied to the trophies and purchases.

It shouldn't be a problem. Knowing how large Sony is, I'm assuming everyone on SEN is stored in some huge relational database therefore there should be a unique identifier (ID) for each user, this is an integer, If a username is updated one place, it shouldn't make any difference. They just need to make some way to check if the username is already being used, which is easy.

I don't know what their problem is.

Guessing the system was not designed to be that big or have this.

Fact of the matter is, every table within a database should have a column of unique identifiers which (may) relate to other tables. Perhaps they've written something to perhaps ban or flag up a user on their system (assuming they have one) which searches for the username, but it can't be that hard to change it so it searches by the username, returns the ID and then flags up or bans the ID, also, I'm assuming they'd have some sort of usernameHistory table.

Database design eh

Why don't they do what Steam do with name changes?
Have a default username that you can't change, but have changeable display names. But, also like Steam, have the ability to see the person's previous display names.

Doesn't get much more transparent than that.

"At the same time, as you'll understand, we don't want to make it so that you can go in, grief a bunch of people in Far Cry, change your avatar, change your username, go into CoD and grief everybody over there. We want to stop that."

Who the fuck does that? He's just saying that because Sony is too lazy to put name changes in database.

:p
I don't understand why it not a thing guess showing you how rushed PSN was

If people are really freaking out and complaining about changing their name, they need to reevaluate their life.

Hopefully its implemented in a software update or new PS5 if they ever even release another system :/