How did you get your name?

[Pyromancer]

steam name: used to go under caldog on everything when i was younger but my crack addiction to anything tf2 related in 2010/11 coupled with the pyromancer's mask being the first hat i ever bought and still love to this day made it pretty obvious, i shortened it from pyromancer to pyro back in 2017 and ended up sticking with it after i got tired of being comradic and changing my steam name every 30 seconds to various lowercase quirky phrases

i joined neb with a dota avatar and changed it to the original version of the avatar I'm using now which was provided by an old friend i haven't spoke to in a few years the day before he went into hospital to get his schizophrenia treated, i still change my avatar to the little halloween version he made for me back in 2018 or so every year because he was super into halloween and shit and i like to do a little nostalgia

i used to have a different coloured version of the avatar for every platform, green for steam, orange for a*thology, red for youtube, blue for discord but i slowly just moved to the purple one on everything instead because i like it more

character name: my first character back in 2017 was named phil bryne because i'm a big jasper bryne fan [hotline miami soundtrack] and couldn't think of anything, my second character was named travis jansen [the fella who afked in the d4 sweep that evil and rabid did lol] which my dude @ viper came up with because it was his grandfather's surname or something and my third character who flagged off mid sweep and was pked instead of me getting banned was called brian 'green' cooper [the green came from an army of bluesuits demanding names as i showed them around d4, them enamoured by the fact i had a beanie bodygroup which instantly meant i was hl2 rebel main character to them], and i'm pretty sure brian cooper is just a jarg version of Ryan Cooper !!! from need for speed pro street

lewis brightstone was pulled out my ass and is probably my favourite character name, isn't accidently a celebrity and is unique enough without being bringe

backstories: the only cool backstory i've ever wrote was on my dutch gamer girl in clockwork who had dual identities and shit, two names and was on the run and shit that i went through authing [i didnt need to i just wanted cool scripts and to legitimise the backstory rather than playing make believe and hoping people didn't call my bluff]

 

[constantdisplay]

1. was trying to think of a cool name that would be the only one to to show up on the steam friend search function because i didnt know what the fuck a profile link was (i was 12)

 

[Blackquill]

I like ace attorney.

But this name is mine now.

 

[Heart Transplant]

I like ace attorney.

But this name is mine now.

likes ace attorney is one of my most notable qualities

 

[Deleted member 5367]

1. Steam Name?

11 years old
dont know a what a furry is
favorite color + fave animal
find out furries exist 3 years later
the name sticks

2. Character Name?

Angelo Martin "Riot" Ortiz Rodriguez
-wanted to play a hispanic character bc i felt they were under represented, chose a NYer because i'm familiar with that
-liked/still like

the name angelo, the rest of the name came about because its intials are "AMOR" which means love
-nickname sounds edgy but was actually given to me icly so hahaha fuck you

Katja Saphirstein
-last name i got on a list of jewish names i found on the internet
-took katja from the mom from the walking dead season 1 video game
-chose a female character because I wanted to play a motherly character, than and I felt Katja's identity is deeply routed in the feminine, e.g the whole idea of maternity etc. that and I thought everyone else was bad at playing females so i wanted to show them how it was done

HERO-9, Isabella Giroux
-Giroux was the last name of a composer i was listening to/performing for at the time
-liked the name isabella
-put two and two together

3. Backstories?

i always have a char idea before i make one, then fine tune as I go

Riot was outlined from the very beginning, then I sorta built onto his backstory/happenings into his past as I went along

Katja was always this protector figure, but the idea of her protector nature stemming from the fact that a large part of her childhood, adolescence, and early womanhood was taking care of her mentally handicapped younger brother stemmed from the time I worked at Dairy Queen

When i worked there I often saw a lot of parents bring their handicapped children there, some older than me, to get ice cream. it was just so god damn touching to me, the idea of caring for someone like that and the innocence and love that was a part of it. it struck me so deeply i retro-fitted it into katja's backstory and even wrote an incomplete character doc about her a flash back of her taking her younger brother to go get ice cream back when they were young

Isabella/Hero-9 was a day one helix char i put aside when I had the idea for katja, and left her on the shelf for a while

she was originally supposed to be a gymnast with parkour auths, her backstory being that she god so, so damn damn closed to getting into an Olympic team but mental issues got the best of her

the story was way, way, way too fuckin dark and i'm ommiting a lot of details because i feel like i'd have to include a trigger warning if I did tell

i totally remade her character and occasionally eluded to the idea of her gymnast backstory, but instead made her this dopey bitch who was more of a comic relief character
she became stupid, oblivious, and overt while her original form was intelligent, keen, and introverted

 

[GenericPlayer]

1. Steam Name?

i couldn't think of a name

yea

2. Character Name?

random name generators or mashing up names of different people

3. Backstories?

i just try to write down general plot points and then expand on it from there, but trying to keep a general timeline of events is necessary to prevent my head exploding

unless the character origin is intentionally obscure, then it doesn't matter anyway

 

[Rondal]

1. Steam Name?
Ronnie is my name, I get called Ronald a lot in real life. Rondal is an anagram of Ronald, I don't explicitly remember what caused me to use that username, but it stuck.

2. Character Name?
Random names plucked from a list, generally tried to go for the stuff that wasn't already used

3. Backstories?
Never really had any proper ones for my world war three chars, but I always enjoy a militaristic background of some form. Gerhard Haas was my favourite character to portray.

 

[I'M #1 SO WHY TRY HARDER]

1. my name was originally meth. i thought that was a bit silly. i liked sprite and also thought of pixel sprites when thinking of my name. now i have several variations of my name like sprite, spr1te, sprite_

2. all of my names have been random name generators or formed in my mind. wu tai lee was one of my best

3. what are those

 

[sots]

1. Steam Name?
2. Character Name?
3. Backstories?

1
think ive only told blackquill about my steam name, but i really liked how sips and sjin had really short names that you could remember easily, since this was the era of xx_Pussy-Smasher24_xx esque names, so i just kinda smashed the keyboard playing around with 3-4 letter names until something stuck and i thought "yeah sots sounds awesome"

2
Liu Shurens my most recent so ill just go over that, googled common chinese names and i liked the idea of having a nickname that resembles and is pretty close to your real name but distinct enough to be seperate, thus came Leo. in the beginning i used them as alternate identities, leo a gang banging new yorker and liu the chinese fish mongerer

3
i watched china mac interviews and basically just made china mac to begin with but eventually he became his own thing

 

[Rondal]

I'll never forget that one character I spent ages developing a backstory for when WW3 was intended to relaunch, and I had a proper backstory and everything for the first time, he got PK'd on the first week in combat

this death inadvertently contributed to the nato jets incident of 2018 @Powley

 

[Gazra]

1. Steam Name? Family member named the account about 16 years ago and it stuck with me. Probably won't ever change it either

2. Character Name? First ever developed character in CW was called Lenny Mclean who is a bare knuckle fighter in real life and I based the character around him in certain aspects. Huxley Ptolemy was just a name made up off the top of my head and thought the character would die within a month at the time due to the circumstances at the start of helix and went on to live about 2 and a half years now and it's thee most developed and time invested character I've ever had the pleasure to do

3. Backstories? Usually chose the fundamentals like where he was born, a half ass family and upbringing story before the war then just wing it from there and slowly mould the characters personality/mental health over time depending on circumstances of what they go through on the server

 

[Deleted member 4609]

1) The name TommyGman came about before I ever heard of half life 2 or Valve as a whole really, I think originally it was just a play on my real name and ‘Gamer Man’ that I used to play on Minecraft or shitty browser games with, as I made this username up when I was /shockingly/ young.

Since then it’s taken on a lot of new meaning when I got into HL2 and the wider internet, I think Thomas Government Man is probably my personal favourite play on it, though I’ve seen folk before go as far as like ‘Terrence Gentlemanly Individual of Administrative Occupation’ or something, it’s funny what people come up with and I get a smirk out of the few who try something new every time they wanna get my attention on steam lol.

2) I pick from usually very poorly known movies or video games if I’m being honest, otherwise I always look at the most popular names for boy/girl in the country of origin for my character and then select a pair that I enjoy the most for a forename and surname. Sebastian Castellanos is a personal favourite.

3) Backstory is something I definitely spend far too much time thinking about. I’ve got pages and pages of notes in some Google docs and all, and for some of my characters entire lifetimes lived out and experiences noted that shape them into who they are. I spend a very long time brainstorming a character and their origin before I play them, even if no one else on the server will ever know the stories. Hell, even my OTA has a very detailed background I spent a long time thinking about that very, very subtly influences some of their behaviour.

 

[dallahan]

dullahan but with an a

 

[Jaf]

1. Jaf was the name my mom came up with back in 2006 when I had to share an account with my two brothers.

Jakob
Anders
Frederik

2. When picking character names I usually go for something short as people will inevitably shorthand it otherwise. In the past, I just blatantly ripped off names from the games I liked.

3. Background stories are usually setting dependant, but generally just have a set of tropes I like to follow and base it off stories from movies, books & games. I enjoy playing the underdog and the kind of 'the road of hell is paved with good intentions' kind of background.

 

[Ricsow]

1) I didn't come up with the name, it was the name of my father's World of Warcraft character so I stole the name for all of my accounts. Asked him about it once and he said he took 'Jigsaw' from SAW and changed some letters around. He too uses Ricsow as his username now so there's two Ricsows. The benefit of the name is that 9 times out of 10 it's never taken, downside is that barely anyone knows how to pronounce it. (Rick-Sow, NOT Ris-Cow)

2) I just pick a cool first name and then use BehindTheName to get a appropriate surname. I only chose the surname for Keith Xavior because it rhymes with Savior, which I though was ironic at the time.

3) I just come up with a basic idea and then build on it while playing.

 

[Señor Jaggles]

1. Steam Name?

I've been J.C for as long as I can remember. People called me that and it just felt right. For some reason, while I was on TS with a few people a long while ago, someone called me by "waggies, jaggies" or something like that, and it led to Jaggles. I kinda liked it and since a few people called me that, I went along with it.

2. Character Name?

Usually randomly generated based on nationality. But it depends a lot. I don't put much thought into names, honestly.

3. Backstories?

Whatever gives me a good base ground to grow both advantages and disadvantages for my character. While a character has traits, its personality and how it affects its development and decisions is highly defined by its background, its past. So I usually think what personality traits and similar I want the character to have, and based on that, I do some reverse engineering to come up with a story that has both good and bad bits.

 

[Saggy]

steam name: once upon a time i was a stupid13 year old, i don't remember what me name was before this point, it was just something random that xbox gave me. then me and my friends would play gmod, tf2 and cs:go together and one of my friends was anal thrasher, i became vaginal thrasher, and my other friend was oral thrasher. but after getting called vagina by russians a few too many times, but still being an immature 13 year old i switched this around to saggy vaggy so it was still "haha funny" but i would get called saggy instead. eventually, i realized how awful these were, and moved on to just being saggy, and now sometimes sagsworth. recently me and a different group of friends played tf2 as a large group, and we all picked a kong to be. donky, diddy, cranky etc., i was funky. so this has stuck and i use this as part of my online identity now also.

character name: my first character name was Paul McDiddlesticks because this is all i could think of. despite this name, they were a new jersey mobster who made their money in vegas and was a general scumbag/scoundrel. i did fightrp on my first day, it went well, i didn't minge punch and i picked up on attempts quite fast. some guy was in the bathroom of the grotto doing some kinda drama romance rp with a femchar in the toilet "please come out and talk" "waah feelings". i came in, took a piss and said ic "shut up im trying to take a whiz", got into a fight with the guy, broke his face on the sink then left. unfortunately i was a brianlet at the time, and verdict points were still a thing because it was 2014 and a combination of mingerunning and low tier contraband led to paul mcdiddlestick's ultimate amputation. i was proud of my first attempt even though he only stuck around for a few weeks, and i like to think i've only gotten better from there. since then i've had a lot, they've all been more or less random, the nicknames have better stories but even those aren't that impressive.

backstories: usually i pick out a couple of quirks i want to give my character, write some vague backstory to justify where it came from and move from there. in my early days i did the tragic backstory meme, but later on i moved on from this and liked to write characters who's lives had been fairly ordinary. then this evolved into a kinda blend of tragic and ordinary. the backstory that feels normal because of the world of the server, but in normal life would be considered to be pretty fucky. in the last couple of years i've started using cyberpunk 2020 rpg rulebook to randomize some backstory elements, it's never anything major but it can help add details to the backstory to refer to, and old friends / enemies so that a life feels full. beforehand my backstories were very much focused on pre-occupation, and now i've tried to liven up the bits during occupation so that there's not a ten year hole in their story.

 

[surra]

1. Steam Name?
2. Character Name?
3. Backstories?

1. a play on gurrazor, when lp went down i thought it'd be funny to name myself Surrator
a couple months later it really stuck and people used it despite me changing my name, so i cut it in half to surra

2. i dunno its really random for me i just pick something that sounds 'right', mostly listen to my gut than anything

3. just like yourself, i create it as i go, although i try to make a basic document about how they got where they are, and some basic information that relates to the character

 

[maxi]

1) my name (boy because im a boy)
2) idk, for ito i just google japanese and russian names and double barreled the surname and found izumi
heinrich was based off of a friend's name in a diff community, them going by HubertModel (their username or something)
3) izumi is the only character with a proper one that i thought out

 

[jerry]

Steam Name?

jason is my real name, jaison is just an extended ver i use

Character Name?

think of random shit off the top of my head and see if it sticks

Backstories?

parkmaster: dad was a park ranger and died in minnesota to a heart attack, how he got the nick. worked with trident got killed within a week
elizabeth: hawaiian woman who fled to d47 and worked with the B.A.F and the E.L.A until the death of engel haas where she lived in an abandoned warehouse in i17 with her ump and rebreather
hans: former union conscript, member of the DRF, helped wallace petrolium found the marshals. died after becoming a martyr.
harrison: coke addict who lives in the middle of bumfuck vladivostok
oliver: um guy working with da rebels
JURY-7 liam: swiss guy who killed 4 people during scarlet day with his homie KING-8 @chronos and never flagged on again lol