Why charging Platinum for changing usernames?

It used to be free, you could change usernames as often you liked, but..

We unfortunately have to deal with the situation that people are heavily abusing the ability to chance their username. Initially designed to allow players to change their name whenever they want we had to learn that this is abused in a lot of ways (although only by a small fraction of players).

– People pretending to be someone else
– People pretending to belonging to a “Clan” where they don’t
– People changing their names for a few games to offend or insult other peoples
– People just using offensive names or trying to cheat our “valid username protection system”.

Besides that it makes it really difficult to keep track of your friends if the names change on a daily base

In order to solve this we will restrict username change to be only possible by using Platinum. (First username change is always free, maybe we will add a second free username change so people can “join a Clan” until this feature is there)

Please note that such actions are not done to get you to pay for Platinum, etc.. But it looks like giving to much “freedom” results in abuse, although only by a small fraction of our user base… But this small fraction unfortunately also effects all fair playing users.