Sony revealed today why you can not change your PSN name. In a recent interview with IGN, Sony Computer Entertainment America president and CEO Shawn Layden explained the reason why, and to be honest we were shocked at Sony's weak response. Up until now you have not been able to change your PSN name once you had picked it, far short of creating a whole new account and losing everything associated with that account including gamerscore, trophies, everything you purchased and more. So what did Layden say was the reason for not letting people change their names? “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,†he said. So basically the whole system is built around a hardcore minority that may go around trolling other players and then changing their names! The funny thing is, if you have ever played on PSN you will of course know that not being able to change your PSN name doesn't stop people being jerks. “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… the 99 percent of users going to have a good experience, how can we help make that happen without giving one more tool to the bad actor to go in and ruin the experience for others?†said Layden. Well for a start you could make user history visible, or have a better system in place to deal with those abusing others in games. If gamers on PSN had to pay to change their names it would limit the amount of people that just want to troll or grief others and then change their PSN names, plus with and updated Terms Of Use they could implement suspensions and such. I still have a feeling that there is more to this than Shawn Layden is letting on, because that just feels like a weak sauce excuse to me, or a poor defense of a system that is flawed. What are your feelings on finding out the reason you can not change your PSN name is due to a small element that may abuse the current system if it were allowed?
