I’ve put this question in this category even though it isn’t really about content creation, there are no more relevant categories and it does relate to content creation.
When you create an Xbox gamertag, do the #numbers always appear afterward or do they only appear if someone has already got the name you tried? Are they a permanent part of your name that appears in Flight Sim or is it like Discord?
I’m trying to make sure, for streaming, that my name appears the same everywhere and I don’t have to tell people I’m called one thing in Flight Sim but my streaming channels use a different name. My name is currently the same as my Steam login, which was just done automatically and isn’t a very good stream name.
I believe that the numbers that follow your name are hidden. I remember there being numbers after “PrincipalJay” however they did not and do not show currently. I found the following on the xbox support page.
I don’t ever recall having numbers after my (original) gamer tag. I changed mine fairly early on though. You can change your gamer tag, but you can only do it once (for free)
I understand there’s a small charge if you decide to change it a second time.
Thanks… I asked some other people who were following the same stream as me last night, and had numbers after their name if those were Xbox gamer tags. Seems that if you have a gamer tag with a number after it then that number will appear on nameplates in Flight Sim.
I think it’s a fairly recent thing, not sure when the gamertag thing was introduced but names ported over from steam (like mine) don’t have the 12 character restriction and mandatory #1234 and plenty of people have been able to change their name to something without those restrictions, but if you want to do it now then you have the restrictions, which are a bit of a nightmare for content creators.
So this creates a dilemma.
Don’t change my name, appreciate that I have a name without the #1234 after it and use this as my name on twitch, discord, youtube as well; however it has no meaning to anyone besides myself because the origin of it was really stupid (if folk must know, it was the name I gave to a character in Diablo 2) and I just stuck with it right around the time steam was released out of laziness; that and people find it difficult to pronounce.
Change my name to something that will work better branding-wise for my stream, however this will mean that when viewed in sim I will have the #1234 as part of my nameplate. Also it restricts me to 12 characters (thankfully not including the numbers).
Accept that the name I use on streaming platforms and my name as it appears in sim will be different. There still the drawbacks to the difficult-to-pronounce and meaningless name but at least those drawbacks aren’t spread to other platforms. The main disadvantage when flying along with streamers and people see me chatting in the comments but don’t know where I am in the sky (not an ego thing, just a community thing, it’s nice to know where in the virtual sky the people you’re chatting with on the stream are) but the advantage is having a succinct name in sim AND a meaninful name as a stream creator/follower.
Try and come up a good stream name that references my gamertag but adds the meaning that is lacking when the gamertag is used on its own. This would be my preferred solution but the key word in that sentence is ‘try’.
UPDATE:
If you can find a unique enough tag then you can have it sans numbers. This is what the instructions for gamertags say, you just might have to try a few different ones before you find one you can have without a number.
My thoughts are that while this whole gamertag thing is pretty new to us flight simmers, Xbox owners have been creating accounts since Xbox first became a thing so by this point almost any combination of standard English words you can think of, someone already thought of it.
Tip… peruse a glossary of aviation terms for ideas
