At the tutorial I was under the impression for your captain and BOs, you get one free costume change and one free name (not the short name, but the longer one) change. But when I went to do so, the cost for changing name is 1500 Merits.
You get the one free name change as a way to change the default name to something more your liking- and as a new character has a null value as default, you burn that free change during character creation. There is no way around it as you can't create a character with a null value for a name.
New BOs and ships have a non-null random name as default, so they can and are created with that default, with the free change stored until you decide to use it. If it was up to me, I'd have phrased it "You have one opportunity to pick a name at no cost," as that's much clearer in regards to the initial character generation, as well as pointing out on the character creation screen that your long name, if not set now, will cost 1500 merits to change later.
Having the Bibliography changes free was the only thing that kept me from filing a bug report over it.
Oh I see... guess that's true there. That kind of bites, I hadn't thought up a full name until now but 1,500 Merit is a lot... and I imagine there are much more useful things to spend it on.
If your like me you will probably do it anyway because the name of one of my BO's was annoying me to the point where i saved from 19-1500 merits quickly.
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You do get one free costume change and a nickname change though.
New BOs and ships have a non-null random name as default, so they can and are created with that default, with the free change stored until you decide to use it. If it was up to me, I'd have phrased it "You have one opportunity to pick a name at no cost," as that's much clearer in regards to the initial character generation, as well as pointing out on the character creation screen that your long name, if not set now, will cost 1500 merits to change later.
Having the Bibliography changes free was the only thing that kept me from filing a bug report over it.
If your like me you will probably do it anyway because the name of one of my BO's was annoying me to the point where i saved from 19-1500 merits quickly.