Adding Human Text w/ disambiguation? To Handle pilots like Darth Vader, Dash Rendar consistently

[chrisalleng]

The Standard Loadout and reprints of pilot cards have created some confusion since there are now multiple pilots in the same chassis with the same price. Proposing a new field in xws, something like displayName, readableName, humanName, whatever you want to call it, that uses the same disambiguation types we see in xws. For example:

Darth Vader (Black One) Darth Vader (Standard Loadout, Battle of Yavin) Darth Vader (Standard Loadout, Black One) Darth Vader (Dark Lord of the Sith)

Then we never have any question about which pilot is actually being used, and these values would be standardized across services. A quick example of where this is an issue, in Pattern Analyzer:

Which Poe Dameron is this? It has a T70 icon, so it must be one of those two pilots, but it's not until scrolling down further that we can see that it is Trigger Happy Flyboy Poe, because the other is labelled HoH Poe. That makes sense to those of us that have been playing a long time to know that Trigger Happy Flyboy Poe was released first, so it doesn't have the disambiguation, but anyone who started playing in the past few years won't instinctively know that.

My suggestion is something along the lines of:

• Always include Standard Loadout, if applicable
• Always include pilot subtitle, not the product it was released with, as it is easily referenced on the physical card
• Faction, if necessary
• Any further disambiguation would be by chassis name? AFAIK there is no further work required, but of course that may change in the future.

[chrisalleng]

As an example of one of the uglier examples, that would lead to almost all of those being used:

• Dash Rendar (Hotshot Mercenary) {original conversion kit dash}
• Dash Rendar (Freighter for Hire) {new rerelease "normal"/upgradeable pilot card}
• Dash Rendar (Standard Loadout, In it for Himself, Rebel)
• Dash Rendar (Standard Loadout, In it for Himself, Scum)

[chrisalleng]

Thinking on it more, I think this is a solution in search of a problem. People are already welcome to just use pilot name + subtitle + sl or not as display names, and choose not to. Why would those people choose to use the display name from XWS suddenly if this was added?