One of the first decisions that must be made when localizing a MMORPG is whether or not it will be possible for speakers of different languages to play on the same world, side by side. If multiple simultaneous languages are simply disallowed, every supported language will require a separate game world, but many technical difficulties will be avoided. However, a more full-featured MMORPG would allow multiple simultaneous languages, and players are coming to expect this feature. Nevertheless, enabling multiple simultaneous languages raises a certain number of localization-related issues.

First, there is the issue of player names: which letters and symbols will be valid in these names? Most MMORPGs let you communicate and interact with other players by typing their name; the name provides a unique way to differentiate between characters. However, what happens when you cannot type the symbols that make up someone else's name? You will be unable to talk to that person, but the person will be able to talk to you. In addition to allowing dialog between players, most games also offer a variety of other services that are keyed to a player's name, such as ignore lists (so you don't have to see the text of rude players) and friends lists (so you can always tell when your friends are online). If you can't type the name, you can't use these features.

The lowest common denominator is usually English, because everybody using a computer can type names that contain the English letters and numbers. However, the French keyboard, for instance, allows one to type many accented characters, such as è or à, in addition to the standard Latin characters used in English. The German keyboard, too, has keys for U, Ö, and various other accented characters that people with English keyboards can't easily type, and Asian keyboards allow the user to type thousands of symbols via special software available only in Asian versions of games. So the simplest – though least flexible – solution is to allow only English-letter names: all keyboards at least allow those letters to be typed. However, this approach is not ideal, especially for Asian players.

MMORPGs struggle with this issue in various ways. Typically a combination of solutions is adopted. For instance, a game may allow all US and European players to play together on the same world, but require that they use English names, whereas Korean users play on different worlds entirely, and are allowed to use their native characters for names.

To avoid this difficulty, some games do away with the need to type player names at all. They provide other interfaces for all their game features so that it is never necessary to type a player's name. Depending on the game and the features in question, this solution sometimes works well, and sometimes is very awkward. But even when it works well, this solution doesn't address the culture gap involved. For instance, US English players cannot readily tell the difference between ì, i, and í, let alone between complex Chinese characters. This can cause confusion by allowing the creation of different names that may appear to many users to be identical - but that are not (such as "Eric" and "Eríc," for example). Mischievous players take advantage of this confusion. If "Eric" is a popular player of the game, mischief-makers can name themselves something very subtly different, such as "Eríc," and pretend to be the original player. They can also attempt to ruin the original player’s good name by acting inappropriately, or try to trick the original player's friends into giving them free items.

For this reason, perhaps an ideal solution is to allow names that include variants of Latin characters (such as í), but to internally treat them as identical to the corresponding English letters (such as i), except when drawing them to the screen. Thus,"Eríc" would be treated the same as "Eric" in every way except when being displayed to the user. This would prevent the creation of a character named "Eríc if there was already a character named "Eric" - the game would consider the new character to have a duplicate name, and disallow it. This approach would also let players use special characters in their names without preventing other players from typing the name on non-native keyboards. If someone saw a player named "Höfud," for instance, they could communicate with that player by typing the name as "Hofud" - the game would correctly identify the player, since there could be no ambiguity. This is a good approach for English and many other Western languages. However, it only addresses Latin characters and does not help European players differentiate similar-looking Korean names, for instance.