DISCORD FORCES MEMBERS TO CHANGE USERNAMES, DISCORD ERUPTS

The social app Discord, a favorite of gamers, inadvertently stirred internal strife after announcing last week that it will force its millions of members to pick new usernames

Now the question is whether the change will escalate into all-out warfare that could include players threatening one another in order to seize control of popular names.

The issue may sound trivial compared to reallife concerns such as mass shootings and killer storms. But it's a big deal for people who rely on the mid-sized social network to recruit fellow gamers, swap virtual weapons and organize strategy in multiplayer games. A Reddit thread on the change drew more than 4,000 comments, the vast majority of them angry or at least unhappy.

Discord, which says it has 150 million monthly active users, has no plans to reconsider the new policy, according to a spokesman.

WHAT'S THE DEAL WITH DISCORD USERNAMES?

Discord users have long been free to choose any name they wanted, even ones already in use.

That was part of the company's goal of letting users represent themselves freely, according to a detailed May 3 blog post by Discord cofounder and chief technology officer Stanislav Vishnevskiy. The approach differed from social platforms such as Twitter, which has always required users to select unique names.