Discord Forces Username Updates, Here’s How to Change Yours

Discord is making a rather big change for usernames on the platform. With gaming expanding in major ways within the last few years and allowing players to play with each on various platforms, Discord has become a useful tool in connecting everyone. It has also been useful for people who don’t care about games whatsoever and just want to form a community of some kind with one big group chat for everyone to communicate in, but Discord users are feeling a bit inconvenienced after the platform announced that it’d be requiring name changes in order to conform to new naming standards. Thankfully changing names is a pretty easy process.

Your Discord username can be whatever you want (within the guidelines of the TOS, of course), even if it matches someone else’s username. Instead, the way you’re properly identified is through a four digit number at the end of your name. Discord is doing away with this system and adopting a whole new one. Now, you’ll have a unique username with an @ sign in front of it, kind of like Twitter. From there, you can have a custom display name (also like any other social media platform). Discord notes that they are doing this to make it easier for friends to be able to find each other without anyone having to remember the four digits associated with their name, but fans are a bit annoyed by this news.

How to Change Your Discord Username

Discord most likely will prompt you to change your name if it hasn’t already, but if you want to go ahead and take care of that yourself to get ahead of the forced update, here’s what you need to do, according to Discord:

1. Click on your user settings tab in Discord
2. In the “My Account” tab of the User Settings menu, select “Edit”
3. Change your username to a desired one (you’ll have to enter your password to do so)

Discord acknowledged in its announcement that there may be pain points with this change given how long people have had certain usernames. 

“We recognize that this is a big change. There may be hiccups with this process, and it may be tough to part ways with that ‘#0001’ that’s meant a lot to you over the years. We’ll be doing everything we can to manage things as smoothly as possible.”

What do you think of the Discord change? Let me know in the comments or hit me up on Twitter @Cade_Onder.