Earlier this month Discord announced that they would be rolling out a new username system that removes the 4-digit discriminator at the end of the current usernames. This change enforces that each user name is unique, and no copies of a specific spelling can exist on the platform. Discord claims this change is being made in part because they've noticed that almost half of all friend requests on the platform fail to reach the intended accounts. The problems with this change are probably immediately evident to most of you, as the platform has over 200 million active accounts, and the statistical probability of multiple people wanting to claim the same name is astronomical.

Rusty Lake, an indie game studio based in Amsterdam and creators of Cube Escape and The Path Within games, experienced the primary issue with the new system first hand: username theft. While Discord gave the company an advanced reservation to pick their username, Rusty Lake found that another user had already claimed their name. On Twitter Rusty Lake posted about the issue and issued a warning to other indie developers using Discord for their communities,

We just received an email that we, as Verified Owners, could finally submit a new username and wow... 'rustylake' is already taken! If we as a server owner with 240K+ members can't even claim it… [...] Now we have a risk of impersonation + extra legal costs to file a possible trademark infringement. In any case
[Discord] was helpful enough to respond with an automatic response email to this issue and the follow up is directing us to another helpdesk.