[Suggestion] Name Suggestion

I was wondering if it is possible to make it so that someone can't change their name to someone that already exists in EMC? For example, say someone has the name sparkles and then someone else joins and then tries to change their name to Sparklesss.

This sort of thing can lead to issues and the wrong person getting blamed for something, or people sending money to the wrong person. It could even lead to people believing that the new name is the same person and getting the original reporting due to the TAB use for auto filling a persons name.

Is there any sort of way to prevent things like this?

That would be a Mojang thing. As far as I know if a name isn't used it's fair game. At the same time EMC can & will ban people with names that are inappropriate.

Unfortunately I think this would be outside the power of EMC. Mojang controls name changes for Minecraft accounts so any rules regarding similar account names would have to come from them.

There is a difference between "display username" and "actual username" (the latter of which we typically just call username).

The "actual username" is the actual name someone has, controlled by Mojang. EMC cannot force this to be changed.
The "display username" is how a username appears in chat, forums, tab, etc. This is controlled by EMC and is, 99% of the time, the same as the "actual username". However, in some special cases, this may be changed so that a player won't need to be tempbanned due to a name change. For example, one time, Rhythmically changed his name to carlmoss, and this was reverted for the time that he had this name so that it would not cause confusion as to be taken as staff impersonation.

From what I understand, this suggestion would extend this aforementioned impersonation protection to all players instead of only staff.

Hm, I'm not sure. As waffle explained, this can be done, and is already done, to a degree. However, where would you want to draw the line? I personally think that the right place is in fact between staff and non-staff. It's the most justifiable one besides doing it for everyone, and doing it for everyone is not maintainable, I think, with 600000 in-game registered members.