Overall I see, most of the reactions are negative so I have to agree with you we shouldn’t go to this direction. But let me defend a bit the idea.

you guys wanna nerf me, right
i mean that is my secret weapon, knowing ppl
i think however, the same reason as names can be negative is actually the thrive of getting known by name
it may even become another disaster. i mean, seriously, imagine they would have done that in the game, coming from them all it would earn is criticism for again “turning features off”.
no, simple answer to crying from players is to listen to the essential part, not the “they were so big, and many, and had friends”, and stop acting like in a game people get hurt.
also, atm. there are no squads. so what the games are at the moment have nothing to do with all this.
and i think, your theories about what makes people afraid is just the wrong message. people will not get better, if you hold their hands.
Yes it would earn criticism, but when did this hold back the devs from remove a feature? I get your point, I don’t think this is the perfect solution. But this would have some great advantage. 4example It would make everybody equal. Equally noname. this would help to move the game to a “fun and brainless” pew-pew way, without removing the possibility to play clever in a team, or just have fun with friends.
Don’t think this is a good idea, you can’t find new people for a corp/community if you can’t recognise the same player after each game.
Community-wise probably this would have a negative effect. The corps would lose an important surface where they can advertise themself. On the other hand, the deathsquads become an enemy of the solo players because of that advertisement. IMO we should advertise the corps in SQ and Leagues in this case. About the recruiting, yes you can’t just pick good players from pvp. you should fly with the candidates to see what are they doing.
I just love when I find people I know in random PvP, especially when they’re in the opposing team. Or when you encounter the same good guy in the other teams, and you both start killing each other on sight…
I also like that. But it has the opposite side as well. When the player die as a cap just to help win his friends on the other side.
I think this would make it even worse for complaints against squads. Possibly giving the opposite effect.
Example.
Newish player joins a team and is up against a death squad of very good vets. They won’t realize the difference between those really good vets killing him and just an everyday squad against him. So the only assumption he can pull from a scenario like this is: that squads are “op”.
They will not see,
-
well this is a team of vets in a corp
-
These vets normally play together
-
They are onTS
-
They actually are using tactics to win.
Yes, they won’t see it. But that will help them to enjoy the game itself.
I think it was a joke. But yeah i get the point here… sometimes you just look trough the names and you can already predict who will most likely win. Wich can affect players efforts sometimes.
I have a better suggestion, players who ‘cryabout’ squads, get their own server and each one of them gets theri INSTAWIN button, whoever smashes the button faster… wins.
or… hesus… they can play vs AI now! Why arent we having squads back yet?
It is not a complete joke. but I like the instawin button idea 
I don’t like the idea of playing names and squads hidden, but admittedly there could be some benefits to it.
Some sort of compromise could be that each player’s name would be hidden till their ship has been locked to once. Could be actually interesting gameplay wise too. Recons would have some actual reconnaissance to do at the start of each battle then.
It has several advantage, and yes it has some serious disadvantage as well.
I don’t think that this is a good way. Pilots should know, who they’re fighting with.
It is just hiding some informations. StarConflict has a great tradition about it. I would introduce it in a Ninja patch
But seriously. Most of the pilots has no idea who is the enemy.