We're Freeing up Old Character Names

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BJWPDaemonSadi wrote:

Best announcement I have seen in a long time. I love the way you guys are handling it as a whole. Allows active players to get the names they want, without punishing people that may or may not come back. I really like it.

Edit: I would like to say that I would NOT want my chat to be account name based. I want my character names to have meaning beyond the fact that I can see them. If I wanted my account name then I would have a char named after it and stick to it. I personally would not like that option

I agree with both points and am sort of on the fence, but I thought of a solution just now! What if your character name showed up with your account name in parenthesizes, or if you hover over the character name it shows the account name, that would be good xD

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jugglereli wrote:

if you hover over the character name it shows the account name

just type "/friend charName" and look up who is new in your friends list.
you got a huge friends list of offline friends already? create a new account to do it.

I just call my character something like this "oerigjieurhgprauigheruiga" and then chat calls me a bot :P

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BALRIM wrote:

Thats nice. Cause every word that sounds like a name already exist.

the names I make up are never taken

rip rare names :(

QUITE COOL

Thats nice news..

This change only stands to benefit me at worst, but I still think it's the wrong solution. I'd hate to be one of the players coming back after launch, perhaps having heard about lockstep mode, who has lost a list of great names. With this, GGG essentially joins a growing bunch of developers breaking the permanence of accounts for internal convenience.

Generally, I think the expectation is that an online (especially gaming) account has permanence regardless of duration of inactivity. And that includes character names that one may be quite attached to. From that perspective, this freeing up of old names is a really bad move and quite uncharacteristic of a company that makes an effort to preserve legacy items and adhere to prior statements at all costs. In fairness, Samantha did mention this would likely be happening at some point on October 8, 2013 so that could technically serve as plenty of, albeit well buried, notice. An email to all accounts that would be affected to give those members a couple weeks to preserve their names would have been nice.

Naturally the obvious difficulties observed with a rising player base in a finite namespace can't help but lead to some sort of action. I think choosing to free character names, from however long a period of inactivity, is the simple solution.. not the good solution. It's not even a permanent solution, as the root cause of the problem persists and it won't be long before we're in the same situation as we are now (potentially even with all active accounts).

Instead of freeing up character names, this would have been a great opportunity to split the namespace to one of many options used in other games. I like <Character Name>[@<Account Name>], personally, whereby names are unique to an account but not universally. In chat, you would only have to show <Character Name>, perhaps with <Account Name> as a hover tooltip (or dimmed in the second line if the chat message is more than one line). Similar display elsewhere, with emphasis generally on the character name but the account association always available. A UI option to display one, the other, or both/auto would likely make everyone happy.

But this pales to losing the iconic globes, so likely it'll go over just fine.

great news, guys.

but perhaps it is time to re-think the characters registry mechanism?

there were many good suggestions over the years - from adding prefixes/suffixes to storing by account key - which would allow a player to choose any name he/she wants for a character, regardless if someone has the same name or not.

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Durentis wrote:

Generally, I think the expectation is that an online (especially gaming) account has permanence regardless of duration of inactivity

No, I think it's perfectly reasonable at some point to say "Use it or lose it." A year is more than fair enough for this. Maybe this would be different if it didn't affect anyone else, but when a given name can only be used by one person, it should definitely go to someone who is actually using it, not someone who made a character back at the start of open beta, played for 5 minutes, and quit, never to return...or worse yet, someone who intentionally took a popular name just so no one else could have it.

Most games would probably just delete the inactive accounts like that altogether, so people who do come back after so long should feel lucky that at worst, they're just losing a name.