Screwed over by Bioware!

To be honest, the problem was on your end. If you were getting the invalid name on all the other servers, then logically the name was no longer available during character creations. However, any existing characters with such names were not force to name change. BW probably doesn't have a program system in place to scan and remove names from characters. Force name changes are done on cm basis, which is why any existing name that are on the invalid list are defacto grandfathered into that name.

As for the cm, overall in wow and swtor they have been helpful, but they don't always know the answer to every question. I once ask if a given name was available and the cm told me it was available. Turns out that the name was on the invalid name list, which is why it was available. That tells me that their method for checking names availability tells them only if a given name is available and not if said name is on the invalid list. In short, there is no cross referencing between the available names and invalid name list. Thus, the reason why cm some times give out technically correct information, but which doesn't solve the customer's problem. However, cm do try to help people with what they can and what they have available.

About that name not being available made me sad due to invalid name, but I remember what the cm said about name availability and managed to get an equal good name.

Oh I know what happened and I lost a few names as well. Not a huge deal for me personally. Didn't affect my game-play one bit. Adapt and move on like the rest of us buddy. and ill repeat and say that he shouldn't have even have been able to have the name Bane at all.

Bane Fits in that Bill I believe but feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

Exactly. That's what I/we figured out in the end. The thing is, I would have never deleted that character if it wasn't for the expressed guarantees of Bioware customer support that I could get the name back regardless. When I failed to create my new Marauder with the name Bane, I contacted the BW customer server again and asked them to restore my character so that I wouldn't lose the name. But -of course- they were unable to do so, because the name Bane had been added to the prohibited list at some point after I created the character. I was also told that if I had never deleted the character, I could have kept the name. Now, if that's not getting "Screwed over by Bioware", then I don't know what is.

Not sure what to tell you then. If bioware can't revert the change raging and such on the forums isn't gonna help your case any, other than making yourself stupid. Your angry we understand. Go chillax

I doubt a cm will care much about the name bane, which is by the way a word. Thus, bane is no restrict to being a name only. However, bane is too much of general name and is no where near as iconic like darth vader or skywalker. Besides, the clause in that agreement you quoted is there to allow BW to force name changes, but in most games rarely enforce them unless said name has political, religious, or commercial implications. Strict enforcement will only cost the company money, which is why companies are very lenient with respect to names. At end, management and executives want a bigger bonus, which you receive if you make more money.

Suck it up buttercup. We've all lost names, it happens. The game did poorly and unplanned server mergers happened. You may have had Bane, but you'd have lost it eventually when they ran the names against the ban lists.

Do the players who already had those names not have claim? Is it just you, since you paid more money? Or since you crafted some awesome fan fiction where Bane knocked back a few too many pints with Revan only to end up sheathing each others' sabers?

You lost your names, think of new ones. Customer service wasn't omniscient and gave you some info that proved to be incorrect, they're human and the banned list of names changes all the time. They didn't delete your characters, they didn't keep you from renaming your characters and they didn't erase your account. I fear what you would do should something truly crappy happen in your life.

It is only a name, change it and move on.

Sure I had cool names like Ice and Winter in the first run of servers (I aswell was one of the first to play this game) but I naturally lost those with the second merge.

I did keep all my names when the final merge occured but that was basicly because all were level 50s and I had alot of /played

I would rather have a full server with lots of players then hugging a name on a empty one

If the name is on a prohibited list you would have likely lost it at some point anyway, even if you hadn't deleted Bane yourself. I'm not sure that would have been easier to bear, in fact I am almost positive that losing the name at L1 (or more accurately, not being able to choose it) is a hell of a lot easier to deal with than losing it at L50 and months of play/establishing the character. Yeh, the CS rep may have not checked the prohibited list and so gave you erroneous information, but you can choose to stew or *shrug* and figure he did you a favour in the long-term.

And just for argument's sake: what of that warrior that you never intended to play? If you had managed to keep the name by not deleting him but he does nothing but take up a slot in your character list he is pretty damn pointless, wouldn't you say?

I understand some of the anger, but I don't understand it continuing. We merged these servers months ago... you should have been able to move past this by now and embrace the new character names.

As to the special characters, there's only one thing you have to do: get the person to speak in General or whisper you. That's it. Then click their name (on their incoming message to you) and it will automatically load:

/whisper <NAME>

Now, just go in there and replace "whisper" with "invite" so that it now looks like:

/invite <NAME>

....and you're good. You can invite to group without needing to learn all the extended characters.

Oi...another name rage thread? I thought players finally became mature about it and accepted it.... not sure why I thought that..