Character Name Purge with Folks not Playing Anymore

You misunderstood my post. I asked him what he "would do" in a theoretical situation of losing his character name after 9 months of inactivity.
I should be "thankful" that they didn't charge me for a server merge? (I'm assuming you meant 'didn't' instead of 'did')

Since the server I was on, Lord Ieldis, was shutting down, it would have been in poor taste to charge for the merge.

That is your value judgement, not mine. I disagree with you.

Yes it was a typo thanks for pointing it out.

Considering that they could have just let the servers languish until they got a paid transfer system up and running, then given you the option to pay $15 to transfer to a server of your choice. Which is what a number of other MMO's have done.

And if your name was "John" (not saying it is, this is just a crude example) you probably would have been required to change your name anyway, no matter which server you chose - due to it being common. But in that case, you would have been choosing where you were going, you wouldn't be complaining in this thread that you "lost your name" and Bioware would be $15 richer.

You are disregarding the fact that during the last server merge, the servers were all changed to upgraded higher capacity servers. The pre server-merge harbinger is not the same server as the post server-merge harbinger, even though they have the same name. This means that NO ONE had the name first on any server, since all the characters on the origin servers were transferred to the new destination server at the SAME TIME. They could not use the "he had the name first" method to determine who got to keep the name, and therefore had to use different criteria.

That person who took a break for 2 weeks, 6 months, or even a year forfeited nothing, not his in game credits, or any of the items in his bank or inventory and not his name. The fact that you want the name his character has does NOT entitle you to it, no matter how long it has been since he logged in.

Well, fair enough. I guess I am thankful that I wasn't charged $15 for the server merge.

I believe you are conflating me with other people on this thread. I'm not complaining about losing a name.

As a matter of fact, I had 9 toons at the time of the merge and not one name was in conflict. This is partly due to making up my own names, but mostly due to the fact that I started the game in March, and some of the names I wanted to pick were already taken.

The reason why I feel there is a some value in the OP's suggestion, is what happened to my friend as described in this post.

All indications are that there were NO criteria chosen by in the 2nd round of mergers. The 1st round, they had the "original server guys keep their name" rule, which was massively unfair but at least it was a method. 2nd round seems to have been random number generator deciding if you kept your name, possibly not even intentionally chosen by anyone working at Bioware and feeling more like just some default setting programed in.

Really? Then where is the understanding for those of us who got screwed in this whole deal? Those of us who like you, had our names, OUR UNIQUE names, for just as long and still ended up losing them in the forced merges? Its easy to say things like "I walk my own talk" when your not effected by the problem at hand in the first place!

It seems like you'd rather sit there and tell us we need to be more original and do this and that when the problem isn't our creativity or originality, its a flawed system that was used both in implementing naming in the first place and used during the merges to determine who got to keep what name.

Just dealing with things is a sure way to never getting what you want. But if your content with the way things are, then why do you always show up to tell everyone to shut up and stop giving their own feedback on issues that they are passionate about?

Of course people don't ever all agree on things, but this is something that can be fixed without anyone losing anything. We pay for this game to function, we should be the ones listened to when it comes to something as integral as character names and Bioware should have thought out a better solution then the one they did when they forced merged people that they placed themselves on low-pop servers at launch, causing this mess in the first place.

You should note that Arlon_Nabarlly is not saying that he should be entitled to take the other player's name.

He's saying that he shouldn't be entitled to keep his own name if he stopped playing.

It's a subtle difference, but an important one.

That was on the last run of mergers wasn't it?

I am pretty sure that the criteria for deciding who got to keep which name was akin to putting on a blindfold and spinning around 2 dozen times, before sticking the probe where it doesn't belong. and that was the winner of the name. Yay Bioware! /sarcasm