Character Name Purge with Folks not Playing Anymore

Can you call them a player if they no longer play the game?

I submit that he is advocating "taking something away from <someone who does not play the game> on the pretense that it is a QoL for <someone who actually IS playing the game> (AKA: a player)"

No it's not at all. We all know that people wanted to get into early access really badly to set up placeholder names for toons they would eventually play. I'll be conservative here and assume that on average 1 in 3 accounts created a single toon other than their main as a place holder. That would mean at one point there were 566,666 place holder account out there. We know like 2/3rds of the 1.7 early on were gone in the first few months, many of them leaving those place holder toons.

You can not yield all you want, that doesn't mean you're right. People who go away for military service are subjected to silly things like this all the time. How do they cope with that, they have family members watch their house, their pets, their possessions, pay bills if needed, ect. If someone in the military is so concerned about their character name that they don't want to lose it they could ask a friend/loved one to log on periodically to keep their account active.

Also everytime I've suggested a system for idle account I've suggested that one way keep the account active is simply to log into this website. While they may not be able to play a game while serving they almost certainly get access to the internet at least every few months for skype, e-mail, ect. They could simply log on during that time and keep their account active.

Then refer to what you actually mean. Legacy name is an actual in game name. When you said legacy I was supposed to assume you didn't mean legacy. So when you say AC should I assume you mean alternating current?

What people fail to understand is you don't own your character or character name. That is property of BioWare and you are essentially renting the right to use it from them. If you regularly rent something, let's say a car, and you 'walk away' from that for a time, you wouldn't be suprised if had been given out to someone else if/when you decided you want to rent a car again. This is the scenario we are in.

Not quite the right analogy, otherwise EA could just give our accounts away to someone else if we stop playing for a few months (they would NEVER do that). Game accounts are an odd thing and I'm not sure what all the fine print is regarding player avatars. While they reserve the right to terminate your account at any time, it's certainly frowned upon to do so without the user breaking the terms of service first (and simply taking a break is not breaking terms of service).

Re-assigning names after a long period of time does happen in wow, and occasionally this does get some people really upset. There are times when people take extremely long breaks do the real life issues. We just had someone come back to the game and buy RotHC after well over a year. I'm actually really surprised he never lost his name (it's a very common real name).

But that's why I think having very strict guidelines for what names could be taken is important. If someone has not played since the first month of the game's launch and they never got a character past level 10, I highly doubt there would be any attachment to that character name if by small chance that person came back.

It's not a matter of policy. It's a matter of how the underlying system works. Dollars to donuts it's a *nix system (Linux, Unix, HP-UX, Solaris, whatever) and THAT means unique "userids" That's not to say it could not be changed, but you're talking a very very deep systemic programming change here that these guys are unlikely to want to change. If it ain't broke, don't fix it, and this would be very fundamental and very dangerous, quite frankly.

Having said that, I still agree. There should be some point at which names could be purged. But you have to deal with the people who do abandon the game. A few days ago someone here was threatening a lawsuit because he left the game for a year, came back and found his characters had been moved to a new server. he was, of course, incensed, even though he had abandoned the game. Do I think he has a case? Not at all, but the point is that in terms of policy changes, THAT'S what has to be addressed.

The policy would have to be something like, "You must login once per {insert what you think is reasonable here} or we'll wipe your toons" and be willing to wait that long before it was implemented. Do they have the right to do this? Of course. They own your toons, your credits, your gear, everything, It's in the T&C, but you can still imagine the howls of protest.

We also know that a lot of dormant place holders (probably most, in the second round when they ran every single character through the name merge filter and put us ALL on new servers) were wiped out during the great server consolidations last year.. so stop pretensing on what was done in December of 2011. It's complete speculation on your part, done in a manner to support what you want.. a purge.

I would say that a character <L10 if they don't play it for 6 months, and someone name changes (or chooses the name), it should override it.

Other than that, if you ever get a character above that level, I don't think a name change should ever be required for a purge.

Also speculation on your part, done in a manner to support what you want.. no purge.

Here I sit on the server I was transfered to with the first set of transfers...lost all of my original names...my main character having to use alt characters in name while the original player from my server remains inactive and lvl 43...The player has been inactive for well over a year now and has no logged in. I have him on my friends list on every toon also have other people that did it for me to check...he has never logged in. It would be so nice if BW would just send out an email to players that havent logged on in a year saying hey please log in your forum account or respond or something within a week or we are removing your char names. Surely a year of inactivity plus a week to respond to an email is enough to warrant this. I would really like to use my free rename to get my original name back on my main character.

This.^^
Pretending that the 2 million players who have quit are all on some extended work trip, overseas vacation or deployed in the military, is silly. We're not deleting any characters, we're simply asking that their names be freed up so that those people who are still customers, can use them. A 4-month inactive period should be sufficient to determine who is still playing and who isn't.

Are you saying that this is not the case?

It's known... the only thing not known is exactly how many. But it is in fact known that they applied a fairness scheme in the second wave that would give priority to active players over inactive players.. so stop pretending otherwise. The only thing not known is exactly every element of the fairness scheme applied (such as level vs level in the context of activity vs inactivity).

And I am in favor of leaving things as is... requiring no action and not pissing off even more players about names being lost..... especially given how much it offended the player base last year with the merges.