Well thanks a lot Bioware.

And if it becomes clear to BWEA that "name taken" is a big reason people start canceling their subscriptions, they will do something, I have a hunch coming the forums to complain about it is the extent of it, though.

As a general rule, most MMOs keep accounts as they are in case players return to the game. Generally speaking, in the past when MMOs have cleared out inactive accounts the result was negative for the game itself with little to no benefit other than clearing out the database.

It is generally viewed as bad form, no matter how long a player has been gone. Unfortunately that is really the norm and probably is unlikely to change any time soon.

As a general rule, most MMOs keep accounts as they are in case players return to the game. Generally speaking, in the past when MMOs have cleared out inactive accounts the result was negative for the game itself with little to no benefit other than clearing out the database.

It is generally viewed as bad form, no matter how long a player has been gone. Unfortunately that is really the norm and probably is unlikely to change any time soon.

There are smarter ways to do this though. The most obvious would have been to make Legacy name the unique name that can't be copied and allow the character names be called whatever. On the server side the character names would labeled something like Legacy_Name.1, Legacy_Name.2, etc. This also would have easily allowed people to friend an entire Legacy and get all their friends alts in their friends list too. Instead they didn't think it through well at all. Like I've said many times, one of the biggest problems with this game is poor forethought, planning, and implementation.

So how would you tell every one apart BEFORE they get their legacy name? You don't get that until lvl 25 with a new account. And as for wanting all a friends toons names so you can contact them no matter what when they are on. No its up to your friend to tell you all the toons names.

I have a couple of toons I play on when I DON'T want anyone to know I'm on. This idea would prevent me from doing so and force me to either make no friends on line or play on another server having to start all over from the bottom.

i'm not counting words like "desk", "lampshade", and "sink"; I'm not counter verbs like "running" or "grab" (I guess some people use adjectives like "Stinky" or "Smoking"). But I'm talking specifically about Names.

Still silly:

The number of 6 character words with two vowels (and just considering the 18 most popular consonants) is 2.6 Million. Eight characters with 3 vowels? 236 Million. If even 1% of those are pronounceable there are over 2 Million options... and that's just six and eight character names. We didn't include five character, six character, or nine character names.

Curious about ten character names with four vowels? That's 21 Billion possibilities, with a 1%-pronounceability rating which would give every MMO player in the world their own unique name.

The limitation on names is your level of creativity and adaptability, not the limitations of the numbers of letters.

Malastare -- I love all of your posts.

Also -- math genius? Or google-ninja?