Character Name Purge with Folks not Playing Anymore

I also thought of watership down. getting a name that no one else has thought of can actually be pretty hard if it doesn't include special characters.

As someone who's about to disappear from the rolls of subscribers in 6 days, I'd be okay with this with the following stipulations:

1) There needs to be at least a 12 month period where your account can lay inactive (no logins at all) before this even becomes possible.
2) Even a single login to the game, for however long, on even one toon, should reset this 12 month timer.
3) When the 12 months has expired with no logins, you should receive an email from the game that warns you that your account has been inactive for a certain amount of time, and that you need to log in in order to keep your account "fresh".
4) You should then be given anywhere from 3-6 months after this first warning email before the actual change of name occurs.
5) You should receive a second warning email 30 days before the change occurs.
6) You should be sent one final email 7 days before the change occurs.

Otherwise, I agree with many of the other posters. I have had to change maybe one name through all of the mergers. Some people should perhaps choose more unique names. There can only be one "Dave" per server.

You're suggesting that a person would get +14 months of not logging into SWTOR before their name was no longer saved. That seems to ignore the Sub v. F2P issue.

For someone who stays subbed I think letting them keep the name as long as they keep paying seems equitable. For a F2P I'd suggest that they only get 3 months with an email 1 week prior. And for Preferred players 6 months seems fair.

Treating the Subbed players the same a F2P player doesn't seem fair.

I think that bioware need to implement a middle name or some other option so that you can have note than one unique first name per server.

You convinced me.

No names removed from anyone. Once it's yours, it's yours until you change it.

I disagree with your idea. There are several hundred thousand people who aren't coming back to this game. Their names shouldn't be unavailable just because they decided to quit.

You can not purge names of people that is not playing, they may return later and if someone just took their name, that would make people very angry. I often take breaks for a few months from games like these, but I always return. Had someone just taken my name without asking me like that, I would not be pleased at all. You did not get the name you wanted, you just have to deal with that.

What they should do instead is make the legacy name unique, and let us use whatever first name we want. I still think it is weird that we still have online games where there cant exist more than one person with the same name.

You really are an unpleasant individual. You go on and on about how those who complain shouldn't presume on the motives of the company or assume how others enjoy or play the game. Yet here you are presuming that everyone had a common name like DarthPwner and lost it.

What people are asking for is not unusual or out of line. This is done in other MMO's. I do not think there should be a purge, but prudent examination by the support staff of requests could result in a higher level satisfaction for subscribers. My name was lost due to server mergers. A name I picked during head start. It reduced my interest in the game. I took a break for a while and came back (as a subscriber) but I found that not having the name reduced my attachment to the character and hence reduced my desire to play the game. In the end, for subscribers, attachment to particular characters and their (imaginary) placement in the Star Wars mythos is one of the few things this game really has going for it right now.

You are wrong. On WoW, a name on an account inactive for an extended period of time will be opened up if you submit a ticket and ask. This happened for me, ironically for the name I has for my SWTOR character before the mergers.

So, you are wrong.

In addition, as many of the apologists on these forums like to remind people, as players, we don't actually own anything. Not the name, not the character, not anything. Bioware can (and has in the past) change its policy regarding anything at any time with little or no warning. The irony here is that those who are mocking the complainers for being angry about things like changing the wording on customization so Bioware could charge subscribers are many of the people in this thread saying that name release shouldn't happen because of player rights and precedents.

All they need to do is to have it be like WoW's system.

You can petition to have names cleared in WoW via a low-priority ticket. When CSRs have time they look into it and clear the name ONLY if it meets certain criteria to be deleted.

For example, a level 50 character should not be renamed even if the person has been gone for a year.
But a level 5 that sat there for a year should be, if the person hasn't logged in at all for that year.
A level 5 on an active player's account should be protected.

I had a "popular" name cleared so I could use it in WoW last year, but since I'm not playing anymore, I fully understand I no longer have claim to that name if someone else submits a ticket and I meet the criteria for renaming.

I'm still pissed about losing the name that I created within 10 minutes of servers going live on the first day of early access due to forced server transfers. I preordered just to get that name, and the person who has it doesn't play. How do they have more right to it than me when I've had an active account since launch? My sin is just not having the foresight to make it on the server that wound up being merged into.

They could fix this by making it like GW2's system: Let us have spaces in our names, with capitals. Then we could make first and last names.

I will say this... I'm a RPer and I tend to go for pretty unique names, but lately when I want to make a character I have to try 10 variations with increasingly weird spellings before I find anything at all that's free. It's really annoying.