Character Name Purge with Folks not Playing Anymore

Honestly if they add lifetime subscriptions I'd have no problem with them making all Lifetime account names permanently taken. My argument that all non-subbed account names should have a "safe" period (I like the idea of 6 months for Preferred and 3 months for F2P) still seems perfectly reasonable to me.

/signed in support of purge

Coming back after a while, man tough to find a name. It's not just stupid stuff like "Luke Skywalker". For example, create a character and go through the random name generator. Virtually all names created by the random name generator are taken. Can't they program the random name generator to not randomly generate taken names? I'd imagine it's more of a problem with SWTOR vs other games due to F2P and the low number of servers. So, -, ', and special characters eh?

So make it one year.

Any character that hasn't been logged in 365 days loses their name. That'll open up a bunch. If you're gone from this game for a year, you probably won't even notice or remember what your names were if you ever come back.

I saved my original names at prerelease, only to lose them all when forced server merges happened. I played everyday and still do, however the people I lost them to have not logged on at all (yeah I friended them so i could see if the logged on). I was so mad at this bs and it still erks me to this day. I would be in full support of your idea only if there was a way for BW to give the person who lost the name an option to reclaim it before it is made available to the public.

No, make it unlimited. There's no such thing as a shortage of good names.

You can have up to 22 toons per account on a server.

Let's say that the most populated servers (Harbinger, Bastion, Po5) have up to 50,000 subbed players. In addition there's another 100,000 active Pref/F2P. That's 150,000 active players on a server (for the purpose of this post let's define active as in logs at least once every 60 days). However, remember how SWTOR went from 1,700,000 to sub-500,000 subbed players? Even if 1/2 of the 1,200,000 came back as preferred that's still 600,000 that didn't. Since prior to server merges the limit was 12 (now we can purchase another 10 slots) then that's (12x600,000) 7,200,000 names minimum that might be unavailable. After APAC is merged that will be over (7,200,000/21) 350,000 names on a server that are taken. Given that some people have multiple F2P accounts we're looking at more like 400,000 names per server of accounts that are inactive and almost certainly not returning.

P.S: Yes many of the numbers (not the number of servers number of subbed players obviously) are guess, but I'm fairly certain that of the 1,200,000 who left SWTOR, over half did not return.

Only someone with an extremely limited imagination needs this. If necessary get out an encyclopedia and look up names. Come on people use your brains!

As an avid roleplayer and a preorder subscriber, I can testify to the frustration of lost names. A simple fix is to do like some other games have done and make names unique to the account, using the @username as an identifier to differentiate like named characters.

One of the greatest selling points for a preorder, in my case at least, was early access. Frankly, the point of this wasn't to be level 20 on the first day of official release. It was to reserve the names I wanted for my characters, which I did. Eventually most of them were lost to server merges. True to the above idea of using account handles to differentiate like named toons, I started using -legacyname as a suffix for a lot of my chraracters if the name I wanted wasn't available. This isn't optimal since the name isn't recognized as case sensitive, but it works.

In short, though, I think a change in the naming system would be better than purges.

I think a mass name purge is not needed. However, after playing WoW for 6.5 years, every so often I would be in the mood to roll an alt and the name would be taken by some lvl 1 who had not played in a year. I would simply send a request to have the name "Released for Reuse". It would take anywhere from 2-24 hours (depending on how busy CS was) to have the request completed. Then, all I had to do was sign in and make a character with that name before anyone else realized it was available. I would absolutely support a case by case basis for name re-use.