Character Name Purge with Folks not Playing Anymore

What a surprise. You don't agree. You have the opposite/contrary opinion. Gee you are so intelligent and superior. Whatever.

If you don't pay. You don't play. You should forfeit your name. There has to be some kind of reasonable limit for this. I'm not saying that if you don't log in for two weeks then you should lose your name(s). But 12 months? 24 months?

IMEANREALLY

Umm, this game has the most names taken per server of any game ever. There are 21 servers supporting 500k subscribers who can have up to 22 names per subscriber. That's 500k names gone per server just that quick. Second you have all the prefered and f2p people taking at least a couple of names each. Then you have every inactive account ever created, which is millions more.

You literally couldn't run a phone book through a name filter and get more than a handful of acceptable results.

Give each name a 2 week grace period PER LEVEL !

A lvl 1 char would then need to login at least every two weeks to keep its name... A lvl 10 char already would have 20 weeks, which is almost half a year.
A lvl 50 char would have 100 weeks, which is longer than the game is in existance so far.

Logging in just once would reset the timer and even if the timer has run out, the name is not automatically removed but only "on parole".

If you delete a char, the name stays locked to your account for another day, so you can safely recreate with the same name that you already had.

(Anarchy Online was doing name sweeps in the past with several warnings ahead.. automated mails would do just fine.)

"The rights of your fist end on the surface of my nose."

Naming policies need to be changed. Character names should not be unique. Legacy names should. Communication should be on-Legacy basis, with "stealth/hidden" options for characters you want to hide on.

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.

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.

I keep seeing people claim that the account hasnt been logged in in a year. How on earth can you tell that? I have a sentinal I havent been on in 6 months. But my account has been logged in multiple hours almost every day. You can friend 1 name. you cannot friend an account so you have no idea what their account status is

Case-by-case sounds good to me. The only thing is I don't think customer support would be in favor of the increased workload. Wide-sweeping, automated changes may also cause a bit of a backlash.

I don't see a problem with it -- depending on what extent they were to implement it.

Forced re-names when your account has been inactive for over a year? Obviously, with a week warning or such, prior to doing it.

There are obviously edge-cases, hence the warning given to you via e-mail. If you're gone for more than a year, the chances of you coming back are slim-to-none. There isn't really a good solution -- but after THAT long of a time-frame?

Hell. I left for 6 months, came back and had to rename 99% of my toons. No warning to me. I have names I enjoy, but I understand the frustration others have.