Character Name Purge with Folks not Playing Anymore

Hehe... taken.

By the way... I have used that as a character name for more then 10 years on many MMOs on many servers, through server mergers and transfers, and never been unable to have/keep the name. I have about a dozen other character names that are simple yet unique as well and I've never had competition for the names.

Now.. my favorite names for commerce mules (ie: GTN alts) is Jan, and Nan.. and I did lose those through the server mergers.. but I got over it.

After playing some of Cryptic's F2P mmos I wonder now why other mmos don't follow a similar style of naming rules.

Basically, names are set up in a <character name>@<user name> fashion with character names not being single-use restricted. Yes you'll see multiples of more popular, common or coincidental names, but at the same time loosing names to server merges, inactives or someone who just happened to get it first is a non-issue.

It would save a lot of headache for players who either get the "name in use" message or lost it due to inactivity, merges or something else. The devs would have less of a headache with server merges because no one's names would conflict with someone else who has it as well.

How is that any different than what happened to us Day-1 players, who had our names taken from us?

So you want the other Day-1 player from a different server to have their name taken from them? The issue with SWTOR is that they created too many servers at the start. Then they had to merge them all together. I haven't lost any of my character names in any of my moves.

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.

No, wipe the inactive accounts first and foremost. That should be a no brainer as it hurts nobody that's showing a current interest in the game. If they haven't even poked in as a F2P they simply are not important at all compared to paying customers in game right now.

A friend of mine lost his main character's name in a server merge, to a level 6 toon that hadn't played for over 5 months prior to the merge.

To date, that other player still hasn't logged onto that toon.

Since this other player was on a "destination" server, he had priority in keeping his name, and has never taken advantage of it.

One of two two players would lose out in such a name-conflict situation. My vote would be for the one who is actually playing the game instead of the one who got bored and left ages ago never to return.
Look at the flip side. Would it be selfish to create a character, get bored with the game, unsub, stop playing for 18 months, then come back to find your name given to someone else and complain about you should have been able to keep your name?

Pretty much this. Gotta love the selfish entitlement of some players here.

Nope still that is something that should never happen. As someone else has already pointed out, are you saying that someone who is on active service overseas,who doesn't re-activate their sub, and is offline for 9 months, should they have their names reset to OUIGWOEUGWQDP ??

Get out of town. They'd have more right to be upset than any other reason posted on this forum.

As Andryah has already said, maybe people should choose some name that are more unique and not the general norm that people use out of pop culture and fiction.

A sith warrior named Gilgamesh oh how original! It might be something completely outside the norm for star wars canon, but people make the same mistakes all the time when it comes to choosing names.

I have had Dacce for over 10 years, and I have never lost it and even starting a game thats old (I tried out CoH in its final year) I still got the name no issues.

I did that myself and apparently it didn't work out as well as you claim to think it would and if you read my earlier post I clearly laid out the history of me with my name and with this game. The fact I lost my name to someone that hasn't been on for at least 9 months is BS!! PERIOD!!!

So lucky you are...I have had my name for just as long and somebody took it on the one server that I got forced onto and hasn't logged on in ages but your response is basically "ok, deal with it"?

Its not like my situation is any different from yours, I just got screwed cause of a FORCED double server merge. I'm sure there was someone else who lost Andryah during the merge too, suppose that mysterious SWTOR algorithm worked out in your favor then, how surprising...

Funny how its always "deal with it" and "stop complaining" when you respond to people as though Bioware shouldn't take any responsibility and fix their screw-ups...it's as if its not a personal issue to you then everyone else needs to shut up and take it...

My name is who I am online, it is my entire reputation of over 10 years of gaming!!! To not have it for the reasons previously stated is a disservice to both me as a paying active, loyal customer and to Bioware as a previously lauded game developer. They need to find a way to fix the name issue and as Cryptic and several other developers have shown, its entirely possible to do it if they tag names via account names instead of character or legacy name. There is always a way if they are willing to do the work to find it...