Bull Throttle

Yeah, but every 'healer' has been on a PUG with someone who made them want to do that too!

Well I'm not sure those are the actual words they used, but you got the sense of it spot on.

That shouldn't have happened - they were supposed to have changed all trial globals to random gibberish so they wouldn't clash.

Yeah same here - and I suspect for the vast majority of players; why NCSoft thinks most real people have fixed IP addresses I don't know!

Hint to NCSofts IT department - the world just ran out of IP addreses and we're all now having to switch to a new system to generate more.

The real kicker of course is every time you authorise another IP address on the block allocated by your ISP like this, the next person who is allocated that IP address has it authorised too, it's an awesome security feature.

As a dev I'd have thought you'd think it was perfectly reasonable.

The customer services teams have been given a toolkit that carries out a number of tasks, renaming accounts or deleting accounts are not one of those tasks.

In order to carry out a rename or delete (oh god help them an account merge) as we've been requesting, they have two options:

Option one: pay a developer at developer rates to perform the edits - running a specialist script having backed everything up first in case of mistakes then chacking manually - tying up a 'proper' developer for a menial task to cut risk may be ok for the occasional fix, but on this scale?

Option Two: Create a tool for the CS dept that is able to delete/rename.

There's a good reason why that tool wasn't in the kit in the first place - there is far too much risk of human error, far too much risk that the wrong account will be deleted or renamed; too much risk that the wrong person authorised the edit; too much risk that some disgruntled player will at some point change their mind and want the account put back.

I can see why no MMO I've ever played has ever allowed an account deletion or rename and it has nothing to do with the database structure, but everything to do with protecting the customer's information and protecting the company against complaints of misconduct.

As much as I'd love to keep my EU account name, renaming my NA one; as much as I'd love to have my accounts merged; as much as I think it would be sensible to delete all trials after 90+ days in order to free up the resources, I know that these things are not something it is reasonable to ask the CS department to do, or reasonable to get upset about because they can't.

In order to do what people are asking for, there would need to be budget & time allocated to developing a cast-iron tool to hand to the CS department, which would still have risks associated with it everytime it was used.

Personally I'd rather they spent that time, energy and money improving the game.

Heh, have you played any other MMO than this in the past couple of years?

Most of the recent ones seem to see teaming as very much optional.

They're probably worried that most EU players would immediately jump ship given the chance, but given the amount of grumbling the past few days about losing Globals and account login names - and even people saying they'd rather not have a server list merge thank you - I don't know why they would be!

Dithpicable!

I know; as far as I know this is standard throughout the industry - heck even for website databases we generally only put in a 'soft delete' option - database people generally hate deleting records as it can muck things up (especialy if FFM is right about the schema being less than ideal), but from this side of the fence, it would solve a lot of issues - and I was only talking about long dead trials, not full accounts of course.

Still it's all moot; it's their system, they've already decided the procedure, I wouldn't expect them to change anything now - but it would be nice if they offered people with conflicting accounts under the same master account some way of resolving this that didn't leave a bad taste in the mouth.

They ought to delete trial accounts once they hit 90 days past the end of the trial to avoid conflicts.

They should certainly delete one on your master account if you request it.

Heck, they ought to offer to merge full NA/EU accounts under the same master account - as a chargeable service if necessary.

There's a lot of things they could do if they really wanted to, but they're all time+money+hassle, so don't hold your breath.

yes? and?

change it back.

er... did you miss the "free activation to coincide with the server list merge" thing? I'm planning on using that to change my NA global so I can nick it for my EU account.

/edit
and they've already said you wouldn't lose it to a trial account as all trial accounts are having their global names changed to generic trial names.

- almost.

First two are spot on, but Global names that clash will be set to the name of the last character you logged out with - if there's still a clash, that's when they start chopping letters off.

This is about Login names, not Global names; whether or not your Login name is duplicated/changed has nothing to do with your Global name.

I think that referenced global names, not account names.

They probably assumed no-one would care if account names changed as it's not something you'd share.

Yay! Thanks all

Well that sucks.

If they'd said the server lists were going to merge before they announced this pack, I'd have it on the correct account now.

wait...are you delaying the reactivation week as well? I was relying on that to sort out my NA/EU accounts.

Huh, they didnt have keyboards when I was a nipper - Atari 2600 joystick FTW!

(Binotone paddles FTL :/ )

In my case, because WASD gives easy access to 1,2,3,4 & Alt+1,2,3,4 without moving the fingers far (plus the first few funkeys aren't much of a stretch).

Virtually every game I play, including most of the MMOs use WASD for the correct movements, the few that use A & D for turning get rebound pretty quickly.

No-one needs keyboard turning, that's what the mouse is for!