Dante

Now here's a little tidbit I found recently...

The hastily constructed TARDIS console that the Doctor throws together from scrap was actually the result of a competition to allow kids to design their own TARDIS. The BBC childrens' program Blue Peter ran the competition last year and the results can be seen in this episode. For the full report, see here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...&v=gLF-6TkZL2Y

Personally I think it's a double victory getting to design a TARDIS and getting it into the Neil Gaiman episode.

As much as I appreciate the thought behind the OP, no shiny reward will really make this pill less bitter to swallow. I would far rather be treated as an equal customer and have my loyalty valued regardless of what region I am in. Unfortunately, this is not the first time EU players have been treated as second class subscribers and I'm absolutely certain it will not be the last.

Thanks for the solidarity though.

Damn fine episode in my opinion.

A nice touch was how the Tardis energy was the same visual effect as regeneration energy. It's been a long standing theory that a Time Lord's regeneration is tied to their TARDIS, this seemed to confirm it.

Okay, before I begin, this is not a ‘Wah, I lost my global’ thread. This is, in my opinion, something that should have been done before Global Server Access was enabled. Simply put, run a check of the joint global database and flag any account that has been inactive for over two years, appending their global name with a designation marking the name as inactive. Also grant a global rename token to any names that have been changed since GSA went active and anyone flagged as inactive.

This would free up old, unused globals and give players affected by the merge to possibly reclaim names that they have had for years and were renamed due to a clash with old, inactive accounts. If a player returns after two years, they still have the opportunity to change their name.

Although it could be argued that this is a not a vital service, it may go some way to fixing the mistakes made during the EU merger into the NA server cluster and might restore some sense of fairness to the whole process.

I tentatively agree with the OP. I am pleased to have global access at last, even if it is something I feel should have been done many years ago when our community support and marketing was nuked from orbit. For a long time, I have argued for merging the lists so to see that day finally here is a relief.

However, the implementation and communication surrounding it has been a disaster and has served to turn what should have been a joyous occasion into a frustrating event that can be summed up in a word that rhymes with ‘Bustercluck’. Ever since I started in the EU five years ago, I’ve seen the community treated like second class subscribers, always lower in priority than the US servers even though we pay the same fee. We get no publicity, no official player meets, no boxes in our shops (despite promises) and we regularly would lose our test server the moment any closed testing was needed. The way this merger was handled just reinforced that opinion.

The global rename, although I was ok with it at first, has now deeply saddened me as it was entirely at the cost of EU subscribers. Although our protestations got trials excluded, the fact that a two week old subscription in the US could gazump a long term, many year veteran in the EU showed where the company’s loyalty truly lies. Ditto for global channels which, in the first announcement, hadn’t even been considered, despite them being a focal point for many parts of the community. Sure, we do benefit the most from the merger but its implementation was a customer service failure on many levels.

With a game as old as this, not pissing off your loyal player base is as important as gaining new players. A global name purge could have been performed but apparently players who left four years ago are a higher priority than those who have been here since the inception of the game and supported it through thick and thin. The changes will inevitably inconvenience someone but why the loyal customers and not those who left years ago and might never come back?

Supposedly, we were going to get a reactivation weekend to sort out our US accounts before the merge but that seems to have been reversed for some unknown reason. Oh and the whole business of ‘dropping letters’ in a clash worked so well too didn’t it?

So no, I’m not happy. Glad to finally have the access we should have had years ago and I am grateful to those who made it happen but very bitter about how the EU has been treated once again. A pyrrhic victory all round.

I tried using my old NA account last night but found that it was inactive. Did the reactivation happen?

*Epic Facepalm*

Great minds and all that. Just opened a similar thread on the RP board.

I'm now grudginly @Dante EU

Hey all.

So, bitter as I am at the enforced renaming of EU players, I figure we need one of these threads till we at least figure out who's who and what our new names are.

I have grudgingly accepted @Dante EU as my global. Please feel free to use this thread to collate any changes you've had to make.

I survived the downtime. My global didn't. *Sigh*

At the moment, I simply don't know enough about how the in game event is going to be handled to wrap my RP around it. I'm happy to patrol Kings with the rest of the Militia but if they do decide to stage it all in one zone (booo!) then we can just roll with it and relocate there. Some emergency call can come from Vanguard stating that the core of the forces is teleporting down into Atlas rather than the rest of the city.

In all, it's proving very hard to get a solid idea of what this event will be like. I guess we'll see on Wednesday (along with calls of 'who are you again?' on the global channels...)

Not sure if I really want the badge anyway:


OVERLOADER

Despite overwhelming odds, you managed to log onto Freedom on the 27th May 2011. The server crashed five seconds later but you got the badge making you a real overloader!


Hmmm....

Good grief. There are times I dispair, I really do.