Character Name Policy -- Thirty Day Notice!
By
0zymandous,
Posted on: 2007-07-31 15:59 in News, Events and Announcement Discussion
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I would suggest a sliding scale of some sort. Something akin to:
Lv 1-6 inactive account 3 months
Lv 7-14 inactive account 6 months
Lv 15-30 inactive account 9 month
Lv 30-40 inactive account 12 months
Lv 40-50 inactive account 15 months
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Yep, this would be just about perfect. They could even get a bit more complex with it then that really.
What if they took months paid into consideration when you went to get a name? Lets say you are a 39 month vet and the name you want is on an account that has been inactive for 15 months and had only paid for 3 months before then? Sounds fair to me that you should get the name. While someone else that had paid for 24 months and been inactive for 15 might would require that you wait longer to get the name . Just thinking on this on the fly it would make sense to maybe have a threshold ratio and once a person was past the threshold his names became vulnerable. So that way someone that played a long time and a lot of people knew back in the day would be in less jeopardy of losing their names should they decide to come back one day, while somone that just played for some random month or two isn't keeping names away from the active player base.
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I can't say but 6 level is simply too low to my oppinion. You barely have seen the game at level 6. I mean at level you don't quite feel like a hero or a villain rather than just a normal person with some (crappy) powers. The game only somewhat starts at level 20... and of course you only have seen like one or two zones by the time you reach level 6.
... Not to mention level 6 can EASILY be obtained within two hours (unless you goof around a lot) >.> *coughcough*
So, I wonder why you people came to the conclusion of making level 6 the limit. I hope it's concluded out of statistics and not a decision after a game of darts with the numbers 1 to 50 or something >.> Personally I'd say 15 or 20 is better (and yes, getting to level 35 means you already spend a LOT of time on that character :P )
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I would suggest a sliding scale of some sort. Something akin to:
Lv 1-6 inactive account 3 months
Lv 7-14 inactive account 6 months
Lv 15-30 inactive account 9 month
Lv 30-40 inactive account 12 months
Lv 40-50 inactive account 15 months
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Are you out of your [censored] MIND!!!
Lv 50's should NEVER EVER be considered! It takes some peoople almost a year to hit lv50!
Didn't it used to be lv35 or 36 for cutoff?
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Are you out of your [censored] MIND!!!
Lv 50's should NEVER EVER be considered! It takes some peoople almost a year to hit lv50!
Didn't it used to be lv35 or 36 for cutoff?
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Explain to me why someone who made a lv 50 named whatever. And never plays again why his name should be forever locked out of use?
And on a side note: I played casually since launch and had my first 50 in less than a year. and that was WITHOUT the number of PL missions that used to be around. I know people who made 50 in a week exploiting missions such as the old COT portals, Werewolf herding, mole machines not to mention those damg Winter Lords. So don't make the mistake in believeing all lv 50's were earned. a fair number of them were Powerleveled in alot shorter time than you would guess.
Nemsis lv50 Inv/SS
Arch-Nemsis lv 50 SS/Inv
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So, I wonder why you people came to the conclusion of making level 6 the limit. I hope it's concluded out of statistics and not a decision after a game of darts with the numbers 1 to 50 or something
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Try reading the thread. They did make a determination of how to free the maximum # of names with the least disruption.
"Null is as much an argument "for removing the cottage rule" as the moon being round is for buying tennis shoes." -Memphis Bill
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Thats just my humble opinion and it is very much on topic.
[/ QUOTE ] None of it has anything to do with the name change policy. Even as an example of whatever it is addle pated point you're trying to make.
"Null is as much an argument "for removing the cottage rule" as the moon being round is for buying tennis shoes." -Memphis Bill
A question/suggestion. I tried out the renaming on test and realized something. I could end up paying for a name change and then find the name I was looking for is still not available. Could we have a system of checking if a name is available BEFORE paying for the change?
Example:
Ultimo. is my character's current name (with a period). I want to remove the period, so I pay for a name change only to find the name Ultimo (no period) is unavailable (maybe there's a L7-50 character out there that's been inactve for three years... Lord knows, we have to protect the name for him...). Unable to change the name, I go back to using the period. The money paid is wasted.
If I could check availability BEFORE paying, this could be avoided.
One thing the policy will do is free up names that were "reserved" (by simply creating a character and never levelling it), but only by those who have since ceased paying for their accounts. Who knows how many of those there might be.
There are also other reasons why a person might have to stop playing and paying that are related to hardship. It's nice that so many people are willing to swipe the names of these people's characters simply because they had personal issues that took priority over gaming for 90 days.
Taking care of an elderly parent who fell and broke a hip, or a loved one that has cancer and needs your attention, etc.
Losing a job and having to prioritize for a while as to what we spend our money on. I know a kid right now whose account is inactive because his parents hit on some financial hardships recently and they had to choose to stop paying for CoH - their own accounts and their kids' accounts. He is in the process of looking for a job right now, but if he doesn't find one within the requisite 90 days he loses his character names? Yes, maybe those people will never come back, but 3 months is not a lot of time in terms of any of the examples I've used in this and my previous message. I'd be upset if it happened to me, and I'm betting most of the rest of you would, too.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that I think that 90 days is way too short a period of time to judge a person unworthy of keeping the names of their characters, whether they are level 6 or level 46.
Storm
Serenity is not freedom from the storm, but peace amid the storm ...
Level 6 is too low. Level 14, when you get your travel power, is a more reasonable test of whether someone was serious about a charater. Level 6 you can get in less than 2 hours on a good sewer team.
But- some name change system is better than none. Kudos for re-implementing a long awaited and much requested feature.
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-Steve Aylett
Thank <Bleep!>!
Thanks Dev's!
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I still want to know how they are going to identify those people who have had to be inactive due to hardship beyond their control.
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I imagine NCSoft isn't going to keep track of that at all, because the only thing these people in unfortunate situations is going to lose is *possibly* the name of their level 1-5 characters.
Which is precisely why everyone in this thread who is saying...
ZOMG!!!!!! LEVEL SIX IS TOO LOW!!! IT'S NOT GOING TO FREE ENOUGH NAMES!!!!!!!!!!! I MUST HAVE MORE NAMES AVAILABLE TO ME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! SCREW THE DEADBEATS WHO MAY COME BACK AND WANT TO KEEP THE NAME OF THEIR LEVEL 20 CHARACTER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !
are just adapting an overly harsh and punitive stance which is hard for me to credit to anything but self-centeredness.
NCSoft knows how many people reactivate accounts when there's a new issue or double xp weekend and NCSoft knows how many people they don't want to tick off by freeing up the name of a level 20 toon that the player is willing to pay to play again.
As I mentioned above (as if half the hysterical rants here are posted by people who have the courtesy to read a thread before posting in it), I can easily see 300,000 names being 'freed' by this move.
I would love to know the actually datamined count of have many names fall into this category... but I know I that I don't have a right to demand it. And without numbers, anyone who says definitively "it's not enough" is just looking silly making judgments based on insufficient data.
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Level 5 and below is affected because it is the least intrusive to our player base but nets the greatest number of names.
Trial accounts are in a different pool altogether. We can free up names from trial accounts whenever we want without recourse because they were never paid for accounts.
Ex
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This is the first I'd heard that they were clearing the trial accounts out of hand. THAT I agree with.
I also agree with the below level 6 thing. These are character players never really played. Level 20 is too high for some that is about as high as they ever get and they could be attached to that character.
Remember the point isn't to punish people, the point is to free up names from people who aren't ever going to use them or miss them.
I don't personally see this as having all that much effect, sure it will free up names but almost all of the names names no one will want anyway. Why everyone assumes that the magical name that they want must be locked up by someone who doesn't play anymore and who was low level I don't know.
Lots of names are locked/squatted by current players who just don't use them. I have characters I haven't run in over 2 years, one of them a level 50. Actually just last weekend I respeced a character for ED changes.
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Ex is correct. We datamined how many names would get freed up by doing the purge at every level. After level 5, the amount of names freed up drops noticably on every server. There are a LOT of names being "camped" by inactive accounts on characters under level 5.
Sure, it doesn't take a lot of effort to get past level 5. But in the case of name campers, it looks like they didn't even put in that amount of effort on those characters. They simply made a level 1 character with the name and called it a day, or played a tad and got a level or 2.
We admit, the previous name purge was too high a level. I had a lot of people tell me that they wanted to come back to the game, but were turned off when they found that their character's name had been taken during the last name purge. We wanted the most amount of names freed up, with the least amount of impact on players who might want to return to the City of games.
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under lvl 6 is kinda lame how about:
Inactive account 90 days toons under 10
Inactive account 1 year toons under 30
Inactive account 2+ years nothing is safe
also any account inactive for a year that wasn't active for more than 3 months sould also not have safe names.
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I understand the need to free up names , but I'm with Ex and company on this one.
One particular reason is simply this: our fighting men and women stationed overseas. I know several of them (at least) that LOVE City of Heroes, and have characters ranging the full level spectrum. If someone is called away/deployed, more than likely, they are going to shut down their account for the duration of their duty overseas, since they will not have access to play in such places as Iraq or Afghanistan (plus that vaunted poverty level pay scale the military has doesn't help one's budget while deployed). So imagine their surprise when they return home, as many have after 14 months of extended duty to find their favorite characters names taken from them. I'm sure they could live with the level 5 and belows being gone, but anything above that I think should be available.
The other reason is some folks don't powerlevel their characters, and take their time developing their characters. Of those, and I'm sure many forum readers are in the "been ther/lived that" situation, where there just aren't enough dollars in one's bank account to maintain the "entertainment" category that CoH/V is, and instead, cut it off until they can get their finances in order. My impression is that many die-hard CoH/V players are in this category, living pay check to pay check (or are students, sraping by on the ever-cheap Ramen), and I'm sure they'd be more pleased with Ex and company's plan than your suggestion.
I know you are thinking of the players, and I applaud that. There are other folks out there in our community, however, that we have to keep in mind, and our military men and women, are amongst them.
Again, I think Ex has hit the nail on the head. Cudos, Ex!
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Ex is correct. We datamined how many names would get freed up by doing the purge at every level. After level 5, the amount of names freed up drops noticably on every server. There are a LOT of names being "camped" by inactive accounts on characters under level 5.
Sure, it doesn't take a lot of effort to get past level 5. But in the case of name campers, it looks like they didn't even put in that amount of effort on those characters. They simply made a level 1 character with the name and called it a day, or played a tad and got a level or 2.
We admit, the previous name purge was too high a level. I had a lot of people tell me that they wanted to come back to the game, but were turned off when they found that their character's name had been taken during the last name purge. We wanted the most amount of names freed up, with the least amount of impact on players who might want to return to the City of games.
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A++ to Positron and Devs on this.
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Why lvl 6?
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Level 5 and below is affected because it is the least intrusive to our player base but nets the greatest number of names.
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I think my biggest concern with only freeing up only the names of characters Level 5 and below is the quality of names that will be yielded. Sure there are a lot of names...but is there going to be a decent amount of good quality names that will be yielded? Or is it going to yield a bunch of names with punctuation and/or numbers that doesn't make sense?
I too am in favor of a tiered system for the character name policy. To me, it doesn't make a lot of sense to give name priority to someone that's been inactive for a long period to time instead of a player who is an actively paying customer. Say for example you have an account that has been inactive since the time I2 went live (assuming they signed up at the time of the game's launch), this person was a paying customer for only around 2 1/2 months and has inactive for nearly three years! It boggles my mind why this person should be given priorty in name choice verses someone who is a current paying customer.
I will say that I feel that some of the suggestions for tiered character name policies are perhaps a tad bit too harsh. I'm of the opinion that if a tiered policy was put into place, the time increments should be exponential (so the time increments required to loose a higher level character is much longer than the time increments required to loose a lower level character).
I also think that all levels should be subject to the name change policy. Yes, even 50s...though the total time required to loose a name for a level 50 should be substantial (say 2.5-3 years?). My reasoning falls back to my earlier example...why should someone who has been inactive for 3 years still be able to hold onto a name just because the character is level 50? I think the arguement about a player's attachment to their character/character's name at this point is moot. If they indeed were attached to their character, why are they not an actively paying customer and playing said character? I speculate that attachment to the game and all aspects (including their own characters) likely died off quite a long time ago.
I also think that if a tiered system were put in place, there should also be a policy that would allow persons to be exempt from the name policy under extraordinary circumstances. The best example that I could think of would be members of the military who are being deployed overseas...though the exemptions shouldn't be limited to just military if NCsoft finds other types extraordinary circumstances appropriate.
Just my 2 inf...
I can understand the companys desire for wanting people to come back positron, but how long is enough is enough? there are people who haven't played in over 2 years! why keep thier names reserved? How long will the excuse they might come back and play be? will 10 years down the line people who haven't played for 10 more years still have thier names reserved because the "might" come back?
While I can agree with the stance to a point, there has to be a reasonable cutoff time. I personally think 2 years should be the abosolute limit on that. (but thats my opinion)
And I may be wrong, but during the last purge, wasn't an announcement made about it as well as emails sent to past account owners?
If they still did nothing, I dont feel sorry for them.
I think current customers should have priority over past customers.
Nemsis lv50 Inv/SS
Arch-Nemsis lv 50 SS/Inv
I would agree with this. At some point, people are just not going to come back. Their names should be freed up eventually. While a poster above said 15 months should be the cutoff for your name going back to the pool regardless of level, I think that is a bit too soon. I would support sometime over 2 years inactive losing you the right to squat on your level 50's name, and possibly even their space in the database. It may sound harsh, but how many really come back after a 2 year hiatus?
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that was me, but i just kinda threw numbers up with a 3 month period between. I agree 2 years should be the cut off. The 15 month was just for the example. 
Nemsis lv50 Inv/SS
Arch-Nemsis lv 50 SS/Inv
I don't think the policy is unreasonable. I do think that anybody that thinks names are scarce is just being unimaginative.
Cheers,
Simon
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There are a LOT of names being "camped" by inactive accounts on characters under level 5.
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I agree with expiring lower-level non-played character's names, simply because allowing level 1 character names to be permanent at some point will cause something like what happened with the domain name system - dozens of character name squatters who demand a ridiculous fee to give up the name.
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As I see it, there are a lot of people who came to CoH (especially in the early days), and make one character. They played that character for awhile but got tired of the (hunt 10 CoT on the rooftops, now go and kill everybody in this cave map) missions and started playing around with the character designer before getting bored with it too and canceling their account. The problem is that person just canceled with 10 or 20 level 1 characters on their account and maybe even some good names if they took the time to really make a nice character. I think the level 5 and below policy is going to open up more names than people think.
I know I got alot of good villain names at the time of the last purge on Protector for when CoV came out. I'd be mad to if someone got Viper, Imhotep, and Vlad the Impaler (actual spelling and not i's for l's and vice versa) from me 
I did a little data mining of my own, and found that on my newer account, which is just about to hit the 21 month mark, there are 52 characters under level 6. And on the main account, which we've had for a little over 2 years, *79*!
Our accounts are probably a little anomalous, since I have a 13 year old and a 9 year old who both *love* making new characters, but I have absolutely no problem believing that there will be a huge number of names freed up by this policy, even restricting it to alts under level 6.
And since that's the case, why would NCSoft risk alienating potential returning customers by taking the names of higher-level characters if the benefit of doing so is small? The point of the policy is not to punish players with inactive accounts, but to free up names for active players to use, so why make the policy any harsher than absolutely necessary?
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Just a small example; I've been playing for 2 1/2 years now and I do have my share of high level characters... however they're entirely focused on two servers. A while back I checked out what was floating around on the other 9 servers, and found that while I maybe only played the 24 on Pin & Guardian I had another 45 alts spread around... all of them under level 8, most of them level 2-3.
So if a very active player still has 40-some characters under the cutoff; I'd bet that the vast majority of character names belong to level 10 & under.
Someone joins the game, rolls up a character and plays a bit, then decides to roll another AT, then another... before too long they've got a full server of >10 alts and maybe one in the teens or beyond.
COH has just been murdered by NCSoft. http://www.change.org/petitions/ncso...city-of-heroes