Discussion: One game, one global server access

Leaving aside all rage about the global renames - I look forward to seeing the EU servers/players

and its far less than ideal but I'd suggest going the globalname.eu method to help preserve your identiy

Just wondering, will super group names be affected by this also?

As far as I know you can't change a SG's name, and if it follows the same basis as global names The Legendary Titans with a bit of bad luck could end up being The Legendary Tit.

You won't have to worry about losing your SG name since that name is server specific.

Another aggreement here in how unfair this is to Eu players. Vet status should absolutely be taken into account.

This from a UK player who plays in the US servers.

This does seem to be another badly considered idea. Like the recent 'security measures' and the launcher update which locked out South Americans.

Come on - what happened? I used to be such a fan of how this game treated it's player base but recently it seems to have gone downhill. The guys I've spoken to in support have always been lovely but these hamfisted ideas are originating from people who don't seem to care whether they keep their players.

Okay, calmer now. This struck a few nerves with me (at least three that I could note) so I'll try and say way. And sorry to Zwillinger for being the messenger shot by that bullet.


1. The time.
The time, not the timing, being 4pm Pacific translated to 12am GMT for me and at least 1am for our friends on the continent. After a long day it got my inner conspiracy theorist going about how late the post was. As someone pointed out to me it's about the end of the 9-5 working day in Cali.

2. The wording.
Well the wording as you can see states that this is a MERGER of the server lists and it obviously isn't. It's an INTEGRATION of the EU servers onto the NA listing.

I'll explain: I currently work for a company that bought out the last company I worked for (same place of work, different upper management now). It was a buyout of a private company to one that trades publically. To the day that the old head office shut our formers bosses kept wording it as a merger of our two companies, implying that it was an equal partnership coming together to form a new company and it wasn't. We had been BOUGHT OUT. It's not a merger if one side buys the other outright.

So when I see 'merger' it implies that like the forum merger which was a merger of two seperate forum archives into a new database unlike the announcement which goes on to say over and over that only EU players are being affected by this amalgamation.


3. The EU players second-class treatment.
After so many years, posts and threads about being 'second-class citizens', we finally get something that has met with almost universal praise by everyone and it gets one last back-hand in that we are guaranteed to lose out one last time for the reason that 'it will affect the least amount of players'. I just found it so hard to stomach that we were basically being subverted one last time before we're finally considered equal.



And to those who said 'like it or lump it'; remember the last time it happened? Not on the network itself but on the base price changes? Oh yeah, you remember now? No? Well, let's tell the story.

The decision was made to revisit base prices around i13 and the verdict was that the prices would change and in order to benefit from the change you had to destroy your exisiting bases and reclaim the prestige that way, like it or lump it. And it was lumped, lumped a lot! Post after post about how hard-working base-builders had been here for years, that they deserved to be treated better and that the changes should be retroactive. And then the news came that they were going to be retroactive, once you'd popped into the editor for whatever scripting algorithmn to work its magic.

The decision was 'like it or lump it'. it was lumped and things changed for the better. Long-term vets and new users benefited.


Now, here's the situation I'm in:

Game account wise; I actually HAVE the conflicting US account. I named both my first accounts for each version the same because four years ago when I set it up; I never thought the server lists would ever be merged. EVER! Now they have, I'm paying for a decision I made four years ago when our localisation staff were still around and seperation was 'a good thing'. I would prefer to rename my own account rather than have a prefix 'just because'.

Global wise? Losing out. But I'll expand on that. When the forums were merged, we got lumped with an _EU or _NA for every conflict. I got Tyger_EU. Fair enough, I figure a solution would come later as merging the two together was the priority. Then it did, a first-come, first-served email to the support staff to get it changed back or to an alternative. Which was better than the alternative of 'who'd been here longest' because of Tyger_NA. I would've been beaten by 16 days by someone who'd registered, made one post and never logged in again.

Now I have to compete with Tyger42 except he wins by default because he is on the NA listing. My main is actually called Tyger so when I log in, I'll get @Tyge instead. Tyger42 hasn't logged into the forum since the 3rd of January which might not be an indication of playing habits but given the statistics came back with at least 500 posts in the previous 18 months, he used to be a very frequent poster, at least 20 a month. He may not play anymore, he may have let his account lapse, he may feel his ears burning, log in tomorrow and prove he's still with us, shaking his fists at my daring challenge to 'his' name. Since global chat came in Issue 3 which was the European release and my choice was my main Tyger as well..... he still wins because he's on the NA list (maybe he'll just give me the finger instead ).

And then what about the US players? I notice that it's only EU players that get a rename in cases of conflict but what if the US players wanted to change? Maybe they're sick of having their current (conflicting) global and wouldn't mind a change to something else but no rename token to do it with?

I still think the forum solution would be a better choice; of appending _NA and _EU to conflicting globals and letting us fight it out. At least that's a choice and:

99.9% of us would accept that choice, even if there's a chance we could lose anyway.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dispari I don't know why Dink thinks she's not as sexy as Jay was. In 5 posts she's already upstaged his entire career.

As a Eu player i can easily see the problem facing us her and would deffiently shout out that this is very unfair to us. but i can also see the views of the NA players and devs (i say devs as in everyone who works behind the game to make it as awesome as it is ).

i would say with time n thought. Age of account would be the better way to go. if people come back then it is easy to say. due to changes laterly there was a conflicting name issue and as the other player started the game sooner, yourll ned to change your name...its just like when we create new toons/ start up for the first time- if somethings taken before u, then u loose out really. (now this effects both sides, but easy to deal with)

Ofc i dont know what the ideas the devs have discussed..naturally theyve thought about this long n hard before telling us, but i dont think this should be just a closed done deal.

i think trail accounts shouldnt be included anyway afterall. they are just that. i'd had to loose my name to some 2 day old trail when ive been in this game since just before issue 6.

i hope the devs can open this to peaceful discussions by the players and see what the greater player base say..after all we have been known to be the best fourm- dev-player game out there and something like this would be just an added bonus to our rep.

ty

It would be a nice gesture if Ncsoft were to look at the global name issue on the basis of vetran rewards earned, but I dont hold out much hope of that.

Seeing as the EU servers dont get even a third of support or events of the US servers I cant see Ncsoft devoting the time needed to accomplish such a task, so it looks like we will end up with the solution that "effects the least amount of players" as it requires the least amount of effort on Ncsofts part.

Other than that Im looking forward to the Merger and the chance to interact with our American cousins without having to pay for two accounts.

I'm in the minority here - I'm more than likely going to be affected and my reaction is 'fair enough, what's next?'.

When we had the forum merger, there was an Escalus out there and if they're still about they didn't reply faster than I did to get the name made in to their own. If they have that as their global, I'm going to be renamed to Escalu or Escal or however far back it does end up going and I'll get a rename for my global.

The 'but people know me as...' argument may seem valid, but they're still going to know you as that. Is it so hard to rename yourself to something similar for example 'EscalusRex'. Do I want to change my global name? Not really. Does it bother me? No - these things happen. A small minority are affected and some are making mountains out of molehills. At what point have ragequits/protests/stamping your feet and going 'wah!' worked?

If we have multiple game accounts (or trials) on the same nc master account
can't they give us the option for a combined (master) global for these accounts?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Coolio Thanks, but... I recall having an issue with the forum merge, my old NA trial account using the same global as my EU active one. One option if players have had both a trial and active account across NA/EU, would be that as long as they share the same NCSoft master account information, then merge any trial account characters onto the Live account, and then purge the trial, this should fix the dual @Global and Login info clash on those trial accounts. For the players with dual side accounts, if both are on the same master account offer to merge the @Globals into 1 @Global. In other words merging them should remove the NA/EU @Global clash in this case and would have the added benefit of removing a load of mixed @global names '@EU xuy' and '@xyz' owned by a single player. Players would need the option to change the master or account global during a global rename. This would potentially also help players with multiple same side EU/EU or NA/NA game accounts on the same master account too, letting them also use one @Global identity for both accounts, if they wish to. Would this mean that when accounts go Login ID specific the forums will drop the EU/NA login toggle option?

So I've posted a few humorous posts on this thread as I was taken a back by this, but now I have calmed down.

I know the servers are highly populated on some of the NA servers but how are the communities within them?

I think the big issue with the global names in the EU (speaking on own experience within Defiant) is that everyone goes by them, and on some levels we also use nicknames for our global names as we are such a tight nit community.
Everybody knows everybody on Defiant, through all the previous kicks in the teeth our population has held to the same level with exactly the same loyal Globals regularly keeping Defiant alive.

Because a lot of the EU player base normally stick to their home server, actual toon names are hardly ever used is this the same on NA?

The first thing I do when I join a pug, is click on each team member and Add note, immediately I know whom I am teaming with, even if I have not teamed with them for some months.

I know people have taken huge amounts time building there global name and their reputation as either a good player, nice player, helpful player or those that like to RP, TF or even PvP. We even know the globals for the bad apples on the server and use this as a means to avoid. Basically what they are doing to Defiant will be taking 6 years of history of hard fought reputations and close bonds and dumping it in the trash without giving us a chance to defend ourselves and that is what hurts.

I believe a fairer system needs to be addressed, I can take losing my global if someone had it before me but that's about it, no other system will work for me.

Will I quit over this, no.
Will I be left with a bad taste in mouth, yes.
Will I venture to a NA server, most probably not after this.
Will seeing my global name be used by someone else hurt, yes most probably (especially if they are a tool)

It sometimes seems that someone is looking at figures and saying "look we have upset the EU here and numbers haven't dropped, we upset them again and still they haven't dropped, looks like whatever we do to them we arn't gonna lose any subscriptions so don't take a chance at upsetting the NA peeps"

So what about account-character-transfers?

The mere reason i have several accounts was the fact i couldnt play on US on my EU account and visa versa (playtime makes EU at times totaly empty), but this change making 2 identical accounts (US and EU one) kinda obsolete.

I care little for the money i spent, with this change thus lost, it was my own choice.

But i do care about the future and my characters, even with acces to all servers, to play my characters (i have 83 characters in total) i have to continue paying for those accounts. While i could transfer over a bunch of most-played characters to 1 main account and divide them among the servers (on US i only play Freedom/Guardian), it would be nice there would be such a feature.

Luckely only the global will be merged (yes i care little about my global name), merging servers would be a serious issue for me since i have duplicate names on serveral servers.

Additonaly, what will happen with loginnames? I have an EU and US account with identical login-names, how will the client know wich account i'm trying to log in?

I hope rednames are watching because what people are saying about...

* Active accounts > inactive
* Older accounts > newer

... makes a lot of sense.

That aside, I wonder if now people on the east coast will actually have people to play with early in the morning if the EU folks are still up

Aah misread that part, since they are kinda related to eachother (the veteran of pre-EU release months are added to my EU account, alike my EU payments afterwards were added to my US account, in some way they are linked).

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jordan_Yen That aside, I wonder if now people on the east coast will actually have people to play with early in the morning if the EU folks are still up

Basicly i would say: No. They are still on their server, EU folks are still on their own server. Unless 1 side decide to create a character on the other server, they still will play alongside eachother.

Then again, this is yet another 'EU will get shafted' step of many, only mather of time untill EU servers itself will be removed (alike happened with Asia CoH).