Free the names!

That's the beauty of superherodom, though. Silver Age Silliness.

Which is the opposite extreme of people advocating that people who have left the game deserve to have names reserved in perpetuity.

Which is also why I advocate a middle-of-the-road position that boils down to a couple of simple concepts: 1) If you are really attached to a name, you never have to lose it, and 2) the more you play, the more your attachment to characters is recognized by earning longer-term (even for throwaway characters) and permanent (for your cherished few) reservations.

If you play the game for a month and leave, I genuinely feel that you haven't played enough to really be attached to much of anything. You absolutely, positively, shouldn't be tying up names indefinitely. If you play for a few months, you've probably gotten a bit attached to the game and, if you have to leave for a few months because of whatever but plan on coming back, you get some leeway with your characters. The longer you play, the more attached you are to your characters and their names, and because you've been funding the game, you've earned the commitment of NCsoft not to just blow away your identity.

In short, the more commitment you've shown us, the more commitment we'll show you. It rewards current players and treats former customers with an amount of respect commensurate with their financial support and contributions to the game.

Have you been away for 2 years straight?

The Electric-Knight ______ Malfaz _____ Zox'Oculox

@Zethustra

"Now at midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew come out
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan

www.pauldamonthomas.com - Original Music

"Codename Carrot-top" - This buxom flame-haired femme fatale may seem like a girl who's only looking for a good man and good time, but any enemy agent who's caught on the wrong side of her twin forty-fives can expect to be planted in the ground before morning.

It's all in the execution. An ironic name can work just as well as a standard-issue Something Person construction.

True, but on the other hand, that which you call "the other extreme" is practiced by most other MMOs I've seen. I've seen few games that treat character names like a valuable resource to be managed and purged.

There was one game that instituted a idle character deletion mechanic a while after it got started, though. It happened to me--which I found out after trying to pick up where I left off--and because of that, I never looked at the game again.

Ehhhh, maybe. Recognizing veterancy would be nice if it has to be done. Though I imagine people would still complain about not getting the character names they wanted, because the guy who has them is a frequent customer with a long veterancy record.

Was that what you were asking? I read your post as "anyone who has played the game and has been gone for longer than one month but returned."

Still, I've barely got over one consecutive year of play time since four years ago when I started playing this game.

Yeah, what could possible go wrong...




Lets go find some of the people that were banned because their characters had leveled too quickly while level-pacted.

Angel Red
"We're heroes. Fighting injustice is the thing we do." ~Rebel Scum

And those are great names for a hero who is an animate carrot. Or has carrot powers. Or maybe, with a good backstory, is orange. But for the vast majority of characters, any combination of "carrot" is inappropriate.

Take, for instance, my midget, mutant green, Mexican lucha libre tanker turned villianous brute when they gave me the option. His name is his fighting name - el Chupacabra. Without the name, the character does not exist. It loses the whole point for it's existence.

The same applies to plenty of character names. Any anagram name doesn't have the easy option of just coming up with something else. Names that are puns or references can't be changed - "Mortal Coil" doesn't have the same impact as "Daily Grind" even if the core meaning in usage is the same. My teen goth in mesh shirt and utili-kilt character "Hot Topic" would not have been able to run with his reluctant partners Abercrombie and The Fitch if I hadn't snagged the names.

I'm just astounded by how much support you can get for a (very valid) complaint that not having colorable hair on a hat costume piece so severely limits how useful it is for making characters, but not get the same outrage at the name limitations - as if the name is somehow a less important part of the character than hair color or how they stand when they are angry.

I think it's silly. Cute, but silly. I'm not knocking it, if that's the kind of character you enjoy playing, but it is silly.

Someone who frequently quits and re-subs is still far more likely to return than someone who played for three months at release and hasn't come back since.

Okay, one, what does this have to do with anything? We're not talking about active players being banned, we're talking about people who aren't even playing the game possibly losing character names. Yeesh.

Two, what do you mean, "level-packed"? Are you referring to the people who exploited known issues in the AE system a while back? The ones who exploited AE after Positron said, "If you exploit AE, we're going to smack you down"? That wasn't nerdrage, that was stupidrage. And honestly, if someone is going to quit because the developers don't want people using exploits, then good riddance; these people do not have the long-term health of the game at heart, and they will ultimately do more damage than their $15 per month helps. I thought we had hashed all this out already like two years ago.

But again, that has nothing to do with the conversation at hand. It's not like we're saying that if you play for seven years and let your subscription accidentally lapse for a day, your characters should be immediately deleted and your forum name changed to "Idiotface."

Actually, that's not the case in either example I was thinking of.

Your mileage may vary, especially if your tongue doesn't fit comfortably in your cheek*. For my tastes, it's less silly than the average Bond girl. Add an illustration by Howard Chaykin or Brian Bolland, and hey presto, a post-modern neo-noir heroine.

EDIT: And here she is, freshly created on Virtue (where, go figure, the name "Carrot" has already been taken).


My basic point is that what might seem like an obstacle may turn into a springboard.


* And if so, why play a fundamentally unrealistic game like a superhero MMO?

Yeah, who knows? Maybe they realized that that sort of name was the exception rather than the rule or something. Crazy, huh?

Nothing to do with AE or the exploiters. No, I was referring to people that had a character in a leveling-pact with another character. Where one person was able to play their character more than their counterpart, then they logged in and were able to claim multiple levels sometimes all the way to 50. Some of these people were caught in the same smack-down.

When people comment 'Pfth, any possible downside will be minimal.' as if nothing can go wrong, then my prior statement is relevant. I was not stating that they were the same issue just that things can and often do, go wrong, or that there may be unintended consequences.

You only have to head up to the Mission Architect forums and read the "Copyright/Profanity filter" thread to see another example.

Angel Red
"We're heroes. Fighting injustice is the thing we do." ~Rebel Scum

I believe Ch'p, B'dg, B'Shi, Dkrtzy RRR, and Zghithii would like to have a word once the premiere of the Green Lantern movie has let out.

The Electric-Knight ______ Malfaz _____ Zox'Oculox

@Zethustra

"Now at midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew come out
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan

www.pauldamonthomas.com - Original Music

Even if there were a rule to superhero naming - and there is none - you mean exceptions, plural. Claiming that only certain names work for superheroes is as pointless as claiming "all of the good names are taken".

Also, Mr. Zsasz.

Quite so. I'm going to take a break and have fun levelling Codename Carrot-top.

Level 1 Traps/DP Defender LFT!

... That's what City of Heroes needs! A popcorn emote!

With reference to the name@global scheme, I've played Cryptic's offering, and the first thing I noticed was when it was on, how much visual clutter it really is. And I don't believe they even have names as long as ours.

Now, imagine if this went in, and you had (to use one of my characters), "an adorable little fox@ArcticFahx" showing up in the chat window.

On the flip side, when you have the @global turned off, it can get confusing when you have Captain Tanzania and Captain Tanzania discussing something.

The main reason I don't feel the devs would ever adopt such a system, though, is that they don't have it already. An old saying comes to mind, "better the devil you know than the one you don't". Basically, in this case, if people are complaining about the current naming system, but a roughly equal number of people would dislike the new suggestion put forward, it is better to do nothing.

Originally Posted by Back Alley Brawler Did you just use "casual gamer" and "purpled-out warshade" in the same sentence?

Not all Global ID systems are created equal. I've described other systems in my past posts because of those who point to Cryptic's method and say that all global ID systems are just as bad.

Global ID systems can be both effective and yet unobtrusive. I've seen it happen.

"Do nothing" is a nice third option, but as we've seen, there are people who really want taken character names and want something done about it. In light of that, I would much rather some sort of global ID system than name purges.

We could all gather around a grey-con Freakshow faking dead in Brickstown and /em picklock him!

Could you provide these examples again, or a link?

I'm not totally opposed to Cryptic's method, but I do see its flaws. I might be willing to live with those flaws, but I am not convinced. However, if there is a better solution then I would like to ponder that as well.

Sure.

The best global ID method I've seen involved giving every player a unique ID number. In the game, characters added each other to their friends' list through ID cards, which had the character's information along with their global ID number visible.

The friend cards were account-based, so if you friended someone as one character, their character's friend cards would appear for all your characters. You could also easily find out who their alts were this way, as it would list them for you if you so chose.

It was also possible to display the global ID numbers of people around you with a single button press. The game let you use that button to cycle through having the character names displayed above people, having their class and level displayed, or having their account IDs displayed--or nothing at all.

It was a good way of making it easy to view people's global IDs without having them in your face all the time.

For City of Heroes, they could model the displaying of global names (or some other kind of global ID) similarly. Make it so that all you have to do is press a key and people's names are replaced by their global IDs, and pressing the key again would switch it back. That would keep everyone's names from reading like an e-mail address.

As for friending, all they'd have to do is display the global name (or global ID, if they don't use global names) of the friend in a separate column of the Server Friends list.