Free the names!

See my Guides and Tutorials

In the real world, there are 18 pages of people with my exact same name that shop at Microcenter. Don't be melodramatic.

In the past couple months or so on Virtue, I've snagged Sister Pact, Glamburgler, Tide Shifter, Albanian Eagle, Opposite Force - which I also got on Freedom, and Miss Thunderstrike. My ancedotal evidence just beat your ancedotal evidence. Its all about the creativity. If the name you're looking for is taken, try another one. The sky's the limit, and there's no penalty for being unique.

(For fellow Virtues, Miss Thunderstrike is currently open and available to a good home.)

Blood Widow Ricki * Tide Shifter * T-34 * Opposite Reaction * Shaolin Midnight * ChernobylCheerleader

Entropy Legion * Hyperion Force * Hero Heights

Again, in the real world your name is only part of your identity. To the superhero, his name is his identity. You don't get newspaper articles about "Sparky Flame Man (the one with a targeting monocle, boost range, and doesn't have leadership powers, and his address is @rsclark in Steel Canyon) saves kitten!"

Think of it less literally. If someone acts in your name (i.e. identity theft) and purchases a large quantity of things, your credit rating is at risk.

No, your anecdotal evidence did not beat my anecdotal evidence because those names were free on Virtue for a reason. Really, Glamburgler? I would hardly call that a "snag" and if I did snag that, I wouldn't tell anyone. It's a punny name, but really, I wouldn't be surprised to find it available. The others are decent, but I am sure they weren't your first choices. You actually tried Wave for Tide Shifter, and Eagle for Albanian Eagle, and Thunder for Miss Thunderstrike. But all of those were taken, so you had to settle. If there had been a name purge, you might have gotten a couple names on your first try.

I hated when threads like these get to the point where people try to say "No way! Good names are still out here! I just found "_____" on a highly populated server!" Well "_____" was available for a reason, and just because you got lucky with a few names, doesn't mean the other thousand people on your server are getting lucky with names. And every name that you think is good that you snag, is one less name that is "good" available to everyone else, still making a name purge on names from accounts that have been inactive for years necessary.

You mean the one that has only one server, a (presumably) much lower player character population, and nobody minding the store when Goku and Mr. Incredible are literally running around the Tutorial area?

Blood Widow Ricki * Tide Shifter * T-34 * Opposite Reaction * Shaolin Midnight * ChernobylCheerleader

Entropy Legion * Hyperion Force * Hero Heights

Well, considering how many threads pop up about the servers being dead, it's pretty safe to assume there are quite a few inactive accounts. At this point there are probably more inactive accounts than active accounts, and I would doubt that these inactive accounts don't have names on them. Any name taken on an inactive account is a name that is being wasted. And wasting things is selfish. Think about all the children in Paragon City starving for character names, why can't we ship all the unused names over there to help them out?

You're really not in a position to be a name snob when you think Wave, Thunder and Eagle are great names that need to be freed from the oppression of the inactive.

Wow. Just.. wow.

And now we're mind-reading. No, they weren't my first choices, but I never 'settled'. I kept trying until I found one that fit, it never took me more than a handful of tries at that.

And I never went with anything as simple as 'Wave', 'Eagle', and 'Thunder'. Wow. Just... wow.

Blood Widow Ricki * Tide Shifter * T-34 * Opposite Reaction * Shaolin Midnight * ChernobylCheerleader

Entropy Legion * Hyperion Force * Hero Heights

There are currently like four different Batman's.

There have been two Supermen active at once.

There are four green lanterns who call Earth home.

There are two sometimes three Flash's running around.

So yeah, screw your special snow flake idea.

How could the second name purge be done because of a game that came out before City of Villains, if City of Villains was the reason for the first one occurring? That does not make any sense.

And the last name purge was in 2007, what competition came out near the end of Summer 2007 to warrant that name purge?

CO was a viable competitor, they even ran the Loyalty Program at that time because of it, yeah it ended up not being so great, but at the time, the fear was real. A Name Purge would have been great at that time.

You meant he ones that's free to play, and thus probably has a lot more 'players' than CoX at the moment?

(Emphasis added.)

This is overstating the case. While technically no one can have exactly the same name as you, they can have names close enough to easily cause confusion. People use all kinds of tricks to make names appear to be what they're not -- replacing upper case i with lower case L (or vice-versa), or upper case O with zero, and so on.

"Memphis Bill" will be different from "Memphis BiII" (ending in two upper case i's) in the database, but for players who use the standard font and select players through mouse commands for invitations and chatting instead of using the keyboard to type out the name, they are essentially indistinguishable.

Similarly, Memphis Bill and MemphisBill and Memphis-Bill are all "unique", but people meeting Memphis Bill in-game will be hard pressed to remember exactly which spelling was used unless they add that particular Memphis Bill to their friends list.

If someone wants to clone your name using one of these tricks, you can lose your uniqueness. Such a person could go to your server, copy one of your character's names, and spam Atlas Park with obnoxious comments. They could fool the majority of users, besmirching your name in their eyes. Yes, users could use Add Note or Get Global Name to get the scumbag's global, but many people don't know about that or wouldn't bother.

There are also other, benign, reasons to know the global names of other characters all the time.

Not that long ago I joined a channel, a sort of meta-supergroup, where people play a lot of hero and villain alts. I know their global handles, because they chat on the channel all the time. But because I haven't been playing with them for years, and they have so many characters, I often have no idea who they are when I'm actually teamed with them, especially on leagues. I constantly find myself using Add Note or Get Global Name to get the global handles for local names. A few of us have set up a bind to initiate chat on the channel that includes our local character name to help avoid confusion.

So, if there were an option to display global names with local names, I might very well turn it on so I know who I'm talking to on team or league chat.

Opposing sides of this argument are drastically overstating their cases. You can always make good new names with the current setup, though they'll rarely be your first choice. And names are currently unique only in the narrowest technical sense of the word.

Both the current implementation and an implementation that allowed duplicate names disambiguated by global are reasonable and viable solutions. I'm against a change because I don't really see it as necessary, it would cause a lot of bugs and confusion for months, and it's time the developers could spend doing something more important.

I'll let the conversation die here - hi mods - but I'll end it with the known fact of how it wasn't long at all after the game went F2P that the 'FOR SALE' sign went up.

Blood Widow Ricki * Tide Shifter * T-34 * Opposite Reaction * Shaolin Midnight * ChernobylCheerleader

Entropy Legion * Hyperion Force * Hero Heights

We call comic incontinence like this "milking an idea for all the revenue we can get." These things keep children entertained and parents buying. I don't see how you could expect your argument to carry any weight unless you fit into the first category.

Yes, since Atari are focusing on casual multiplayer and mobile gaming, your point being? One studio will not save a publisher from focused (re: incompetent) management.


If you look into it you’ll find that Cryptic were actually one of the few studios making Atari any money last year, but since the management wasn’t focused on that manner of online gaming, a big wad of cash was more desirable than keeping the studio and game around for continued profits.


Want another example of publishers being rather dim? EA and their new online store/service Origin, here is a service that offers customers the ability to buy direct from the publisher, with no middle men and no packaging, yet they sell at a higher price than both brick and mortar stores and other competing digital sales services.

Lemur Lad has this response covered, but it's worth reiterating that Paragon is currently making big investments in CoH's endgame, which would naturally appeal to returning customers with established characters. Now is not the right moment for Paragon to generic people's level 50s because they've been absent for a period of time.
And we've had returning players post on these boards saying they'd be disappointed if their characters had been renamed in their absence. Anecdotes, to repeat, are not data.
The game has an option to check if a name is in use even before you begin creating a character, so it would seem the devs are prepared for quite the opposite. For my own part, I use this feature most of the time since it spares me aggravation.

Also, hundreds? Not exaggerating? Just for the sake of verification, could you post this list of hundreds of names you've tried?
For the record, I find Glamburgler hilarious and would prefer to team with a player by that name over "Fire Girl" or something similarly dull yet "iconic". Tastes vary.
I see now, you strongly do believe in finite limits to creativity in this game, that there's only a sharply constrained combination of words that "work" for superhero names (and this in a language with one of the largest vocabularies). I can only sympathize with your position and suggest you search for an online superhero name generator to help brainstorm. Whenever I find a name I've come up with is in use - and unless I'm being extraordinarily eccentric or obscure, I've come to expect this because, honestly, I'm not that creative - I hit the books (dictionaries, thesauruses, etc.).

Ehhhhh?

There have been multiple Green Lanterns from Earth for years, perhaps even decades. They are quite different in characterization.

The multiple Batmen is a new direction for the character, it may be interesting to see how it evolves from the 80's onwards 'one man war on crime' idea of Batman.

There have been multiple flashes for decades as well, Usually Jay Garrick as the mentor and either Walter West or Barry Allen as the current Flash.

You do know that being the first to get a name on a server, in no way actually makes you special right? It won't help you be the prom queen, it won't make you more popular at work, it certainly won't help you get laid.

Yes, because all everyone wants is to get laid. I'm sure your mom is proud of you for pulling the internet cool guy card.

As I said before, it's not about being special. I don't have any 'iconic' or 'good' names for my characters. But the names I do have are my names. That's what is important to me, that my identity I've chosen in game is mine.

I can have my dates mixed up and the point can still stand. They had overriding outside reasons in conjunction with the name purges. It wasn't always the release of another game or a big change in this game, but compensating for the flood of trials was a bigger reason than the lack of player creativity. The point you've missed is, there's no overriding reason to have a name purge now, therefore they're unlikely to consider one. And no, I don't think they consider "we haven't done it in a while" to be sufficient reason.

CO was not a viable competitor. It was a potential competitor. Nothing they did here was done out of fear, just pragmatism. You can't say a game was viable and when it pretty much tanked within a year, and never held as many subs as this one did.

Wrong!

It was @Techbot ALPHA, with a LASER CANNON AND HIS ROBOT ARMY!

What do you expect? I'm EVIL!




(Seriously. I want my name back. It was the right colour, too lime green, not gunge coloured...)

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

You played the passive agressive card first mate, just responding in kind.

Now isn't that awfully selfish of you? You're claiming that these aregements of letters belong to you? That some one else couldn't possibly use them with a completly different character design and story?

You are aware that when it comes to copy righting a character, Comic book companies can't do it on name alone? They have to go on look and back story as well?

Now on to that last part, do you only play one character, or do you have some sort of online multiple identity disorder?