Excraft

To be honest, I'd rather that older, slogfest TFs like Synapse and Citadel get a refresh rather than a straight merit boost. HC could more than quadruple the merits for Citadel and I still wouldn't run it unless I wanted the badge for the accolade.

While I agree with the sentiment behind what you're saying, this is making an assumption that all of the names are "high quality/desirable". Unlikely as it might be, someone may have created characters named "test001" through "test1000" or any combination of gibberish letter/number combinations just to try various costume concepts. I've done that and I know of others who do the same. We don't have hundreds of characters like that, but it does happen. I'm not sure banning people for poor houskeeping of gibberish names on unplayed characters is a good idea.

Sure. Please circle the words where GM Crumpet spoke to the specific quality of the names. Maybe I missed it, but all that was said was they saw accounts with 300 and 400 names being camped. No mention of what any of those names were, gibberish or otherwise. It also wasn't stated how many accounts there are like that or how large a portion of the total accounts they comprise. You seem to be the one making assumptions about this, not me.

Why? For all any of us know, those characters were all named gibberish or something like costumetest001 through costumetest400.

That's exactly the point. I'm sure were you to ask most people who was Indiana Jones, they'd say Harrison Ford, not any of the other actors.

Why not?

That's easier said than done though. Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones is iconic. When people think Indiana Jones, they think Harrison Ford. It's not a simple thing to recast iconic roles like that.

Going to be honest, this looks terrible to me. Sad as it is to say, I'm pretty much done with superhero movies. The MCU has stunk since Endgame and don't even get me started on the DCU. Good luck to James Gunn. Everything I read about upcoming projects sounds like it's all going to be another steaming pile. The trailers for this look like more pushing of "the message" instead of actually writing good characters that have good characterization that go on a journey.

Would you happen to know how many accounts with 300 and 400 level 1's are there in relation to the total number of accounts? I would wager it's a very small, fractional percentage, if that. Also, how are you determining they will "never be used"? Unless those accounts belong to someone you all know personally who is definitely never coming back, it's still possible someone may use the name, small as a chance as that might be. I'm not suggesting this policy get changed or removed. I'm just curious about the stats as I think it important and more data provides more clarity. Thanks.

I believe you either missed or misunderstood what I wrote. I was only commenting on the design of the costume, and not in context of whether or not is should have been genericized. It definitely should have been based on the name and character bio.

You're still misrepresenting this. It's not impossible, nobody said it was impossible to write code that would allow names to be non-unique here. The people who do know the code here and know what kind of effort would be involved with that said that it was a lot more work to do versus re-using the old name release code from live server days. That does not make it impossible, just more work.

I don't object to anyone at HC doing what they think is best. I still think some folks are getting very carried away. Reading the subsequent posts here, I see it was a combo of name and character bio, so yes it should get changed. The costume isn't anywhere close to the character though.

Not sure that's a fair comparison. The HC patch notes are nowhere near the biblical length of the service agreement with places like phone service providers, social media, etc.

Looking at this, it confirms my belief that some people reporting these characters are going overboard. The name, yeah I can see that... but the costume? Doesn't look anything like the character from the show to me.

Same. I don't see a need for this to be honest. Players are already building diverse teams to run content. Isn't that rewarding enough for them?

Personally, this is a fair point and something I thought is an issue as well. It's a niggle of a UI problem, but to me it will be easy to miss for some to miss for sure. I wonder if there is a way for HC to move any characters to the "front of the line" to show up on the first page of the character listing to make it more obvious to the player?

I don't disagree with you here in one respect. For clarity, many of us campaigned for this policy to be based on account (not individual character) activity. If the account is active, that player is reachable by others to discuss exchange of a name. A couple of the HC folk contributed to that discussion where they explained how the account tables were separate from the individual shard tables, and there was no easy way to link them together to flag all characters on every shard for that account as "active" when someone logs into their account. I'm sure there are HC folk who could explain this in much finer detail, however suffice it to say they said to do this would be difficult and time consuming, so they opted for the low-hanging fruit solution of reviving the name release code that existed on live. Personally, I think HC should take that whole linking of accounts and characters on shards together properly to solve this issue once and for all so everyone can have the name they want without arguing over this kind of stuff. Given they are volunteers with limited time, makes sense that they went with this policy though. I do hope they can take on larger projects to correct these long-standing issues at some point though. No doubt there are old accounts from 5+ years ago that haven't been logged into since the "secret" server was announced publicly. At least to me, an account that hasn't been logged into for 5 years (or longer) is abandoned. Your opinion may differ and that's fine. As for people not reading patch notes or in-game popups, I can't say I agree with you there. The information is readily available to everyone and HC can't be responsible if they provide that info, but the player doesn't take the time to read it. Once this job is set live, I've no doubt it will be put into the patch notes and show up in game. If a player clicks the close button immediately on login, that's on them.

I can make up math too. The odds of someone getting a name they want is actually 50/50.... they're either going to get it or they won't. See how easy that was? 😁 If Mr. Math Wizard really wants to dazzle people, have him calculate the odds of finding just 1 acceptable name in all the combinations of all of the words in all of the languages you're able to create a name in game with. Chances are pretty good that people will find a good name in that... much better odds than it getting freed up by the existing policy. 😉

That's great! LOL

Yes, you are. Embarrassingly so. @ZacKing is absolutely correct. The HC people have shared technical details on this topic in multiple threads and explained the challenges in working with the separate account and character/shard databases, the difficulties in fixing/upgrading the code to change it so that names don't need to be unique and why they chose to go with the name release code instead. That name release solution is the more simple, low hanging fruit method they are comfortable with using since they are volunteers with limited time. I'm sure there are others who have seen the same HC posts who can confirm the same things. The odds of a single desired name even being in a list of 700,00+ to begin with isn't "1 in 3." You haven't "rebutted" diddly. You've provided your opinion, just like everyone else. You have as much knowledge of what is or isn't in the "inactive" name pool as everyone else does, which is none. You're guessing.

Imagination has nothing to do with it. Of course some people are getting their hopes up that a name they want is going to get released once the policy is live. Of course there are some people who are hoping the name they want is in that 700,00+ number being tossed around. They wouldn't be vehemently arguing for enabling the job right now if they weren't. To say otherwise is being disingenuous. As for the rest, I never said anything about anyone expecting a 100% guarantee. That's you adding in nonsense that I never said. What I did say was that some (not all) people are getting their hopes up and they're likely to be disappointed. That's it. If you don't feel that's the case, good for you. I'm sure we'll have this very same discussion after the name release routine is set live and the inevitable myriad of complaint/rant posts start cropping up about the job not working right because a name someone wanted didn't get freed up for them.

And this is where the false sense of hope is coming into play. People see big numbers like this and are getting their hopes up that the name they're after is going to get freed up immediately when the job is enabled. 700,000 names seems like a lot, but how many of those names are just gibberish? Nobody knows. I'm confused. Aren't you saying you're entitled to a name?

That's fair and I agree as everyone is going to have a different opinion on what constitutes "long enough" or when an account can be considered abandoned. I'd be curious to see this too. It seems to me people are seeing numbers like "700,000 + names will get released!" and thinking that the one they want will be in there. They're gambling on the hope of it being in that list and are going to be frustrated and disappointed when it isn't.

Tell us something we don't know. We all know it is against the rules, that's why there's a discussion about reporting it when we see it.

Items 1 and 2 are spot on. Not sure I can agree 100% with your third bullet point. If a player hasn't logged on in a couple of years, I'm not sure I'd say they're "invested in a character" they obviously haven't played in literal years. I do get where you're coming from though. I'd add a fourth point in that the existing policy is giving a great many people what I see as a false sense of hope in that a name they're after is immediately going to be freed up and they'll be able to get it. It's setting those people up for a major disappointment when that doesn't happen and I imagine there's going to be a whole lot of complaining from people who's hopes were squashed when the existing solution didn't work as they had hoped. Honestly, the best solution to hope for is that HC can bring on enough developers who are able to tackle this once and for all so that names aren't unique. From posts HC folk have made, they understand the issue and what it would take to fix, it's just too big a project for their limited time and small team of people to tackle. Hopefully they can bring on a good group of developers who can make that name upgrade happen as it solves all the problems once and for all of names being taken due to camping or inactivity. No one would have to see the "name is already taken" message again.