MHertz

It also used to be a badge of honor to have a 50 on your account at all, in light of the limited number of slots you got. With 1,000 slots per server, it only exacerbates the name camping problem and without much benefit to the person doing the hoarding. Who cares if someone has 300 50s that they don’t play?

The shards need to know that a given name (found on Account 789) should be made available to Account 223 upon character creation. Somehow that flag must be set. As I understand it, either a) A script has to be built that grabs a list of inactive accounts from the login server, then access each shard and set the flags on all applicable characters on those accounts. This would have to be run periodically (probably no more than 1/day, but could stretch to 1/month); or b) The shard server has to add a real-time check every time a name is requested, such that it tracks a name back to the account that owns it, calls the login server, and verifies whether the account is active; or c) Some code must be written such that when people log in, the “last active” date is appended to the account; this would have to a workaround in case that account hasn’t been logged in since the code was added.

You said a lot about what “should” be able to be done, without (as far as I can tell) any experience or knowledge that would make yours an informed opinion. If the devs say it’s not a thing they can easily do, I’ll side with them, rather than accuse them of being “incompetent or incapable” (your words).

Again, I reiterate, they are looking for people with knowledge and applicable skills. Armchair vaporizing does no one any good. Or just maybe when the devs say something is difficult, we … believe them? Crazy, I know.

Good thing I didn’t assume that, then. Some desirable names are being played now. Some are not. The odds are good that the desirable names are likely to be older, because they are often easier to think of. It is also probably the case that characters inspire players to play when the powers, costume, bio, and name come together well — so “good” names may have a longer shelf life than one-off test build names and hack jobs and pun-of-the-moment ideas. (The corollary here is that a new player is likely to stay longer if they can get a name they like.) It is equally unreasonable to assume that the only idle names are undesirable. People don’t take breaks from the game, or stop playing, or move on to other things, because they didn’t have any good names. Sometimes even good names will go idle because the player moved on. A player leaves behind, let’s say, 20 characters. Maybe 1 or 2 of those names are cool. Someone should get them.

It is a volunteer staff. If you are that wise about how the data is structured, offer to write the solution yourself. People would thank you.

I doubt they are actual gibberish. Maybe uncommon, unpopular, silly, or improbable — but most likely actual words. Like I said, the awesome names are maybe 5% of the total, because most names just aren’t that good.

A quick sample of active players using the names they could get. I hope you can see that’s not the same as a sample of names that are presently idle. Names that are idle for 1 year: were created with more freedom because there were fewer existing names already in use at the time may have contributed to the unavailability of better names for the active players now I’m not saying there’s going to be a ton of awesome names freed up by this. Likely not — most names just aren’t that awesome to start with.

If you’re assuming those 600k names are mostly gibberish, then you’ve got your hopes up too. Some of them will be idle names like “Phoenix Dark Dirk Steel” that are useful to very few. Some might be names like “ashagsjah” that people used as a mule or as a base builder or as a spammer. But I’d wager a good portion, maybe 60%, will be at least second-tier names that would smooth the process of getting a character online: the whole Darkblade, Shadowblade, Nightsword, Starstab, Shadeknife iteration people go through when they can’t think of anything really superior. Maybe 5% would be names that make people go “yeah, awesome!” I have long said in this thread that the odds are good that few individuals will be able to declare success from this — defined such that they would find a name they always wanted. We shouldn’t be trying to measure this by how people feel about the names that become available to them.

By no means. I said I would never miss it if someone were to haul it all away. I’m just too lazy to get out in the garage and do it myself.

Sweet! I’m all about solutions based on things we can measure. If database stability is not an issue, then it can be disregarded. We still have the issue of, what did we estimate, 600K potential names being freed up, out of 2M names? That’s a number worth discussing. That’s 30% of the existing characters — it’s not nothing.

I believe it was already mentioned that this is a distinction the game cannot make, because there is no “account activity” that can be tied to a character. I would be in favor of this hypothetical example, for all the good it does.

At least it is a measurable metric, as opposed to hypothetical scenarios about people who feel a certain possessiveness about a thing they don’t care enough about to use, but can’t allow anyone else to enjoy. I keep boxes of old crap in my garage too. MIDI cables, external Zip drives, old computers, portable CD player, chargers to batteries that turned to lumps of acidified plastic long ago. If I’m honest, I’m never going to haul out that old PowerMac 7100 and play “Fool’s Errand” ever again. If someone was volunteering to clean that crap out, I would never miss it. I might go, “Dang.”

I counter with another specious argument about some hypothetical player who tries to return to Homecoming but his favorite toons were given Generic names or deleted. They go around and badmouth the game, no positive feelings, and so on. It’s fun! We can make up scenarios all day. Give active players 1 year to hold their names (including 50s) and give inactive players 6 months. I know that’s a distinction the database can’t make at present, but that would at least favor players who are here.

And I’m for it. If the character isn’t being played at all, not even once a year, then it’s just cluttering up the database. If the player loves the character so much he can’t let it go, but is so indifferent about it that he can’t ever be bothered to log on as that character, it becomes like Gollum’s relationship with his precious.

If our benchmark for whether purging old data is “are people better off?” then this whole exercise has to be re-evaluated. Which people? What is better? In general I would say the game would be better off deleting idle characters, especially on idle accounts, because that would have a measurable effect on database stability and memory usage. All we are talking about is the name, and I’ve already said that, in my opinion, it is difficult to attach any benefit to any one user. Most people will still say “I can’t find a good name.” Only a few will be lucky enough to say “I got the one I’ve been waiting for.” So “are you better off” is not, to me, a compelling argument. Suppose you could “retire” a character. Its name changes from Captain Firepants to Emeritus Captain Firepants or Captain Firepants (Retired) or something. You can no longer trade, gain XP, respec, or use the auction house. You keep a version of the name, you keep the character in the database, but you free up the name for someone else who would actually use it. It would have exactly the same effect as your unused character does now — it sits and does nothing. Would that be better or worse than deletion? Would that be better or worse than a name purge?

I agree with most of your post, but not this. In general, sure. Someone hasn’t logged in a character for a year, great — flag the character name, level 50 or otherwise. How the character reached 50 is not the issue and just muddies the water here.

That’s how I came up with the name for Stickbonker. I thought, what’s the inevitable and stupid conclusion of looking for the most obvious not-yet-taken “named after power set” name for a Staff mêlée fighter? And to RP him, I thought, what kind of person would choose that name? I rarely have trouble finding names, because I don’t name for powers very often. Mr Crunch (invulnerable/EM Tanker) Akoya (FF Defender) Moongold (fire/empathy Controller) Zephyr Lily (katana/SR Scrapper) Caxino (archery/devices Blaster) Overkilt (Scottish mace Brute) Carmen Astra (dark/dark Defender) I could stop playing tomorrow and I doubt more than one or two of my names would be claimed.

Yes. That’s the warning I’m trying to deliver. When the name purge goes through, some people will definitely lose their names. Only a small number of people will actually get names that were being hoarded. We are likely to see more examples of “I lost my name, this game sucks!” than “guess what, I just got the name I have been wanting for years!” And more than either of them we’ll see “The name I want still isn’t free!” Again, I’m not saying this is a good reason not to do the name purge. It ought to be done. We just can’t expect the solution to look like sunshine and roses and tons of perfect names and nobody ever complaining. Very likely more people would want that name than could actually have it, so the balance will tip in favor of “the name purge didn’t work! I still can’t get that name.” Lots of people name their characters after their power sets. Let’s see, it’s a broadsword/dark armor Scrapper, I’ll call him Darkblade. Or Nightblade. Darn, that’s taken too. How about Shadowsword? Darksword? Shadowstab? Occlusion Scalpel? Doompoke? Darn. All taken. Well, I guess I’ll go with xXDark B1ad3Xx. That may be an exaggeration, but it probably will continue to happen more than “darn, I lost a name.”

I agree with your whole post. I am not trying to claim the name purge should not be done; I am just cautioning people, as you are, to mitigate their expectations. Someone somewhere will get upset at losing a name; and hardly anybody here will perceive that the solution worked and freed up the name they wanted.

There is solving the problem, and there is solving the perception of the problem. The actual problem: Inactive accounts and active accounts with inactive characters are holding names that are going unused. First perception of the problem: “I can’t play this dumb game! I can’t get any of the good names I want!” Second perception of the problem: “I can’t play this dumb game! I took a break and came back to play, and my favorite character names were all borked!” Solving the actual problem of idle accounts does not solve the first perceived problem with any reliability. But it may create the second perceived problem. If you are keen to solve the actual problem, then give up on the idea that the perceived problems may have a solution. The name you want may belong to a level 50. The name you want might get logged in regularly. The name you want may get logged every six months. The name you want may get freed up in the purge, and snapped up by some other lucky player who plays every day. The name you want may get snapped up by a greedy player who also doesn’t play the character. Or the name you want falls into your lap, and you end up taking a long break from the game yourself. In all cases, the perception of some third player is still “I can’t get the name I want.” I assume the devs have enough data to suggest the name purge would free up some reasonable number of names, or they wouldn’t be doing anything about it. That doesn’t mean you will perceive any change yourself — but the people who lose their names might perceive one.

I want them to go back to when travel powers were used to get you from one mission to another, not for speeding through Pocket D to get from your AE farming station to the trainer and back. Travel powers used to mean something, dang it. Asking for free travel powers so you can further min-max your build? Meh, it’s not a priority. Might as well ask for a Farming power pool, containing one toggle that does Maneuvers + Tough + Weave + Hasten. It’s about as likely to happen.

I also remember when capes and auras were added. I know you went to a lot of work to prove me wrong somehow, but I know which issue it was and when I showed up.

I had to go back and look to see how early I began — apparently I was playing as of Issue 1, because I remember the Council-Fifth Column battles in Atlas Park. The thing I remember most about those years was doing Stan and Lou and working on the forum newspaper.

I don't recall any differences in opinion worth quibbling about, and I'm very glad to know you are enjoying the story surrounding the Willows. As a longtime Dungeon Master, I'm happy when everyone gets together to write a story in common. It's kind of my story, but I have plenty of good and helpful co-authors like yourself.