ShardWarrior

Not sure what servers you are on, but I am seeing people advertising to put together mission teams and/or TF/SF/iTrial/WST teams all the time on Excelsior and Torchbearer. Literally every minute or so. There is absolutely no issue with non-AE content needing to be kept alive on either of those servers. TFs/SFs/iTrials requests fill up quickly. From what I can see with my own eyes, interest in these is very vibrant and there is a lot of interest in running them, so no, there is no problem. If there is a struggle to find teams for this, I do not see it. Wanted to add - people are speed running TFs all the time, not just AE, and that was not the intended purpose of that content either.

Just guessing here, but it seems like someone took issue with a few people farming EMP merits from Vet levels on multiple characters in AE. Removing Vet levels from AE would only force people doing that back into PI portal map farming, so the net result is same. STO had a similar issue with people leveling up alts to run them through the Reputation system and cashing in on the big dilithium bonus for completing a rep. That is a different story though because of the in-game dilithium exchange where people can convert it to Zen to buy things in the store, and that impacts Zen sales on a live game. I just do not understand why this is such a horrible issue here. If someone wants to invest that kind of time doing enough farming to earn 5,000 EMP merits like in the post @Troomade above, more power to them. They are not people I would be teaming with to do other "correct/dev approved" content anyway, so it makes no difference to me personally. Being able to convert EMP merits to Reward Merits was a nice bonus and means to buy recipes that I needed to complete a build without needing to farm tons of inf to buy it on the exchange. Like others have said, I do not chase Incarnates on every character either, so piling up worthless EMP merits does not solve anything for me. This is just making me want to play less, not more.

I hate this for the same reason as well. I really do not care for being forced into team content and relying on others to run TFs as the main source of merits. Running a WST once or twice a week was ok, now basically having to farm iTrials for merits does not make me want to play more. It is definitely going to have the opposite effect. I liked having the option to convert EMP merits from Vet levels when I did not feel like running TFs/SFs. I cannot help but agree here. That is exactly what this change is.

All depends on what the names are and if they are desirable to someone else or not. They could release 700,000,000,000 names and if they are all meaningless strings of letters and numbers that make no sense and that no one else would want to use, it becomes pointless.

This is a very good point. Would having some kind of intro and/or introductions type mission like Levantera's "Welcome to Vanguard" arc that introduces you to everyone in the RWZ? Something like that might help here get the player familiar with all the contacts and what they can do.

Nor is there any guarantee that these "no sympathy" entitled people who are checking names daily are going to actually use any of the names they may wind up getting either, so the net result is nothing.

Well, for starters, you have no way of knowing how long they had the names in question. For all anyone knows, these were costume or character experiments they had for a few minutes and decided not to keep. Nor is it any indication on how many total characters the person has in total. If this is the same person I think it is, they post A LOT in the costume showoff thread, so these may indeed be just costume experiments that are only around for a very brief time. Second, if they are publicly releasing names then they are not really squatting them, are they? Third, so what? So long as that player is active in the game and you are able to contact them to negotiate releasing a name, why is this an issue? Why are they obligated to turn it over to you if they do not want to?

If this is the case, which I am extremely skeptical of, would it not be better to deal with that one individual instead of inconveniencing everyone else?

Were this auto-release thing only applied to dead accounts, there would be no reason to contact a GM because the names would be released automatically due to account inactivity. If the person is still playing, you can get their global handle and contact them to negotiate.

Every more modern game I have seen does not have this because it is not necessary. Cryptic fixed this in the engine upgrade they used for CO and STO which made the need for a name release irrelevant. Names are a combination of character@account as far as the system is concerned. I personally have seen several duplicate player Captains named Jean Luc Pikard or James T. K1rk running around in STO. It just is not that big of a deal.

I understand not wanting to put any additional burden on a volunteer group. With that said, were this my team I would rather the burden be on us to solve this problem instead of our end users having to be inconvenienced. Anniversary badges are not as frequent as this is going to be. I appreciate your time in providing answers. I understand that there is no changing any of this at this point.

Thank you much for the technical response. Some follow up questions - Why not run an update routine as part of regular maintenance or even run on off peak hours? Is having people repeatedly logging in and out for each character they want to keep less stressful on the system? If this problem is as enormous as some are making it out to be and from your explanation here, that certainly seems likely. Not sure I understand why having all of the characters showing the same last login is undesirable? I am sure others find this useful, just saying I personally do not. Seems odd to me that adding a single column for "active account" to the character database is a huge effort. Is this more effort due to having to rework the character select code to access it versus database architecture issue?

I always get a chuckle when @Bionic_Fleaposts a bug report 🤣

Yes, it does provide a solution. Your solution is to contact the player who has a name you are interested in and negotiate with them for releasing it. If they do not want to release the name to you, they are absolutely under no obligation to do so. If an account is abandoned, there is no recourse for another player to contact them, so those can and should be freed up. I am having a hard time feeling any sympathy toward the entitlement people have in thinking they have more right to something than someone else. There are any number of valid reasons someone may have a low level character name reserved. None of them make you more entitled.

Unlock names that are on accounts that have not been logged into for 2 years or more. Chances are highly likely these are abandoned accounts. Once again, if the account is active, the player can be contacted by another player to negotiate the release of a name. If a player does not want to release a name, they should not be forced into doing so. The decision to release a name or not should be left in the players hands, not arbitrary nuisance code. There are name release threads here on the forums for players to utilize. Help direct others there to poke around and see if they find something they like. I will say the same thing others love to say when it comes to cosplaying/homage characters - be original. Come up with a different name because someone else already has the one you wanted. You cannot have this both ways. Emphasis added. If you read my post, which it appears you have not, and had any inkling about relational database programming, you would understand you agreed with my point. There has to be some link between account and characters on a shard. If you can query the character database, regardless of size, for an account ID then there is a link between characters on a shard and account. If you can do that, you can update all characters on all shards as active upon login. I am very skeptical that a query is overly difficult to write that would do this. Were I to make a wild guess, this sounds to me like the character database and/or tables are not at all optimized properly. That is something that should be addressed. They can say it is difficult all they like and if you want to take them at their word, feel free. I choose to be skeptical. That is not meant as an insult to anyone nor am I saying anyone is lying so no need to get bent out of shape. Given what I have personally seen of the code for this game, it certainly is not an easy thing to work with. With that said, doing things the easy way is not necessarily the best way in my opinion.

That would be nice, but does not solve the annoying problem of repeatedly having to log in and out. I simply refuse to accept there is no relation between account and characters on a shard where the characters cannot be flagged as active when a player logs in. I just do not buy it.

I may be misunderstanding the questions, however I believe everyone knows these answers have been provided already. If I am understanding the question right, and I think I am, it is that these answers themselves are what should be but are not being analyzed further. The easy fix route is being taken to the perceived problem(s) with sledgehammers used as solutions where more delicate tools should be used. I think it absolutely gets ignored that this is an aged game using an aged engine with the overwhelming majority of the player base being mature players who have already experienced the content dozens of times over from when the game was live. This is a critical piece for many, however from what I can see pointing this out falls on deaf ears. The preference seems to be to force you into laborious chores that take longer because that is the "correct" way to play and if you do not agree with that, then you should just leave. These are two very important components as well. Along these lines, I would add that teaming can lead to being buried under layer upon layer upon layer of brightly colored flashing VFX and sound coming from other players to the point where team content is just not enjoyable. If I cannot see or hear what is going on, it does not make me feel super and it is not fun. This is why you see quite a lot of melee characters running off to solo on their own while teamed. There simply is no fun in grouping up and having mobs of enemy NPCS wiped out before you can even get a shot off. That is not fun. Sadly, pointing these out also falls on deaf ears too.

Appreciate the intent, however you all seem to be ignoring the very legitimate reasons many people have provided here as to why players may have this many low level alts. I understand that any feedback on this is futile at this point since there is no changing this, however it is important to be said. You all are not really thinking this through from a user perspective. People who have a great many sub 50 alts they want to keep are now going to be forced spend an inordinate amount of time just logging in and out of the game to preserve names. That is annoying and not user friendly at all. It may not seem like a lot, but have any of you logged in and out a few hundred times or more yet in one sitting to test this? Even doing this once a month is too much and I cannot imagine that is not stressing the account server. I honestly do not buy that there is no way to flag every character on every shard as active upon logging in to the game, distributed architecture or not. There has to be some link between account and characters on a shard. Adding to this, how much research was put into how many names are going to be freed up that someone else is actually looking for? When this was done on live with a much, much, much larger population, it accomplished very little, if anything at all. It is a shame to see history repeating itself. Regardless of how many sub 50 alts people have, so long as the account is active players are able to be contacted by other players to negotiate the release of a name. That is the proper way to go about this. For accounts (not characters) that have not been logged into in 2+ years, go to town and unlock all of the names. Chances are very good those are abandoned accounts that will not be coming back.

I noticed this as well. I have also seen it teleport into the hand, then disappearing, the reappearing in the draw animation. This was on Katana and Titan Weapons. I have not see this on Broadsword or Dual Blades. I have not tested Staff yet.

What threat? Outside a few edge cases, most all of my characters can handle just about anything inside or out of AE. They are mowing through missions regardless of where I am playing them. If you need some build advice, there are plenty of available builds to study from in the appropriate AT forums here.

No one was speaking about back end code. Outside of AFK farming, there is no behavioral difference between farming an AE map and a non-AE map.

There is a lot to unpack here. I think you are blinded as to the myriad of reasons why people are using the AE and not really examining why AE being used so much. One could just as easily say that the rest of the game is a boring, repetitive slog and it takes far too long a time investment to level a character and gain the materials desired to build them out. This investment of time is magnified with each desired alt, and it definitely impacts experimentation with alts. Or one could say that people just want to build out complete characters before exemplaring to run the rest of the content since they perform better. The "normal" content being boring for them is a problem. The game being 18 years old and using out of date technology is a problem as well. I personally do not think this is as simple an issue as you and many others believe it to be. This simply is not true of everyone. I also completely disagree that it does not promote playing other content outside of AE. That is demonstrably false. Some folk like using AE to more efficiently and quickly build out alts who then get played frequently in non-AE content. They have posted as much in threads like these and I know quite a few of them myself. Making things more difficult for them is not conducive to keeping them around, which I am fairly sure is a goal. I know there are a very few, very vocal people here on the forums who just cannot fathom how anyone would find the repetitive content of the game boring, but there are many, many people who do and AE provided them an outlet. Again, whether the NPCs were player created enemies or developer created enemies makes no difference. Builds are easily attainable that make the player nigh indestructible against just about anything the game can throw at them. I understand and appreciate you are in the camp that everything should be "worked for" and "earned" by "playing the game". What I never see from this side of the debate is what is an acceptable amount of times a player has to play through the same content before it becomes boring? I completely agree with you on AFK farming, however I will never tell anyone they should not do it. It makes no difference to me personally and if they are indeed doing nothing but AFK farming all the time and never leave the AE building, I will never be teaming with them for any content outside of AE anyway, so complaining about that is just silly. Everyone wins in that scenario.

Just want to point out that what is or is not desirable is entirely subjective to the individual.

Most of the ire appears to be coming from AFK farmers from what I can see. It is not something I participate in, however far be it from me to tell them what they should or should not do in the game. If AFK farming is what interests them, brings them joy and lets them have fun while logging in, more power to them. Again, not everyone cares about farming incarnate materials. Emp merits gained from Vet rewards can be converted to merits to buy a whole host of other things. And back in the day, players could still get recipe and salvage drops from those non-AE farm maps as well as XP and influence. They were used to power level alts all the time. Beyond that, AE was just slightly more convenient than PI portal mission maps. You are making a very large assumption that there will not be people moving back to those PI farms, and I still fail to see there the difference is between letting people continue to farm as they like in AE versus farming something like PI radios or portal maps. I do not think you are seeing that there is no difference in that regard and since there is no difference, why is this change even necessary?

Given the magnitude of the amount of word combinations that can be used in the English language alone, two million character names is insignificant. Sure, only a fraction of those characters may be actively played, but I will also bet real money only a fraction of a fraction of them have names someone else may want. This is unsympathetic and ignores quite a lot of the feedback provided here from role players who may be keeping lower level characters for any variety of reasons. Not to mention there are those who have no sympathy for others who cannot use a thesaurus or apply a little creativity to come up with another name. At least if the person who has a name you might want is still active, you can contact the player and work out some sort of deal for them to release the name for you. That seems fair too.