ShardWarrior

No worries. Sometimes a second set of eyes is helpful. As far as whether these suggestions are all coming from the same small circle of people. I have my suspicions about that as well. And from what I am reading in this and other threads, I am not the only one. No, I personally have no direct proof so take that with a grain of salt, but I have seen enough smoke to know there may be a fire somewhere.

This is an edge case. Quite clear not everyone would go through the time and effort to do this. And even if they do, let them for all I care. It is their time to waste and if that is what brings them joy in playing, more power to them.

I certainly hope not. Based on what the Homecoming folk have posted, they will not make changes unless they have a broad appeal. If only 10 to 20 players will benefit from this, then it was a complete waste of time and should never have been done in the first place. Having said that, I am in no way against this change, so please do not get all bent out of shape over that. Perhaps I misunderstood the post, but I do not believe this was intended as an attack on the PvP community. You may be reading this wrong.

Unless I am mistaken, my recollection of the few requests there were for advanced difficulty options was that the game is too easy and people wanted more of a challenge. Having the challenge itself is incentive enough for them based on what those requested it had said. I guess that is no longer the case?

If too many reward merits from EMP conversion was a problem, why not add in more things to spend those reward merits on? I mean, you all are creating yet another in-game currency to buy costumes? Just use merits. Or add converting them into the same sort of reward table where the amount that can be converted is limited per day.

Brainstorm is there too and very few people use it, so your argument about the "I win!" button does not hold any water. If it did, the majority of the players would be on Brainstorm.

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.