Any news on phase 2 of naming policy?

[Ghost]

Ok, found what was actually said

 

“There are over TWO MILLION characters in our database. Only a fraction of those have been played in the last week. I don't want to get much more specific (such as going into numbers of accounts and such), because Cipher will stab me. But yes, under-leveled, unplayed characters are a huge deal, and I can guarantee a LOT of names are going to get freed up!”

Edited February 18, 2023 by Ghost

[Greycat]

1 hour ago, Ghost said:

Ok, found what was actually said

 

“There are over TWO MILLION characters in our database. Only a fraction of those have been played in the last week. I don't want to get much more specific (such as going into numbers of accounts and such), because Cipher will stab me. But yes, under-leveled, unplayed characters are a huge deal, and I can guarantee a LOT of names are going to get freed up!”

 

Which my response would be "in the last week? So what? Why would that even be a metric to determine anything?"  For instance, i've got a SG that only meets once a week, for instance, which has a couple of characters in it. if we have people sick, or it's a holiday (or series, say, Christmas and New Years) we may not meet for a week or two. This is a game, not a job. My "Unplayed" (by this metric) and "under-leveled" (I should have no requirement to hit 50 in some timeframe, thanks) on my *active* accounts are my business.

 

Now, if the comment were about "accounts that haven't logged in in the last six months," for instance, that would be a different discussion. But "these characters haven't been touched in a week!" ... again, so what?

[Ghost]

12 minutes ago, Greycat said:

 

Which my response would be "in the last week? So what? Why would that even be a metric to determine anything?"  For instance, i've got a SG that only meets once a week, for instance, which has a couple of characters in it. if we have people sick, or it's a holiday (or series, say, Christmas and New Years) we may not meet for a week or two. This is a game, not a job. My "Unplayed" (by this metric) and "under-leveled" (I should have no requirement to hit 50 in some timeframe, thanks) on my *active* accounts are my business.

 

Now, if the comment were about "accounts that haven't logged in in the last six months," for instance, that would be a different discussion. But "these characters haven't been touched in a week!" ... again, so what?

2 million accounts.

I’d bet that if you add up the total players so far in 2023, it doesn’t equal 2 million.

 

Now, just to be clear.  I only posted that to show that there will be more than a few dozen, or even a couple hundred names released (which is what was being speculated).  Whether you like it, or even agree with it - I don’t care.  I was simply pointing out what had been posted elsewhere.

 

Edited February 18, 2023 by Ghost

[ZemX]

5 hours ago, Greycat said:

Which my response would be "in the last week? So what?

 

Which my response to that response would be, "Read the whole post".   Impervium mentions not wanting to get into more detail.  That means they HAVE more detail than the four words you clipped.  The post ends with a guarantee that a LOT of names would be freed up.   We can infer from that that a lot of those names are either on sub level 6 characters who haven't been played in thirty days or they are sub-50 characters who haven't been played in a year. 

 

Nobody is releasing names based on who played last week.

[SaintD]

5 hours ago, Ghost said:

2 million accounts.

I’d bet that if you add up the total players so far in 2023, it doesn’t equal 2 million.

 

Now, just to be clear.  I only posted that to show that there will be more than a few dozen, or even a couple hundred names released (which is what was being speculated).  Whether you like it, or even agree with it - I don’t care.  I was simply pointing out what had been posted elsewhere.

 

I would expect 2 million to be orders of magnitude higher than the active playerbase.

[Oubliette_Red]

I have no doubt that "a lot of names" will be freed up. It would be interesting to know what % of those freed up names will actually be claimed afterwards.

 

[Excraft]

9 hours ago, Ghost said:

2 million accounts.

I’d bet that if you add up the total players so far in 2023, it doesn’t equal 2 million.

 

It's not 2 million accounts.  It's 2 million character names.  There's no mention of how many individual player accounts are in that number.  You'll note they won't tell anyone how many of those names are on accounts that haven't been played in over a year or more.   If the name is attached to an account (not character) is still active, the owner can easily be messaged to negotiate the release of a name.  If the account hasn't been logged into for a year or more, by all means free those up.  More than likely the player isn't coming back.  There's also mention of how many of these "2 million names" are actual words and not just random jibberish.  Nor is there any mention of what defines a "big deal" as stated in the post.

 

 

[Excraft]

3 hours ago, ZemX said:

Which my response to that response would be, "Read the whole post".   Impervium mentions not wanting to get into more detail.  That means they HAVE more detail than the four words you clipped.  The post ends with a guarantee that a LOT of names would be freed up.   We can infer from that that a lot of those names are either on sub level 6 characters who haven't been played in thirty days or they are sub-50 characters who haven't been played in a year. 

 

Yeah this is true, but you can infer a lot of things based on that post. 

[Greycat]

8 hours ago, Oubliette_Red said:

I have no doubt that "a lot of names" will be freed up. It would be interesting to know what % of those freed up names will actually be claimed afterwards.

 

 

Well, considering on live they only ran the script twice - and the second time *radically* dropped the level that was affected because it didn't really make a lot of difference...

 

 

Also... *looking up a few posts* I didn't think i'd have to specify that no, I was not saying or even implying anything about two million accounts. That should be obvious.

 

 

Edited February 19, 2023 by Greycat

[Astralock]

23 minutes ago, Greycat said:

 

Well, considering on live they only ran the script twice - and the second time *radically* dropped the level that was affected because it didn't really make a lot of difference...

 

 

Also... *looking up a few posts* I didn't think i'd have to specify that no, I was not saying or even implying anything about two million accounts. That should be obvious.

 

 

 

 

Live and here are apples and oranges.  When they ran the script twice on live, the game was paid, and accounts could only have a maximum of 36 characters per server (which you had to pay additional money for past the first twelve), for a total of 468.  Here, you can make as many accounts as you want for free, with up to one thousand per server, for a total of 5,000.

 

IIRC, Telephone stated that they expect about 600,000 names to be freed up below level 6.

[kito]

On 2/16/2023 at 2:52 PM, SeraphimKensai said:

Honestly at this point HC has been up just about four years. The likelihood of you getting a particular name if the name release policy is activated is miniscule as a lot of players have a significant number of 50's which their name is protected indefinitely.

 

Your best course of action is to try to contact the global account of the character named what you're looking for and see if they are willing to release that name. I know I've been approached a couple times in that fashion and have been able to work out some type of agreement (as the characters I had were just dormant lvl 50s I hadn't played in 2+ years).

 

If you're unable to get the name that way, then it's basically a waiting game to see if the name does get released and then a lottery to see if you actually get the name.

 

 

I remember the first month of HC many people having made 15-20 hero's and pl them to 50 just so they had the name locked. They where not even going to play that LVL 50 just delete them when they wanted the name.  

 

Sadly I think many of them no longer play. I would not be surprised if well over 500 names where locked on dead accounts people are never going to use again.

[Excraft]

14 hours ago, Astralock said:

Live and here are apples and oranges.  When they ran the script twice on live, the game was paid, and accounts could only have a maximum of 36 characters per server (which you had to pay additional money for past the first twelve), for a total of 468.  Here, you can make as many accounts as you want for free, with up to one thousand per server, for a total of 5,000.

 

Ok true but how many people are making dozens of free accounts and filling up every character slot on every server?  Pretty safe to say there's less than a handful if any at all doing that. 

 

14 hours ago, Astralock said:

IIRC, Telephone stated that they expect about 600,000 names to be freed up below level 6.

 

How many of those are "desirable" names and not just gibberish?  

[SaintD]

10 minutes ago, Excraft said:

How many of those are "desirable" names and not just gibberish?  

Who cares? What's your actual problem here? That you won't get the very specific bunch of names you want and presume them to be locked forever on some old account? All basically abandoned names will be freed up, and if the ones you want aren't in it.....tough. Get over it. You've been making characters just fine up until now without them.

[Erratic1]

On 2/17/2023 at 11:27 PM, Captain Fabulous said:

And yet there is page after page after page of discussions just here in the forums with dozens of people hating the policy because they have hundreds of characters they can't possibly play frequently enough to avoid getting the name released. And these are just the ones who come to the forums and post.

 

• You do not have to play. You have to login.
• The frequency of necessary login to maintain name lock decreases with the level band of the character.

Of my 96 characters:

• 19 are 50 so their names are not coming available period.
• Roughly a dozen more are characters I currently intend to play going forward.

That leaves 60ish characters whose names are up for grabs. Logging out will not take more than 20s. Add in load time when logging in and being generous with the estimate you are looking at no more than 60 seconds to login and reset a character for the duration of the level/name release band they are in. So perhaps an hour of my time were I to want to do that. But no reason to do it all in one sitting. At no more than 10 minutes of time per day, all the characters could be safeguarded in under a week.

 

Mind you, I am not going to do that. There are perhaps a half-dozen names total out of the 60 which I might be inclined to try to hold onto and truthfully, I am unlikely to make much effort for them let alone the rest. But were someone inclined it is not massive effort.

 

Granted, were someone trying to hold 500-600 character names they would have to put in 5-6 times the effort but still doable and with low time investment unless one is trying to hold onto names of sub-level 10 characters.

[Erratic1]

On 2/18/2023 at 3:20 AM, Greycat said:

 

Which my response would be "in the last week? So what? Why would that even be a metric to determine anything?"  For instance, i've got a SG that only meets once a week, for instance, which has a couple of characters in it. if we have people sick, or it's a holiday (or series, say, Christmas and New Years) we may not meet for a week or two. This is a game, not a job. My "Unplayed" (by this metric) and "under-leveled" (I should have no requirement to hit 50 in some timeframe, thanks) on my *active* accounts are my business.

 

Now, if the comment were about "accounts that haven't logged in in the last six months," for instance, that would be a different discussion. But "these characters haven't been touched in a week!" ... again, so what?

 

Yeah, just logged into a brute I got to 50 last Sunday for the first time in a week. I had other characters I was focusing on and got back to him today. 

 

On red side I have a number of characters I play with on the group of friends I have who play red side exclusively. They have far less time to play than I do so any of the characters there may not get logged into for weeks at a time and that is with them playing every other to every third night.

[Erratic1]

14 hours ago, Astralock said:

IIRC, Telephone stated that they expect about 600,000 names to be freed up below level 6.

 

The question is how many are of them are names anyone would want. Toilet Bowl Man is not one that I am anxious to grab. 😛

[GM Crumpet]

The problem we want to avoid when we do eventually go live is for something to go wrong and it to suddenly free every single name and everyone to wake up with their alts called Generic <number>. It would solve a lot of issues with name camping though 🙂 

[GM Crumpet]

43 minutes ago, Erratic1 said:

 

The question is how many are of them are names anyone would want. Toilet Bowl Man is not one that I am anxious to grab. 😛

You're in luck, that name is free on all shards 🙂

 

[srmalloy]

1 hour ago, SaintD said:

That you won't get the very specific bunch of names you want and presume them to be locked forever on some old account?

And this is what I expect to happen when the full name reclamation system goes live. All the people whose sense of personal value in the game is locked up behind getting that one perfect name that they absolutely have to have or the game is ruined for them hanging on the imagined promise that as soon as it goes live, that one name that is necessary for their happiness will immediately become available, and they'll be able to grab it before anyone else does. And when it goes live, and the name they feel belongs to them either doesn't unlock, or is grabbed by someone else before they can grab it, they'll feel horribly betrayed and whine about how it's not working right because it didn't let them get their name that they should have by some imagined 'right' to it.

 

And while I don't see any need for such a thing myself, I'm certain that it's possible to write code that inserts itself into the input stream and drives mouse clicks to iterate through the character select screen to pick each character in turn, log them in, and immediately log them out, since the locations where you need to click on the select screen don't move. So someone sufficiently determined to hang onto their character names would be able to get around the idle check.

[Erratic1]

1 hour ago, GM Crumpet said:

You're in luck, that name is free on all shards 🙂

 

 

I said I would NOT like to grab. 😁

[Captain Fabulous]

2 hours ago, GM Crumpet said:

The problem we want to avoid when we do eventually go live is for something to go wrong and it to suddenly free every single name and everyone to wake up with their alts called Generic <number>. It would solve a lot of issues with name camping though 🙂 

Meh, that's what backups are for. 😜

[GM Crumpet]

2 hours ago, Erratic1 said:

 

I said I would NOT like to grab. 😁

I know, just giving you options. Bidet Boy was free....... it's not now 😛

 

[MHertz]

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.

 

[Captain Fabulous]

22 minutes ago, MHertz said:

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.

 

The problem is the belief that when they free up names that you're going to be able to get all the names you weren't able to before. The reality is you'll be lucky if you get ANY of them. The flip side of this problem is that people feel ENTITLED to hold onto names indefinitely, even if they don't actually play those characters, simply because they got there first.

The reality of a game where names can only be used once is that some people hoard them, some people rarely play, and others leave the game entirely. The bottom line is that if you've got a character that you don't/rarely ever play that name shouldn't be locked to you if someone else (who assumedly will actually play that character) wants it. So 1.) it needs to be done for the health of the game, 2.) it's not a perfect solution, but will definitely help the problem, 3.) don't expect you're gonna get that prized or coveted name you've always wanted cause the chance is pretty low, and 4.) understand that if you don't use a name you might lose it, and don't lose your goddamned mind over it because it's only fair.

[Mjolnerd]

8 hours ago, MHertz said:

• 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!

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.

 

If for whatever reason I didn't pay my phone bill for a few months, I'd lose my number. My actual, real-world phone number that people use to contact me for actual, real-world things. I've given it out to people. They need it in case of an emergency. The phone company would give me a reasonable grace period; I wouldn't have to get a new number because I paid the bill a day or two late, but after a while, certainly less than a full calendar year, they'd say "okay, I guess you must not need/want it anymore then" and free it up for someone else to use. And even if that were somehow a colossal inconvenience to me personally, it would also be a perfectly reasonable thing for them to do.

 

At this point, anyone who loses "their" names has had, what, three years' worth of warnings that this policy was going to be implemented at some unknown future date? Plus about six months of more specific, direct, in-game notices that it was coming more imminently.

 

These (former, let's not beat around the bush here) players have been notified. Repeatedly. Over the course of literal years. Anyone who's been paying any amount of attention, and they should be if they care that much, knows it's coming. They don't necessarily know when, but they know. The devs have taken reasonable steps on more than one occasion to inform players of the impending name-pocalypse. Presumably they'll take even more steps (forum posts, probably even a news item in the HC Launcher) once a specific date is chosen.

 

Anyone who gets blindsided by this will have ignored several good-faith attempts to communicate it to them. I find it difficult to be especially sympathetic.

 

Edited February 20, 2023 by Mjolnerd