Any news on phase 2 of naming policy?

[MHertz]

6 minutes ago, Erratic1 said:

Here is a quick sampling of player names from my most frequented server showing right now as I type:

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.

[ForeverLaxx]

I will always hold the opinion that active accounts should be the deciding factor for a name release policy; however, I'm pretty sure that HC doesn't have (claims it doesn't have) the ability to tell a "dead" account from an active one.  How this is the case I'm not sure, but for now, I'm going to just assume it's the case so I don't keep rehashing the same points over and over regarding the account vs character debate.

 

What I will say on the matter though is that everyone's definition of what constitutes a character you "care" about is going to be different. You're not really going to make progress on this front either because of that. Someone can love a character concept more than someone else's "only made for PvP" machine, but log into them far less. Who is anyone else to say they don't care about that character? It's a pointless battle best avoided.

 

What it comes down is figuring out the best compromise for all parties involved. No system is going to please everyone, and honestly, I think 50s being exempt with a 1 year timer on everything above a certain level is the closest we're going to get to an "active account" check. Yes, it's a pain in the neck for people with multiple pages on multiple accounts to log in to their RP or Concept characters that aren't level 50 to avoid losing one of the defining features of their character's identity, but if the devs are dead set on releasing names, it's probably the most fair way to do it.

 

As far as it being worthwhile in the long run? I don't believe it will be. Not only did Live's active population dwarf ours, but the amount of names released for reuse far outstrip the number of active accounts/names we have. Even in that situation, almost none of those names were reused and something like 90% of them were just random keyboard smashing or nonsense words/phrases. Of the actual "usable" names, the majority of those weren't even considered desirable and were never reclaimed by anyone.

 

I think everyone who clambers for names to be released believes they're going to get that "really cool name" they found was taken on creation when in reality, that's almost never going to happen in practice. Just like they learned on the Live servers, I foresee many of these names staying unclaimed if released (assuming certain parties aren't privy to which names are free and fully intend to grab them the second Phase 2 is turned on).

[Greycat]

8 minutes ago, Excraft said:

 

The game has to be able to know whether an account is active or not from back when the game was subscription based or even when it went F2P. 

 

This one, I'll argue we may not actually have - not in the same way, at least, as we don't have a subscription / payment server (NCSoft has that, and it's not something the live COH devs would ever have touched, because it's not part of the game.) While I'm not a database developer or anything, that is something that could have been handed off sort of like -

 

Payment server: "NCSoft account ThisGuy has accounts on COH, Game1, Game2, Game3. He has paid time on COH and Game2. Game1 and Game3 - deny access, COH and Game2, grant access."

 

*Access* being granted would be different from actual account activity (since it would, I'd imagine, also involve things like if an account is temporarily/permanently banned or not,) and the "paid account" server couldn't care less if you were actually logging in to anything, just if you'd given them money.

 

I don't know what it flagged right offhand, but yeah. "Live-era-did-they-pay" - the only way we know accounts went "inactive" and/or had access to things once we had VIP, paid costumes/ATs/etc - wouldn't care if you were actually playing or not and probably triggered something else in the game's database.

 

... if that made any sense.

 

In short, they probably had a way of saying an account was "active" (or let's say "live" or "log-in-able") versus "Inactive" (unpaid,) "Free" (limited,) "Banned" etc.

[Excraft]

8 minutes ago, MHertz said:

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 don't have my hopes up for anything.  I'm just going by what we were told.

 

On 2/20/2023 at 1:23 PM, GM Crumpet said:

I think Number Six said a number that was mind boggling, but are they names people would actually take? Good solid names are most likely to be level 50 characters which would never be picked. A lot of the inactive names are pretty random and aren't likely to be chosen by another player. You might be lucky and find the perfect name that has been languishing on page 9 of someones alt list for three years at level 1. I wouldn't rely on it though.

 

Most of the ones with actual words are most likely 50s that are excluded from the naming policy.  The rest sounds like meaningless gibberish words.

[Ghost]

I’m just gonna say that I know of around 35 awesome names that will not be released….because I still play them regularly 🙂

Edited February 21, 2023 by Ghost

[Excraft]

1 minute ago, Greycat said:

This one, I'll argue we may not actually have - not in the same way, at least, as we don't have a subscription / payment server (NCSoft has that, and it's not something the live COH devs would ever have touched, because it's not part of the game.) While I'm not a database developer or anything, that is something that could have been handed off sort of like -

 

It's possible but I think it safe to say the game has a link between an account and characters on shards.  It has to otherwise it wouldn't know what characters to display when you picked a shard.  That can be used to flag activity at the account level.

[MHertz]

3 minutes ago, Excraft said:

The rest sounds like meaningless gibberish words.

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.

[MHertz]

3 minutes ago, Excraft said:

That can be used to flag activity at the account level.

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.

[Erratic1]

2 minutes ago, MHertz said:

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.

 

It is unreasonable to think that desirable names are universally not being played. 

 

 

2 minutes ago, MHertz said:

 

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.

 

I was here a year ago (and two and three). Naming has not gotten meaningfully harder in that time. "Black Ice" went early I am sure and was not available after the first week or two. 

 

Some character names I have gotten in the last year:

 

Restless Dead

Ultrapower

Glamours

Street Druid

Trapstress

Ghostfist

Stellaris (renamed later)

 

Eye of the beholder how desirable those are but they are not names nobody would think of (I think).

[Greycat]

1 minute ago, Excraft said:

 

It's possible but I think it safe to say the game has a link between an account and characters on shards.  It has to otherwise it wouldn't know what characters to display when you picked a shard.  That can be used to flag activity at the account level.

 

Well, yes, it does. (Again, going to that "anyone can spin up a COH server" bit, there's a DB tool that shows "Character,"  "Account" etc. on it - not much more, and I don't know how to dig for other info in it at the moment.)

 

What I was more aiming at is that the "Account being active" flag was probably more handled by the payment server, which was never part of the game and which determined if you were allowed to log on (or what your status was, later) or not. One less thing for the DBs *we* have to worry about.

 

Basically, two "can you access this" steps:

Payment server (NCSoft) => account paid or not => indicate this to game login server to grant or deny access.

(THIS one would be interested in time, if the account had run out, etc.)

 

COH server => did the payment server say they can log in? => login => ok, these are your characters, last logon, etc.

It wouldn't need to know when the last time *you* logged in was, but it knew how long the character was logged in.

 

What I'm *suspecting* is that whatever tool the live devs ran (only twice, because it wasn't worth it with the result) on live got a list of "last active >365 days" accounts from NC's payment servers, then used THAT to filter for characters using their other criteria (like the second run being purely "under level six, not active for x time") instead of running it solely on the database of accounts.

 

But that's all *purely* a guess on my side.  And yes, I'm sure our devs could come up with a reasonable filter or whatnot to tell "this account has not been logged on to for a year," because - yes - it has your characters to show you on your own account. It may not be *easy* - as mentioned, not a db developer.

[MHertz]

12 minutes ago, Erratic1 said:

It is unreasonable to think that desirable names are universally not being played. 

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.

Edited February 21, 2023 by MHertz

[Excraft]

39 minutes ago, MHertz said:

It is a volunteer staff.

 

So?  That makes them incompetent or incapable of making complex changes to the code?  Seems to me they have the time and people to take on big projects.  Wouldn't something like tying this to accounts - or better yet, changing the code to use account/character instead of just character - be worthwhile to the long term health of the game?

[Ghost]

4 minutes ago, Excraft said:

 

So?  That makes them incompetent or incapable of making complex changes to the code?  Seems to me they have the time and people to take on big projects.  Wouldn't something like tying this to accounts - or better yet, changing the code to use account/character instead of just character - be worthwhile to the long term health of the game?

No to all your questions

[MHertz]

4 minutes ago, Excraft said:

Seems to me they have the time and people to take on big projects. 

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.

[Erratic1]

44 minutes ago, MHertz said:

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.

 

Then as you like to say, good thing I didn't assume that.

 

44 minutes ago, MHertz said:

 

A player leaves behind, let’s say, 20 characters. Maybe 1 or 2 of those names are cool. Someone should get them.

 

I don't disagree. The key words above are, "leaves behind". Active players have not left.

[Number Six]

1 hour ago, ForeverLaxx said:

I'm pretty sure that HC doesn't have (claims it doesn't have) the ability to tell a "dead" account from an active one.

 

Of course we have that ability, that's not a question.

 

It's not about accounts not being tied to characters or whatever, it's about the way shard isolation works. Once you're logged in, you get handed off to a different server depending on which shard you pick, and those shards just get handed an account name (which is how they know which characters to retrieve). The shards themselves do not have access to the account database - that would be a violation of shard isolation and bad design from a security perspective.

 

Sure, we could pass along last activity date when you log in, but that's not the problem. Doing inactivity based on account means that Everlasting would have to know the last account activity for all accounts, even ones that have only been logging into Excelsior lately. And it would need that information to be readily available whenever somebody is creating a new character in order to know if the name should be reserved or not.

 

It's not impossible, for sure. It could be done with an on-demand lookup back to the authserver, or a local cache that gets updated whenever someone logs in on every other shard, or several different ways. But it would mean implementing a new system that doesn't currently exist, and it just isn't worth the developer time when what's already been done is perfectly adequate to address the issues. Especially true when you consider that one of the concerns is someone with an otherwise active account deliberately holding onto many names with no intent to use them -- much more of a risk when accounts are free than when there was a subscription fee.

 

Also to clarify some confusion from upthread, when the system goes live, the timer does NOT reset. Red names immediately become eligible for release. Though I'll reiterate that they don't lose the name right away, only if somebody else creates a new character with that same name.

[Excraft]

23 minutes ago, MHertz said:

Again, I reiterate, they are looking for people with knowledge and applicable skills. Armchair vaporizing does no one any good.

 

I already volunteer my free time to defend my country and help my local community, along with coaching kids basketball and soccer.  We don't have to be volunteering here to be able to share ideas, and disagreeing with the direction taken doesn't make our opinions any less valid.

 

24 minutes ago, MHertz said:

Or just maybe when the devs say something is difficult, we … believe them? Crazy, I know.

 

I never said it wasn't difficult, nor that I don't believe anyone when they say its difficult.  Nice try though.  The best solution isn't always the easy one. 

[MHertz]

9 minutes ago, Excraft said:

I never said it wasn't difficult, nor that I don't believe anyone when they say its difficult.

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).

Edited February 21, 2023 by MHertz

[ZemX]

8 minutes ago, Number Six said:

Also to clarify some confusion from upthread, when the system goes live, the timer does NOT reset. Red names immediately become eligible for release. Though I'll reiterate that they don't lose the name right away, only if somebody else creates a new character with that same name.

 

Thanks for clarifying!  That's what I had been assuming after reading the Page 4 patch notes.

[Excraft]

13 minutes ago, MHertz said:

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).

 

Yes, I've offered my opinion on what would should be done as I believe in the long run, it's a better solution.  We're allowed to share our opinions here.  Again, I never said it was an easy thing to do.  You're trying (and failing miserably) to put words in my mouth.  What I did say is that there has to be some connection between accounts and characters on shards.  You don't need to be a database administrator or expert coder to understand that much.  Nor did I say the folks here are incompetent or incapable.  Nice trolling attempt though.  😉

[Greycat]

42 minutes ago, Number Six said:

It's not about accounts not being tied to characters or whatever, it's about the way shard isolation works. Once you're logged in, you get handed off to a different server depending on which shard you pick, and those shards just get handed an account name (which is how they know which characters to retrieve). The shards themselves do not have access to the account database - that would be a violation of shard isolation and bad design from a security perspective.

 

Sure, we could pass along last activity date when you log in, but that's not the problem. Doing inactivity based on account means that Everlasting would have to know the last account activity for all accounts, even ones that have only been logging into Excelsior lately. And it would need that information to be readily available whenever somebody is creating a new character in order to know if the name should be reserved or not.

 

It's not impossible, for sure. It could be done with an on-demand lookup back to the authserver, or a local cache that gets updated whenever someone logs in on every other shard, or several different ways. But it would mean implementing a new system that doesn't currently exist, and it just isn't worth the developer time when what's already been done is perfectly adequate to address the issues. Especially true when you consider that one of the concerns is someone with an otherwise active account deliberately holding onto many names with no intent to use them -- much more of a risk when accounts are free than when there was a subscription fee.

 

Also to clarify some confusion from upthread, when the system goes live, the timer does NOT reset. Red names immediately become eligible for release. Though I'll reiterate that they don't lose the name right away, only if somebody else creates a new character with that same name.

 

OK, but hold on. Confusion here. Because - again, granted, not being able to dive into the database and see what's happening.... (or, really, probably know what I'm looking at if we did)

 

Why are we looking past that first step?

 

It's not about accounts not being tied to characters or whatever, it's about the way shard isolation works. Once you're logged in, you get handed off to a different server depending on which shard you pick, and those shards just get handed an account name (which is how they know which characters to retrieve).

 

Step 1 is the account itself being logged into. Before anyone picks a shard or rolls a character, they log in. Which is kind of the very basic, stripped down to everything level of "is the account active or inactive" that's been mentioned. Is *that* available at all, to have anything done with? If the account itself has not been logged into, period, then specific shard activity is kind of irrelevant - they won't have hopped on to Indom any more recently than they would have logged into that *very* first step, into the game itself. (And/or second step of "have they accepted the EULA" - don't know if that's registered anywhere either.) Or is that not tracked or discoverable at that level *at all?*

 

I'm asking because going from there to "the shards would need to know" doesn't logically make sense to me at that point for what's being talked about. In my thinking it should be possible without doing a heck of a lot to look at that account server and say "OK, User3897 logged in today. User 3898 hasn't logged in since October 6, 2022. User 3899 hasn't logged in since 2021."  Or "Account server, give me a list of all accounts who have not logged in (or accepted the EULA, or whatever) in 366 days or more," and then work with that as the basis, versus a shotgun "character based, active account or not" approach. And wondering why it would involve any shard having to know anything else other than what they already do.

 

I'm reasonably sure the live devs ran their script manually (and seem to recall a comment along the lines of "and it took a while," yeah.) I'm just confused about the whole "and the shards would have to know..." bit, versus "We get this info from the authentication when someone logs in, these accounts haven't been logged into in over a year at all," taking that and just feeding it (and the globals) to the shards at maintenance and saying "Free these up."

 

(Or, to put it another way, I'm asking about parking the car in the driveway, and *to me* it sounds like you're going on to the part of trying to corral the kids to help bring the groceries in and put them away afterward being difficult... I don't care about the groceries, how do we get the car parked in the driveway?)

 

Just looking for clarification here.

[Erratic1]

Tempest in teapot. 50's names are not up for release in any event, so I am not going to argue the point. The furthest I can see it being reasonable to release names of level characters is if/when the work is done to determine the account they are on has been inactive for a significant period.

 

FWIW, I just gave up the name Preeminent. Imperil was open and I felt it better captured the hazardous nature of being around the character (Bio/Rad villainous tanker). 

 

Some may not think either name is all that awesome and that I did really get a good name either way. Beats 'Toxic Todd'.

 

 

[Ironblade]

On 2/20/2023 at 12:55 PM, MHertz said:

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.

What?!  You have a problem with a broadsword scrapper having the word 'blade' in his name?  I feel called out by this!   😛

[Erratic1]

On 2/20/2023 at 11:55 AM, MHertz said:

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.

 

8 minutes ago, Ironblade said:

What?!  You have a problem with a broadsword scrapper having the word 'blade' in his name?  I feel called out by this!   😛

 

Ebonblade is available on two shards

Onyxblade is available on all shards

[SwitchFade]

Reading this thread...

 

Reminds me why I haven't posted before yesterday in a looooong time. Or even read the forums.

 

Also... That's not how economics works.

 

😝😝😝😝😝😝😝😝