Name database - Will this get cleaned up?

[nzer]

4 minutes ago, Excraft said:

A couple of the HC folk contributed to that discussion where they explained how the account tables  were separate from the individual shard tables, and there was no easy way to link them together to flag all characters on every shard for that account  as "active" when someone logs into their account.  I'm sure there are HC folk who could explain this in much finer detail, however suffice it to say they said to do this would be difficult and time consuming, so they opted for the low-hanging fruit solution of reviving the name release code that existed on live.

 

I would argue that it's worth spending the time to do a better implementation given that the system has already not been active for years, but I'm not going to fight this reasoning very hard. If the obstacle is dev time and the devs would prefer to spend that time on other things, that's their prerogative.

 

6 minutes ago, Excraft said:

As for people not reading patch notes or in-game popups, I can't say I agree with you there.  The information is readily available to everyone and HC can't be responsible if they provide that info, but the player doesn't take the time to read it.

 

Of course they can. Most players will not read it, and of those that do, most will forget it fairly quickly. Period. It is for precisely this reason that courts regularly rule terms of service to be unenforceable: it is well understood that people do not read or remember them in detail. The idea that players are solely culpable for failing to apprise themselves of the intimate details of something as utterly banal as a name release policy that is only communicated in patch notes and an FAQ is absurd.

[nzer]

8 minutes ago, Ironblade said:

And if they can't be bothered to read something that is prominently presented in the game, tough.

 

And if they've forgotten it in the intervening 11 months before it actually becomes active?

 

This line of reasoning is completely ridiculous. I remain astounded anyone is arguing it at all. Although not really, because all game communities are rife with rank contrarians who will argue with any point of criticism they can think of an argument for.

[ZemX]

Just now, Excraft said:

Personally, this is a fair point and something I thought is an issue as well.  It's a niggle of a UI problem, but to me it will be easy to miss for some to miss for sure.  I wonder if there is a way for HC to move any characters to the "front of the line" to show up on the first page of the character listing to make it more obvious to the player? 

 

I don't presume to know how ugly the client code is, but it seems like at least once you log into a specific server it has to pull your whole character list from the server.  At that point it should know if any are flagged.  Seems like it ought to be possible to display a top level warning, regardless of which page of characters you are on, saying something like "One or more of your characters on this server is subject to name release within 'x' days."

 

If you're playing on Excel, it wouldn't be able to tell you you've got characters going stale on Everlasting, but it'd be some improvement.

[Excraft]

2 minutes ago, nzer said:

It is for precisely this reason that courts regularly rule terms of service to be unenforceable: it is well understood that people do not read or remember them in detail. The idea that players are solely culpable for failing to apprise themselves of the intimate details of something as utterly banal as a name release policy that is only communicated in patch notes and an FAQ is absurd.

 

Not sure that's a fair comparison.  The HC patch notes are nowhere near the biblical length of the service agreement with places like phone service providers, social media, etc. 

[nzer]

(I apologize for the triple post, shame on me)

 

9 minutes ago, Excraft said:

I wonder if there is a way for HC to move any characters to the "front of the line" to show up on the first page of the character listing to make it more obvious to the player? 

 

This is another good way to address part of the issue, but it still doesn't do anything for a player who takes a several week break (intentionally or because of real life responsibilities) when one or more of their characters happens to be nearing 11 months of inactivity.

[nzer]

1 minute ago, Excraft said:

Not sure that's a fair comparison.  The HC patch notes are nowhere near the biblical length of the service agreement with places like phone service providers, social media, etc.

 

Sure, and they're also not written as obtusely. But I think there's an obvious commonality between them, in that both scenarios are essentially punishing the user for not remembering two paragraphs of a multi-page document they read months or years ago. I don't think there's a reasonable argument to be made that a name release policy would or should be top of mind at any point for any player. It's the kind of thing you'd expect a player to forget about, and intentionally so; it's meant to be a background system that frees up names from players who no longer play the game, not something that is actively managed.

[Ironblade]

13 minutes ago, nzer said:

And if they've forgotten it in the intervening 11 months before it actually becomes active?

 

This line of reasoning is completely ridiculous. I remain astounded anyone is arguing it at all. Although not really, because all game communities are rife with rank contrarians who will argue with any point of criticism they can think of an argument for.

 

People forget things.  That's life.  They can forget how combat works, how the market works, even what their password is.  The fact that someone might forget something is thoroughly irrelevant because we can guarantee that someone is going to forget it.

 

But sure, dismiss me as a contrarian who likes to argue because I don't agree with you.

[nzer]

Just now, Ironblade said:

The fact that someone might forget something is thoroughly irrelevant because we can guarantee that someone is going to forget it.

 

The fact that people forget things is entirely relevant because it creates a pain point with the system and can be easily addressed.

 

Notably absent in literally every single response disagreeing with me over this is any kind of argument whatsoever for why it's desirable for the system to punish people who forget how it works. This absence is unsurprising, because that very clearly is not desirable. Yet for some reason people are jumping out of the woodwork to fight eliminating that pain point from the system. I don't know what you call that if not contrarianism. It's practically a textbook example.

[Ironblade]

11 minutes ago, nzer said:

Notably absent in literally every single response disagreeing with me over this is any kind of argument whatsoever for why it's desirable for the system to punish people who forget how it works.

 

Because, quite simply, that is NOT the goal.  The goal is to make more names available to people who play the game more frequently or consistently.

You're describing a side effect, not the purpose.  And every change to any game is going to upset some people.  This question here is: Does the policy have more pros than cons?

 

I think the policy has MARGINALLY more pros than cons.  In a perfect world, where the existing software could support any reasonable plan, I could come up with a better system.  But the underlying software doesn't allow a perfect solution.  It doesn't even allow a 'really good' solution.  The best it can offer is the system people are arguing about which, as I said, I think is slightly preferable to doing nothing.

[lemming]

39 minutes ago, ZemX said:

 

I don't presume to know how ugly the client code is, but it seems like at least once you log into a specific server it has to pull your whole character list from the server.  At that point it should know if any are flagged.  Seems like it ought to be possible to display a top level warning, regardless of which page of characters you are on, saying something like "One or more of your characters on this server is subject to name release within 'x' days."

 

If you're playing on Excel, it wouldn't be able to tell you you've got characters going stale on Everlasting, but it'd be some improvement.

It doesn't.  It just pulls the status for the current page.   You can see this by the playerslot.txt.   If you remove that file, it doesn't repopulate the entire thing until you visit each page.

[nzer]

6 minutes ago, Ironblade said:

Because, quite simply, that is NOT the goal.  The goal is to make more names available to people who play the game more frequently or consistently.

You're describing a side effect, not the purpose.  And every change to any game is going to upset some people.  This question here is: Does the policy have more pros than cons?

 

Of course it's not the goal. But it is a side effect of the policy as written, an undesirable one, and one that is easily addressed in the design of the policy.

 

The question here should be "can the policy be implemented in a way that does not cause this side effect?" The answer to that question may well be no, because of technical constraints. You'll notice that when that point was brought up I acknowledged it as valid and didn't attempt to argue it.

 

But with the exception of @Excraft and now you, no one who's been arguing with me has brought that up. They have not been arguing that changing the policy would be good, but can't be done because of technical constraints. Instead they've been arguing that the policy should not be changed in the first place. I find that completely unjustifiable.

Edited February 7 by nzer

[ZemX]

2 minutes ago, nzer said:

Instead they've been arguing that the policy should not be changed in the first place. I find that completely unjustifiable.

 

Things that don't need to be changed, shouldn't be changed.   Or more colloquially, "If it ain't broke... don't fix it!"  This wisdom is more than especially true in a 20+ year old code base.

 

You think it's broke.  Some of us others don't.  It can't be put more simply than this.  I think your examples of how someone is going to miss this and be surprised by name release are either contrived.... or well deserved consequences of being willfully uninformed about a game, especially an MMO, that one is playing.  As I said before, the name release policy is just one of many things your hypothetical person who is ignoring all game news is not going to know about.  If losing a name convinces Mr. or Mrs. Oblivious to pay attention to patch news every now and then, it's probably a good thing.  There's all sorts of things they should know about to get the most out of this old game and no, it does not require daily visits to these forums either.

 

And as @lemming just pointed out in the post above yours, even changes *I* think should be minor, aren't necessarily easy or possible in this creaky old client or server code.  There were all sorts of conversations in past name release threads about account based vs character based and reasons were given by the devs for the way they are doing things.  Those of us you're arguing with here didn't create this policy.  People who have much more knowledge of the inner workings of the game did.  Claiming there's "no reason" for it to be this way, as you have before, is presumptuous.  This goes double for all the suggestions further up thread (including yours) that it might be possible to tweak the way names work to allow duplicate names on a server.  Something similar to the Champions solution.  But if THAT were possible, why did this name release policy even get created OR moved up to the warning phase again, by the people who know how hard it is to do stuff?

[Judasace]

1 hour ago, nzer said:

 

And if they've forgotten it in the intervening 11 months before it actually becomes active?

 

This line of reasoning is completely ridiculous. I remain astounded anyone is arguing it at all. Although not really, because all game communities are rife with rank contrarians who will argue with any point of criticism they can think of an argument for.

 

Are not.

[Luminara]

47 minutes ago, nzer said:

If you think not seeing a footnote in a patch notes pop-up or seeing it and not remembering it twelve months later is willful ignorance, you should reevaluate.

 

Not what you asserted to be the case.

 

18 hours ago, nzer said:

I would bet most players don't read them at all, especially not from a pop-up right after they enter the game.

 

You say right there, "most players don't read them (patch notes) at all".  Willful ignorance.

That's on them.  If choose to ignore the newsletters, the open betas, the forums, the Discord channels, the launcher news, the in-game pop-ups, the in-game chatter and the warnings on characters, they have no-one to blame but themselves.  It's not the development team's responsibility to personally visit every player and explain everything they do, nor should the willful ignorance of some players ever be considered an acceptable reason to put the entire game into stasis.

 

3 hours ago, nzer said:

That is, in fact, my entire point. The system is supposed to give players a year to prevent their characters' names from being released, but if you don't know about the policy or have forgotten about it, you actually only have 30 days. I don't think anyone in this thread would argue being away from the game for 30 days is sufficient grounds to lose a character name.

 

The problem with your point is that it's based on the presumption that everyone is going to start camping names as soon as they're released, that the GMs will shrug and ignore players who come back and ask for help recovering a name, that "community" is a word mouthed by self-interested assholes who use it facetiously.

 

We have the most awesome GMs, people who bend over backwards to help players daily and who would go to great lengths to help someone who lost a name after an absence.  We have an incredible group of players who are community-minded and -oriented.  Players who do almost nothing but give away inf*.  Players who run costume contests.  Players who organize lowbie PUGs.  Players who invite newbies to their farms.  Players who log in for no reason other than to find someone and help him/her.  20 years on and we still have people who are excited to be able to play this game and deliriously happy to share it with others, and who would gladly give up a name if a GM reached out to them on behalf of someone else.

 

I don't have much faith in anything.  I don't believe in gods or devils or reincarnation.  I don't believe in fate or destiny.  But I'll tell you what I do believe in: Co* players.  The people playing this game are... well, they're like the old man who runs the general store down the road where I live.  He allows people to buy on credit, even though he's lost tens of thousands of dollars doing it.  He just gives things to people when they really need them but can't afford them.  He gives discounts even if it means taking losses.  He's been running that store for almost 60 years and he hasn't changed how he does it: with compassion.  He doesn't make money off of that store, but he keeps it open, keeps stocking it, keeps doing what he can for the community.  He's in his mid-80's, he could've retired a long time ago, but he's there every day, doing what he can to help the people who live in this area.

 

That's the men and women in the game and on the forums.  That's the GMs.  That's the HC team.  That's the Co* community.  And I have faith that the name release policy won't change that, because they won't let it change them.

 

1 hour ago, nzer said:

Can you not?

 

Of course I can.  Doesn't mean I will.

[Ironblade]

48 minutes ago, nzer said:

But with the exception of Excraft and now you, no one who's been arguing with me has brought that up. They have not been arguing that changing the policy would be good, but can't be done because of technical constraints. Instead they've been arguing that the policy should not be changed in the first place. I find that completely unjustifiable.

 

Fair enough.  My biggest issue with the policy is that it should reflect inactivity on the account, not per character, as many others have suggested.  Unfortunately, this specific issue can't be addressed without a major re-write of the underlying software.  So yeah, as it stands, the policy has issues but I think it's better than nothing.

 

On the bright side, it's clear that the devs know how contentious this policy is and are looking very closely at the issues.  If there are any aspects that can be addressed without a Herculean effort, it will probably happen.  They may even decide not to proceed with it.  I don't think that's the best possible outcome but, considering the existing problems, I think taking no action would be within the range of acceptable decisions.

[Excraft]

27 minutes ago, ZemX said:

This goes double for all the suggestions further up thread (including yours) that it might be possible to tweak the way names work to allow duplicate names on a server.  Something similar to the Champions solution.  But if THAT were possible, why did this name release policy even get created OR moved up to the warning phase again, by the people who know how hard it is to do stuff?

 

You're still misrepresenting this.  It's not impossible, nobody said it was impossible to write code that would allow names to be non-unique here.  The people who do know the code here and know what kind of effort would be involved with that said that it was a lot more work to do versus re-using the old name release code from live server days.  That does not make it impossible, just more work. 

[nzer]

1 hour ago, ZemX said:

I think your examples of how someone is going to miss this and be surprised by name release are either contrived.... or well deserved consequences of being willfully uninformed about a game, especially an MMO, that one is playing.  As I said before, the name release policy is just one of many things your hypothetical person who is ignoring all game news is not going to know about.  If losing a name convinces Mr. or Mrs. Oblivious to pay attention to patch news every now and then, it's probably a good thing.

 

I really don't have the words to explain to you how completely certain it is that the vast majority of Homecoming's players will either not read about the name release policy in the patch notes or will forget about it in the following months. You have to be a special kind of unaware to believe that isn't just not a certainty, but is actually a contrived scenario that won't occur in practice. It will, period.

 

I also don't have the words to explain to you how misguided it is to think players deserve to be punished for not reading patch notes. That really is just a ridiculous notion. I don't want to pretend to speak on behalf of the devs, but I would shocked, and I mean absolutely floored if any of them agreed with the idea that players deserve to be intentionally disadvantaged if they don't read the patch notes. In no universe should the average player of any game be expected to read patch notes. They're provided as a courtesy for players who are interested.

 

1 hour ago, ZemX said:

And as @lemming just pointed out in the post above yours, even changes *I* think should be minor, aren't necessarily easy or possible in this creaky old client or server code.

 

I'm sorry, but you don't get to hop on this bandwagon now. Concerns around the technical feasibility of a better solution are entirely reasonable, and you argued with me for several pages without so much as alluding to them.

 

1 hour ago, ZemX said:

Those of us you're arguing with here didn't create this policy.  People who have much more knowledge of the inner workings of the game did.  Claiming there's "no reason" for it to be this way, as you have before, is presumptuous.  This goes double for all the suggestions further up thread (including yours) that it might be possible to tweak the way names work to allow duplicate names on a server.  Something similar to the Champions solution.  But if THAT were possible, why did this name release policy even get created OR moved up to the warning phase again, by the people who know how hard it is to do stuff?

 

The devs are human beings, they aren't infallible. In deciding on implementing this policy as is they would have made a number of assumptions - not technical assumptions, but assumptions about what players prioritize and are willing to accept, or assumptions about the likelihood and impact of various edge cases, etc. - and those assumptions may not actually be correct.

 

I also don't think they need you to carry water for them. They are not beholden to forum posters. If they want to respond here with their reasoning, they can do so. If they don't want to, they can not. They are not materially harmed by any of our opinions, or the stating of those opinions. Let them worry about what is or isn't feasible, and communicate that information to us when and if they wish.

 

51 minutes ago, Luminara said:

Not what you asserted to be the case.

 

I really don't have the patience for this kind of pedantry. My point is that expecting people to have perfect recall of the exact details of the name release policy at all times is unreasonable. I don't care whether that happens because they didn't read about it in the first place or because they forgot about it. That is irrelevant. The point is that the policy should not favor people who know how to exploit it and disadvantage people who don't.

 

51 minutes ago, Luminara said:

The problem with your point is that it's based on the presumption that everyone is going to start camping names as soon as they're released, that the GMs will shrug and ignore players who come back and ask for help recovering a name, that "community" is a word mouthed by self-interested assholes who use it facetiously.

 

I don't think my point is based on that presumption, but yes, other than the last all of these things are true. People are absolutely going to start camping names as soon as this policy goes into effect, that is made clear by this very thread. And there's zero chance a GM reclaims a name that was lost to this policy, outside of maybe some extreme circumstance. I mean think that through for a minute. You think that if a player comes back from an absence and says to a GM "I haven't played this character in a year and lost the name, can I please have it back?," the GM is going to take the name back from a person who is by definition actively using it and return it to them? They would not. Why even have the policy if that's on the table?

Edited February 7 by nzer

[ZemX]

31 minutes ago, nzer said:

You have to be a special kind of unaware to believe that isn't just not a certainty, but is actually a contrived scenario that won't occur in practice. It will, period.

 

So you are both certain of it and unable to explain it?  Why am I not surprised"?  "It will be so because I say it will be so!"   

 

I have spoken with few people as confident of their bald-faced and baseless assertions as you.  Have you considered a career in politics?

[Mopery]

99 problems but wanting to be the only player named Uberman(or whatever) ain't one.

[ZemX]

1 hour ago, Excraft said:

You're still misrepresenting this.  It's not impossible, nobody said it was impossible to write code that would allow names to be non-unique here.  The people who do know the code here and know what kind of effort would be involved with that said that it was a lot more work to do versus re-using the old name release code from live server days.  That does not make it impossible, just more work. 

 

Fair.  "Feasible" would have been the better choice of word there.  But it's also not just more work.  It's also about risk.  I wouldn't be surprised if changing something like character names, which probably runs through the spaghetti code for miles, might have many unintended side-effects and high potential to break things.  

 

Regardless of poor word choice, the point is the same.  They either aren't working on it or they are working on it in secret.  The latter seems unlikely since I'd think they would want to know if the players even wanted that kind of system.  Do some searching on Champions name system and you'll find a fair amount of debate over whether people like it or prefer unique names.  As I recall, there was plenty of that discussion in the CoH community when Champions released.   Not sure I'd personally care either way if it could be done without breaking all kinds of shit.

[nzer]

20 minutes ago, ZemX said:

So you are both certain of it and unable to explain it?  Why am I not surprised"?  "It will be so because I say it will be so!"

 

I mean I don't know how you would expect me to explain it. I can't put years of professional software development experience, decades on forums for numerous games, and constant interaction with gamers of various stripes throughout my life into a forum post. All I can tell you is that I'm certain beyond any shadow of a doubt that the vast majority of players have zero interest in reading long blurbs of text, let alone about something as boring as this, and that even when they do read them they will retain almost nothing for any meaningful length of time. At any major studio, the suggestion that policy be written under the assumption that all players read patch notes and remember their contents would be laughed out of the room.

 

6 minutes ago, ZemX said:

Regardless of poor word choice, the point is the same.  They either aren't working on it or they are working on it in secret.

 

Again, stop carrying water for the devs. They don't need you coming onto the forums and stifling feedback based on unfounded assumptions about what they are or aren't working on.

[lemming]

3 minutes ago, nzer said:

I can't put years of professional software development experience, decades on forums for numerous games, and constant interaction with gamers of various stripes throughout my life into a forum post. All I can tell you is that I'm certain beyond any shadow of a doubt that the vast majority of players have zero interest in reading long blurbs of text, let alone about something as boring as this, and that even when they do read them they will retain almost nothing for any meaningful length of time. At any major studio, the suggestion that policy be written under the assumption that all players read patch notes and remember their contents would be laughed out of the room.

YEARS!    You know how many people here have probably got just as much if not more experience?  Probably quite a few, myself included.

 

I think you're being rather harsh on the users.  Apparently they can't read or retain any memory.

[PeregrineFalcon]

7 minutes ago, lemming said:

I think you're being rather harsh on the users.  Apparently they can't read or retain any memory.

There are 5 different MMOs that I play off and on, as well as a half-dozen or so other games that I play now and then. Do you know how many games forums I read often? This one. There are two more that I will occasionally read if I'm bored (or on a temporary vacation from this forum) or I'll read the patch notes if I see an update being downloaded.

 

The rest? I just don't care. I don't go to the forums, I don't read the patch notes, I just play the game.

 

There have been a couple of times where I've logged in and seen a big change to my character: name, outfit, skill tree, etc., I just shrug and ask another player what changed or I google it. I don't get upset, no matter what, because if I cared enough about those details I'd read their forums or at least their patch notes.

 

And this is what's more likely to happen if someone who hasn't played Homecoming in three years logs in one day to suddenly find that he's lost a character name. If they cared enough to get upset about a character name they'd have cared enough to log in more than once in the last three years.

[nzer]

26 minutes ago, lemming said:

YEARS!    You know how many people here have probably got just as much if not more experience?  Probably quite a few, myself included.

 

I think you're being rather harsh on the users.  Apparently they can't read or retain any memory.

 

Then I question how user facing your position is/was and how much attention you paid to the users of your products, because believing most players read and remember patch notes represents a colossal misunderstanding of what the average player looks like. Maybe in enterprise software, but games? Not a chance. Obviously most of them can read and retain information, I'm not saying the average player is an idiot. They're just not anywhere near invested enough to go out of their way to read patch notes and remember their contents for literally an entire year.

 

I don't even read and remember most of HC's patch notes, because beyond "oh look, a new thing, maybe I'll try that sometime" they just aren't relevant to me at all. I don't care whether some powerset I haven't used for an archetype I don't really play got reworked. I don't care that some ability got numerically retuned. I don't care that some random bug was fixed. I'm not trying to minimize the devs' efforts, it's great that they're doing all of those things and great that they post the patch notes. But none of that is important to me in my regular play. And if any of you think I or any other player should be punished for choosing not to read patch notes almost entirely filled with things that are not immediately important to me in my regular play, you can please go sit in the corner and rethink your unreasonable expectations.

 

Patch notes are a poor vehicle for this information. A pop up in the character select screen that is specifically and solely dedicated to this name release policy might be an acceptable vehicle, if it was delivered at every single login. That's about where I would place the line for a reasonable expectation that every player is sufficiently notified.

Edited February 8 by nzer

[Luminara]

27 minutes ago, nzer said:

People are absolutely going to start camping names as soon as this policy goes into effect, that is made clear by this very thread.

 

You said that even if people know they have to log in before X period, they're going to forget or just not do it, and they'll lose names.  You've said that multiple times, so I don't need to quote it.

 

Now you say that people are not going to forget and constantly log in on time to camp names so they won't lose them.

 

No, I get it, you think the "wrong" people will be camping names instead of the "right" people, but you're still contradicting yourself.  The new campers will be subject to the same memory lapses, the same inattentiveness, the same lack of interest in putting in the effort, and the same rules which will cause them to lose the names they tried to hoard, or the current name-holders won't forget, overlook, lose interest, lose names.

 

Well done.  You managed to dispute your own argument by arguing against a point you argued for.  You're arguing with yourself now.  Can't wait to see who wins.  Will it be you... or you?  The suspense is killing me.

 

20 minutes ago, nzer said:

You think that if a player comes back from an absence and says to a GM "I haven't played this character in a year and lost the name, can I please have it back?," the GM is going to take the name back from a person who is by definition actively using it and return it to them?

 

I know the GM would ascertain the full situation, make a judgement call, reach out to the player who had the name if he/she felt it was warranted and try to find a resolution satisfactory to both parties.

 

25 minutes ago, nzer said:

Why even have the policy if that's on the table?

 

So the people who never come back don't have names locked away...

 

22 minutes ago, nzer said:

I can't put years of professional software development experience, decades on forums for numerous games, and constant interaction with gamers of various stripes throughout my life into a forum post.