Homecoming Server Update (October 1st): Closed Beta, Name Release, and CoC Updates

[Greycat]

23 minutes ago, Number Six said:

 

It is a completely different system.

 

The one on live wasn't a name release at all, it was a one-shot script they presumably* ran during downtime that looked for characters on inactive non-paying accounts (this was shortly after the F2P transition) and physically removed them from the database to cheaper storage. These "offline" characters could still be seen in the character list and attempting to log one in required the character to go through a process of being re-imported first, which is very similar to a server transfer. Freeing up the names while they were offlined was just a side effect.

 

Our system doesn't work like that at all and is a fully automatic realtime system that renames inactive characters "just-in-time" when a new character is being created with the same name.

 

---

 

* I say presumably because we don't actually have that script. The architecture for handling offlined players still exists in the code, but there's nothing that actually triggers moving characters to offline storage, so it must have been somehow handled outside the game server.

 

Um. So... no, when I say "the account/name system isn't different," I wasn't referring to what you're doing. More to how the accounts and names are (or aren't) linked, which in a previous (or several previous) discussion on this same topic I'd had devs tell me flat out they couldn't see that the account itself was inactive and/or limit running this on inactive accounts.

 

And yes, it was referred to generally as a name release, regardless of it being a script.

 

And the page describes exactly when and why it was - and wasn't - run.

 

Also, for your second post, no, that link is not incorrect. The *database* may not have something called "unreserved," but that is exactly how it was labeled in their announcement post - see https://web.archive.org/web/20051013070956mp_/http://www.cityofheroes.com/news/archives/2005/10/city_of_heroes_22.html for an archive of the page.

 

 

Quote

 

City of Heroes and City of Villains Character Name Policy Change

Monday, October 10, 2005

Starting 10/24/2005 the City of Heroes® and City of Villains™ character name policy will change. Names for characters under level 35 on game accounts that have been inactive for over 90 days will be changed to unreserved status. This means that those names will become available for new character names if picked by an active player. This policy is being enacted in order to free up character names based on player feedback.

If your game account is inactive for over 90 days and you reactivate your account you will need to log back in to any characters affected by this policy to move them out of unreserved name status. If your old character name has been taken by an active player, the game will prompt you to rename your character. You will be given only one opportunity to rename your character. It is possible that your character name may still be the same if an active player has not chosen to use that character name. Your global handle will not be affected.

All characters in an unreserved name status will be shown in your character selection screen; however, their photo will not be shown, indicating that they are in unreserved name status.

If you do not log into the game with a character in unreserved name status, the character’s name will remain available to any active player until you log that character into the game. Logging into the game with the affected character will change the character’s name status back to reserved.

Any questions about this policy can be directed to [email protected].

 

 

[Number Six]

29 minutes ago, Ridiculous Girl said:

BTW... we are getting flagged as inactive at 28 days (4 weeks) rather than the 30 days stated.

 

Hover over the icon. The yellow one is the pre-warning letting you know that it's not eligible for release yet, but it will be soon, so you can preemptively log into it before it gets there. For the 1-5 bracket, that starts showing up 7 days prior to the actual date it would be released.

 

The "at risk" icon for being over 30 days is either red or orange depending on if the system is in enforcement mode or not. IIRC the red icon for when the name is actually eligible to be claimed also has an inverted (white) exclamation point on it, to make them easily distinguishable for people who are color blind or have difficulty discerning the yellow/red part of the spectrum.

[Ridiculous Girl]

 

12 minutes ago, Number Six said:

The icon for being over 30 days is either orange or red depending on if the system is active or not.

 ah ok, the nuance of colours was not noticible, and i did not bother to read the highlight text... 😁

[Number Six]

36 minutes ago, Greycat said:

Also, for your second post, no, that link is not incorrect. The *database* may not have something called "unreserved," but that is exactly how it was labeled in their announcement post - see https://web.archive.org/web/20051013070956mp_/http://www.cityofheroes.com/news/archives/2005/10/city_of_heroes_22.html for an archive of the page.

 

Not disputing that's what they called it; I suppose it's just semantics.

 

Though FWIW it's not just the code that calls it that, the in-game messages when you try to access an offlined character also aren't consistent with the description in that announcement:

 

"The character has been moved off the database because the account has not been logged in for 90 days or more.  Choosing to enter the game will reload the character.<br><br>If you were a member of a supergroup you will need to be re-invited.<br><br>There is a chance your player name was used by another player while your character was inactive.  If this happened, you will be allowed to rename your character once."

 

"We are currently restoring your character from our long-term storage.  Please wait, this may take a few minutes."

 

"An internal error has occurred with the servers.  You tried to login a character from long-term storage before restoring that character."

[Number Six]

2 minutes ago, Ridiculous Girl said:

 ah ok, the nuance of colours was not noticible, and i did not bother to read the highlight text... 😁

 

True, because the system is not in enforcement mode, it uses a different icon for "would be eligible for release, but not really because we're not doing it yet" which is harder to tell the difference. Once it goes live and the red and white icon starts showing up it'll be a lot more obvious.

[Greycat]

15 minutes ago, Number Six said:

 

Not disputing that's what they called it; I suppose it's just semantics.

 

Though FWIW it's not just the code that calls it that, the in-game messages when you try to access an offlined character also aren't consistent with the description in that announcement:

 

Well, like I said. There may not be a tag in the *database* with that name. But it's how it was introduced and described to the playerbase, and it's what it's been called since then generally.

 

Not the first time (see City of Data, internal vs external names, stun/disorient/immobilized/snared....)

 

More fussing at you for calling the wiki wrong when that's the terminology presented in the whole shebang to the player base at the time. 😉 Though that will need updating when this goes live. (Or a second page? I don't know which would be less confusing if someone looked up information on it, with the obvious differences - after all, live but unplayed characters on active accounts are getting flagged in the system here.)

[Greycat]

So, as far as the naming policy (I'm doing the first run of that wiki update,) just to be clear on a few things:

 

- Temporal warriors - are they getting the 1 year limit like level 6-49 characters are?

 

- Since this is JUST looking at the character and NOT the account (and from @Number Six's description, a different way of handling it,) someone coming back to a character they (say) moved to page 27 and forgot about for a year isn't going to have that character hit with the effects of the live script - the loss of their description, battle cry, clearing email/friends lists/sg, etc?

 

- How *are* they going to appear if someone gets the name of an inactive character - say I have an email I want to keep from SomeSuperDude, or I have them on friends/SG roster, but they've been gone for 16 months and suddenly someone else takes SomeSuperDude for their name - is this just appending a "1" to the end (or whatever increment it might be?)

 

- What will the player returning to that character see in their selection list/when they first log in?

 

(I'm sure the info's here somewhere, I'm just trying to consolidate it for the update.)

[Number Six]

11 minutes ago, Greycat said:

- Temporal warriors - are they getting the 1 year limit like level 6-49 characters are?

 

Since they are instant 50s as soon as they're created and never change, the only reasonable option was to treat them like level 1 characters. So they always have a 30 day limit.

 

12 minutes ago, Greycat said:

- Since this is JUST looking at the character and NOT the account (and from @Number Six's description, a different way of handling it,) someone coming back to a character they (say) moved to page 27 and forgot about for a year isn't going to have that character hit with the effects of the live script - the loss of their description, battle cry, clearing email/friends lists/sg, etc?

 

Correct, we're not using any of that system. Getting kicked out of supergroups -- or worse the supergroup disbanding and the base getting deleted if they're the last member, losing email/ah, etc. is just far too punishing on someone coming back after a long absence. That's probably why Paragon abandoned it.

 

13 minutes ago, Greycat said:

How *are* they going to appear if someone gets the name of an inactive character - say I have an email I want to keep from SomeSuperDude, or I have them on friends/SG roster, but they've been gone for 16 months and suddenly someone else takes SomeSuperDude for their name - is this just appending a "1" to the end (or whatever increment it might be?)

 

They get a number appended to the end. 1 if it's available, otherwise 2, etc. If they're already at the length limit then the last letter is replaced with a digit. Basically the same rules as when you do a server transfer if the name already exists on the destination.

 

14 minutes ago, Greycat said:

What will the player returning to that character see in their selection list/when they first log in?

 

They'll see CharacterName1, also with the red exclamation mark because the character is still inactive and subject to name release. If nobody took the name while they were away, they'll just see CharacterName with the alert icon.

[RBT]

4 hours ago, Greycat said:

It is a completely different system.

 

So, from what I understand, the old name releases on Live only freed names from inactive accounts at one time, whereas this name release will "release" names from active accounts on demand if they meet the leveling criteria - and this process is indefinite? 

[WindDemon21]

Completely reasonable curious request. This is being said to make 1.6 million names freed up since this was announced. Can you please post what that number is at 11:59pm on October 31st? I'm super curious on the difference lol

[Greycat]

3 hours ago, RBT said:

 

So, from what I understand, the old name releases on Live only freed names from inactive accounts at one time, whereas this name release will "release" names from active accounts on demand if they meet the leveling criteria - and this process is indefinite? 

 

The old system was a manually run script. Going from what @Number Six is saying, then yes, it's constantly monitored and the rename system *itself* is totally different (and honestly everything that happened to the character under the old system makes sense.)

 

Old system:

- Manual script.

- Cares about if the *account* is inactive for 90 days or more (which is part of the difference with here, I suspect, as the account had an NCSoft billing component saying if it had paid for the time that we don't see or have, from my guess.)

- If the *account* hits that, then the characters get (again, me guessing at the mechanics here) moved to an archive, with a little pointer to the character list saying "this is in the archive, if someone else wants to use the name consider it available."

- Since the *character* got moved to an archive, it would be like a server move as far as the SG, friends list, etc. being wiped, since those were server specific. (No idea why email was affected, other than "different database," maybe.)

 

Current system:

- Fully automatic, always monitoring (which is why even now we get flags popping up as you get near a character's inactive limit.)

- Does not archive the character, but does mark them inactive (or however Number Six wnats to call it 😉  )

- Doesn't lose any  connections because the character itself is not archived - because HC doesn't (can't?) care about the account.

 

I'm mildly curious how much of old vs new was because NCSoft handled the billing (after all, they'd want to track if you had a sub to - say - COH, Guild Wars, Aeon, etc. and which were active, and it'd be easier to have all those centralized in NC) and passed "permission" for the player from there to what Cryptic et al had for game servers.

[TauntingMonk]

I found a bug with the name release that would cause a lvl 50 to lose their name!

Edited October 7 by TauntingMonk

[Lunar Ronin]

13 minutes ago, TauntingMonk said:

I found a bug with the name release that would cause a lvl 50 to lose their name!

 

Bloody Bay... Temporal Warrior/PvP toon?

[TauntingMonk]

I don't have any PvP toons, think it's just been in Bloody Bay for that long and that's what caused it. I've loaded more toons in exemplar down states and going to wait to see if that is the cause for the warning.

[Number Six]

The character "Temp Fairy" on Excelsior has PraetorianProgress=7... that's a temporal warrior.

[Sanguinesun]

 

• GMs may request that you cease multiboxing during events such as the Winter and Halloween events.

If only that was actually enforced.  Same person every year multiboxes in PI for 8-10+ hours a day.  This year though they've been also dropping on Kalista Warf as well one of their mms.    They also teleport away mobs from groups fighting around the motel/spot in KW most usually league at and drop them in the middle of his multi boxing too.

 

But reporting them for it does nothing, like every year.

Edited October 8 by Sanguinesun

[Trike]

On 10/1/2024 at 1:06 PM, macskull said:

I’m curious as to how many of those 1.6 million names are on inactive accounts. As it’s currently going to be implemented the name release policy still makes it trivial for a player who is intentionally sitting on a pile of names to  keep them indefinitely.

I get it, but it is somewhat annoying. I have once-a-year characters that I only play during events like ToT who aren’t very high level, plus a bunch where I’ve reserved names in anticipation of upcoming additions to the game. I’ll have to remember to log them in every month. 
 

But I do understand the reason why this is being implemented, just as it was back on Live.

[UltraAlt]

On 10/6/2024 at 8:58 AM, Kyastral said:

My question is this: what will happen to those accounts that will have ALL of the character names unlocked and the owner of those accounts doesn't do anything about it after the name release is finished? 

 

It seem pretty clear that they would need to rename any of the names that they don't want a number after if the original name was taken by someone else while they were away from the game.

I could happen to some, none, or all of their characters.

[Greycat]

On 10/7/2024 at 1:52 PM, WindDemon21 said:

Completely reasonable curious request. This is being said to make 1.6 million names freed up since this was announced. Can you please post what that number is at 11:59pm on October 31st? I'm super curious on the difference lol

 

You know - and this is also 100% my curiosity - I'd kind of like to see three data points:

- We already have one. "Expecting 1.6 million names freed up."

- What is it - say, ten minutes before this is made active?

- And what is it a week and/or month later, as far as inactive names and names claimed by others? (say, "Before it went active, that number went down to 1.3 million names. A week in, 1.2 million names were on that list. A month in, somehow 2 million names were reused" or whatever.)

 

I've got a few characters that are flagged for rename - RP characters and base builders (which tend to be peacebringers at level 1, because they don't need to level and fly is helpful.) I *highly* doubt I'll see their names change. They'll either tend to be "actual naames" or something people aren't likely to grab, like a base code. (I highly doubt anyone is DYING to get "basecode-12345" for their character.)

[Glacier Peak]

11 minutes ago, Greycat said:

I highly doubt anyone is DYING to get "basecode-12345" for their character.

[macskull]

20 hours ago, Trike said:

I get it, but it is somewhat annoying. I have once-a-year characters that I only play during events like ToT who aren’t very high level, plus a bunch where I’ve reserved names in anticipation of upcoming additions to the game. I’ll have to remember to log them in every month. 
 

But I do understand the reason why this is being implemented, just as it was back on Live.

For levels 6-49 the requirement drops from once a month to once a year, so my plan is to spend a bit of time getting some of those sub-6 characters leveled a bit. Should take all of five minutes per character if you have an alt account or someone willing to help you out.

 

One thing to note is that this version of the name release policy is very different than the one that existed on the retail servers. That one had a couple different iterations and was mostly based on account inactivity, but was also done by manually running a script to release names. It was only ever done two or three times because it was determined it didn't release enough names to be worth doing. Homecoming's release policy is handled automatically and only looks at characters instead of entire accounts.

[Trike]

22 hours ago, macskull said:

For levels 6-49 the requirement drops from once a month to once a year, so my plan is to spend a bit of time getting some of those sub-6 characters leveled a bit. Should take all of five minutes per character if you have an alt account or someone willing to help you out.

 

Good to know. It doesn't help my hardcore toons who are permanently Level 2 which were created to do challenges. Those are goofy edge cases, though.

[Greycat]

On 10/10/2024 at 6:19 PM, macskull said:

One thing to note is that this version of the name release policy is very different than the one that existed on the retail servers. That one had a couple different iterations and was mostly based on account inactivity, but was also done by manually running a script to release names. It was only ever done two or three times because it was determined it didn't release enough names to be worth doing. Homecoming's release policy is handled automatically and only looks at characters instead of entire accounts.

 

Twice, yeah. First run was 35 and below. From the results they had on that, the second run was 6 and below, because that's where the majority of "freed" (and maybe taken, but I don't think we were ever told) names were.

 

(I do wonder, honestly, if the  script would've been run again had the game not sunset, given the free accounts. Alternately, it was and sunset was the *biggest* name release ever... )

[Digirium]

I feel indifferent to the name release because it is indisputable that 100% of characters already got themselves a name.

 

There will be no "gold rush" of players trying to acquire a name already taken by someone 1.6 million seems like a lot of gold but it is fool's gold. The crowd that coveted a name and lacked imagination will still be gnashing their teeth.

 

May be items that matter more will receive attention instead, now it is out of the way.

 

 

 

Edited October 12 by Digirium

[GM Crumpet]

On 10/3/2024 at 2:08 AM, Owl Girl said:

i am not pleased with the activation of the name policy and will be reviewing my legal options to ensure my names remain with me in perpetuity.

Some people have dozens, if not hundreds of alts under level 10 they haven't logged in for months or years. There has been plenty of warning that we are going to implement the policy, and plenty of time to start logging the alts in if you don't want the chance of someone sniping the name. Chances are most names are safe anyway. Unless it's something incredibly obvious you were lucky enough to get in the first month or two of the game starting up then the chances of someone taking the name is low, but not zero.