Feedback talk:User/Clawfford/Free Up Character Names from "Abandoned" Accounts

Famous names

Nah, Savage Cheater should always be reserved, no matter what. There's dozens and dozens of others in the same ballpark.

As for server space - millions of names times a few bytes per name really isn't a big deal. You're maybe approaching the 1GB mark with names. Now, if you're saying we should wipe out characters that are unused, that's probably significantly more - wouldn't surprise me if the necromancer I never play took up a few megs on anet's servers. Multiply that over a few million characters and you get... a terrabyte? Eh, that's still not a huge deal. (There's also the huge ethical debate over whether characters should be deleted by anet, but I'll skip that for now.)

-- Armond Warblade 17:02, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

Strongly disagree

I strongly disagree with the proposal in its current form. I think there's a much better chance that you'd find support for asking ANet to put a time limit on reserving GW1 names for use in GW2.

I, too, would like to be able to make use of names that have seemingly been lost to the Mists — I just don't see that there's an easy or fair way to do this in GW1.

1. Abandoned != no longer a fan. If someone loved Prophecies, but hated EotN and is waiting for GW2, shouldn't they be able to re-use their names without having to do anything else? If someone played loyally and daily from 2005-2009, should they be penalized compared to those who started playing in 2011 and stopped after 2 months?
2. Abandoned in GW1 != reserved for GW2. ANet hasn't stated the rules by which toon names can transfer. Presumably (based on how the HoM rewards are setup), players will have to formally link their GW1 account to GW2 account. ANet could setup a time limit for reserving names (while still allowing accounts to be linked).

As far as technical considerations:

• I believe that this would require a huge development effort: toon names are used as "key fields" for data (that's why when you change a toon name, customized items retain the original toon's name). This means that, at the moment, abandoning a name is the equivalent to deleting the character. ANet could find a work-around, but it wouldn't be easy.
• For all intents and purposes, abandoned accounts are free: the storage space is cheap (where ANet runs into trouble is when a lot of ppls are playing).
• Can you imagine the customer support calls of people whose accounts got tagged as abandoned, but returned to try to play?

Consequently, I would encourage you to reformulate your suggestion as something for GW2 alone and simply ask ANet to put a time limit on GW1 name reservations. (Even so, I can't imagine that any freed-up names would be available when the game first comes out.) – Tennessee Ernie Ford (TEF) 17:20, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

Alternative?

Feel free to steal/adapt my ideas.
Perhaps an alternative would be for GW1 users to be able to designate their character names as reserved or not, e.g. I have at least 4 characters with terrible names that I don't care for, but their titles etc mean that I won't ever delete them, although I realise that their existance stops anyone else creating characters with those names. File:User Chieftain Alex Chieftain Signature.jpg Chieftain Alex 17:35, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

My 2 cents worth...

I am no math wizard on the permutations of 19 character to the power of 26 letters. However, I have no trouble finding unique names for all my characters. I don't know SQL like my husband does, but he and I were laughing at the fact that Anet charges for a simple name changes. He said, all you do is type one line of code and all the names that match in the database are changed.

I had a much harder time when I played WoW and trying to come up with a name. They don't allow spaces either. But I do believe it was a dumb move for Anet to reserve names from GW1 to GW2. I won't be moving to GW2, but my two sons will and plan to use new names.

I suppose Anet could change the names into a numeric code as a place holder. But as Ford said, what happens if the user returns to reclaim their life time account... chaos would follow. Would they get their original name back or be forced to take another? I could understand if you are talking about people with banned accounts. It would be ridiculous for those names to be reserved.--Wendy Black 10:08, 2 February 2012 (UTC)