Player Features and Ideas Discussion

A name change history combined with employment history should solve any problems. So many good names are taken by people who will never play again and at 10 years long in a single-server game, coming up with a good name is becoming unreasonably difficult.

True... but there are only so many books, but I don't think that is what the OP had in mind.

If one Player created a char "Duke Leto Atreides" in 2003 and only did a trail account and hasn't played since. The char name is still not available 10 years later...

I would suggest that if someone did a 14/21 day trail and have not subbed within 6 months the account should expire and all chars should be bio massed. If a subbed account lies dormant for a time (I would say 1.5 years) then all chars are renamed to something like "Race" "Citizen" "Dob" "3 digit randomized number" (example: CaldariCitizen20030101001") that should make quite a few names available.

Also what would be nice is the ability to change your character names. I admit that the "Commander" is not the most original name out there... so I would love to change that... I don't think that changing the name is pragmatically difficult (it SHOULD be only 1 field in 1 table in the database). Adding the audit trail (as the OP suggested) might be a bit more work, but please allow us to change the names.

Stop making these threads to make it happen, it won't happen because CCP would risk hurting players that would come back to eve after a long time.

Also I pity your imagination.

You've played eve for four years and you still don't understand it, how quaint.

History is reason enough.

I have come up with several unique names for my characters without and special symbols or numbers in the names. All a unique name requires is a little imagination and grammar manipulation.

Correct, it is your fault for not securing your stuff before going inactive.

And yet if 3~4 years later if you hear about this really neat feature that they developed and decide to sub for one month to try it out only to come to your character selection screen and be faced with "CaldariCitizen1346876325" you would be pissed, probablly to the point you would unsub again and not return even if there was another cool feature that cough tyour intrest.

Your interpretation relies on a couple of salient points being assumed as fact first.
1) that your character name has definitely been taken by someone else
2) that coming up with a new unique name for your toon being too hard (bearing in mind the literally hundreds of thousands of other accounts that have had the same thing happen here)

I personally am not that fussed about names but corporations should be going to the chopping blocks if they have no active members. There is noone to keep the corp registered. All of which takes me back to a much earlier idea I had once about forcing corporate office and scaling a regular registration tax. Cue the good things this game needs. it is an isk sink that scales with corp size forcing them to remain active or else have their corp penalised or out right anulled.

purely anecdotal. Compared to probably 1 - 2 million unsubbed accounts. After 10 years I wouldn't be surprised if the number was higher.

Guys, guys! All the good ridiculous names are taken! I can't fit any more X's into the name field on either side! What do?

+1 for getting rid of old names as well as name changes.

Not that those characters should be removed from the game, just that they should be required to come up with a new name should they return to the game after all those years.

Notifications should be sent to the owner as well, stating their name has been flagged to be changed, and they have X amount of days to petition against it and or resub.

For example:

I've played many other MMO's in my career and never before have I come across someone with just Zachev as their name XD. Not that I don't mind having a last name though, But I definitely would have petitioned it should this have been available at the time, as the person probably started his character on a trial and never played again (over 3 years ago). This seems to be a rather annoying trend when coming up with new names only to find that the awesome one you just thought of and or use elsewhere is taken by someone who isn't even remotely interested in playing anymore.

While there may be billions of name combinations out there, there are only so many that a person would find acceptable for use, and even fewer that would like those names. I'd rather not see EVE become a game where the only character names available involve adding random numbers into them due to the massive amounts of people who tried the game and quit.