Assembly Hall

Please read through the full post and comments before replying!

Point: Many cool names for characters and corporations are taken by inactive accounts who haven't logged in for years. I want a way to reclaim these names because EVE's growing pile of inactive accounts and dead one-man corps shouldn't become a cool-name graveyard.

Counterpoint: Reclaiming names will anger players who reactivate to find they've lost their name, and will cause confusion among people who knew the old character.

Let's address the first issue, angering and surprising the 'former' owner of the name. I propose a simple tool, either on the site or in the game, where you can enter a name to request it. It will only take inactive names. It will send a CCP support email directly to the inactive account holder that if they do not reactivate their account within 30 days, their name will be adversely possessed (that's legal speak for "use it or lose it"). To avoid spam, only one request can be open for a name. If the request is successful, CCP lets the requester know when the name will go "live", so that they can be ready to claim it.

The second issue, confusion. If a name is reclaimed, all references to the old character should be changed in some way. If the mod team takes away your names for other reasons, typically your name is changed to the generic "Gallente Citizen ######" (which you can petition to change to something cooler). I suggest that the same thing should happen here. This means editing the full history of killmails, contacts, evemails etc. This can be done during downtime.

Please let me know what you guys think. I'm especially eager to hear how some might exploit this, so we can work on solutions to those exploits. I want to make a working solution to one of the problems that has bothered me forever in this game.

Tell me what you think about the following changes
Variation 1: If no response from deactivated account, name remains in place.

Okay, let's cut out the 'no response means yes' part. Could an unsubbed person 'release' a name to you? In other words, we're flipping it. The deactivated account owns the name until it actively turns it over, but can do so without reactivating and deleting the character.

That's a helpful bit of information. That's great news on its own, I bet that covers the vast majority of taken names. As CSM do you have access to the statistics specifying what percentage of inactive accounts are unpaid trials?

More comments to come.

In general i am not opposing the idea of a clean-up - but i do not like that the motivation is the reclaiming of 'cool' names.

I took a long break myself - Eve is one of the few games that actually allow you to do that. So anything connected to accounts that have been payed for in some form shouldnt be touched at all - thats perfectly in line with what CCP announced.

But many names have been 'blocked' on purpose by people to avoid a 'copycat' usage for scams and other things. I know at least a few that created accounts to achieve exactly that. Another reason that some accounts might never been subbed after the trial period is that many people where using free mail accounts and might not have access to those accounts anymore or cannot recall enough details to reclaim them themselves.

I would be very interested in knowing how many assets will be deleted by the purge. Considering how gamy we are in Eve i am almost certain that there are many accounts who where created as parking lot for assets etc.

That would hit the nail right on spot probably - only requires CCP to play along to forward that request somehow to the inactive player via the account systems information.

@Greygal Thanks for pointing that out - i guess i missed that part of the stream and better have a second look at it

wow - no kidding lol - just worked through it. My human speech decipher skills just leveled up by watching it

Edit: That is one neat little trick to get all those people i mentioned above (secure names etc) to quickly subscribe those accounts so they dont lose the names. Well thought CCP

Correct. :)

You know we where messing with you, right?

Surprised this hasn't come up sooner, but what are the chances for some of us active characters to have a shot at renaming ourselves to remove whatever extra filler we had to put on our names because the core name was taken 8 yrs ago but has zero history? (probably due to being an alt or trial that never took off).