Another Name Lost in Mergers

• If two characters have the same name as a result of the server merge, the player that has logged in within the 60 days before the merge will retain the original character name. If there are still conflicts, the character with the higher number of minutes played will retain the original character name.

I really hate this policy. Someone who has started a character a month before the merger can take your name. Doesn't matter if you own multiple accounts or have been playing for 20 years. Spend a couple of months, say playing a TLP server, you lose. Seems to happen even if it is a free account.
True it was on FV and it's been ~8 months since I last checked in. Just sucks that a nickname I've had since I was 5 years old gets stomped on. And having been crushed, stays crushed forever. Doesn't matter apparently if it was a free account and the person stopped playing after the first day. I have yet to do a /w all 'insert name' and found someone that bumped me. If they want to do something convoluted that makes sense, tie it to the user who has given them the most money. At least that I could understand.

Nothing you said is true.

"The character with the higher number of minutes played will retain the original character name."

If you have a character for 20 years lets assume your played minutes should be higher than a 60 day old toon. If you are name squatting on a bunch of alts or are inactive you shouldn't keep the name. If your character is 8 years old and you are inactive on that server but see a server merger announcement then quickly log in to that toon/server within the 60 days and if you have any viable played minutes at all you keep the name. Also, this doesn't belong in TLP forum.

Use it or lose it bud.

What's in a name

Players get way too hung up on their character names, I know it can be highly annoying to discover someone else uses the same name you do, has happened to me several times, but getting really bent out of shape about it is puerile.
Just make another name, it won't kill you. This is just one of the things you should expect when moving servers and if it bothers you that much just leave your character where it is & re-roll. Heck you could create a character on the target server to find out if your name is already taken there or not prior to moving if it is that big of a deal.

Which name did you lose?

What servers did they merge recently?

I'm not a scientist, but he mentioned FV in his ramblings. So I would infer someone on Brekt stole his name, and now he is stuck with Drizzzztx.

When did this merger take place?

He also said this is something he hasn't looked at in 8 or more months.

Taddy. Nickname growing up was Taddy Gilantis 'Middleweight champion of the world' given to me by an uncle who handed out nicknames to everyone in the family.

BTW: To the people that say that isn't the procedure for renaming, it is a copy and paste directly from the web site.

They changed it to Taddyo which in some ways, I would have preferred to keep the old system of Taddyx.

And use it or lose it. I left it alone for 8 months. I've been a paying customer off and mostly on for 20 years. I am still currently an active customer. Because I choose to spend most of my time and money on TLP servers including spending a small fortune on in game perks like experience potions should be justification for me being able to keep my named characters. My account has not been inactive in years, there was no lapse in membership. AFAIK the other people that have bounced my character names are not even currently active! I have never, and I mean NEVER seen one of them in game. It's one of the first things I do when I login on Live servers and get the name change blurb is see if other people that bounced me are there and using my old names. Yeah, use it or lose it? I have not seen a single player that has bounced me in game EVER. On the other hand, I frequently had people confront me in game about names they say should have been theirs, but they couldn't login on the day the TLP started to get it.

I read the procedure as: If you haven't logged in that particular server 60 days, i.e. 61 days, a free play player who has 1 minute of play in the last 60 days gets your name. Doesn't seem fair to active players helping keep the lights on. To some degree, I don't care if the other person has more minutes played if they haven't played in 19 years.

The unique name thing was a Brad McQuad innovation and one of the reasons for the early success of the game as well as its character. Intent was your character would end up with a reputation in game and it would affect how they were treated in game. As many people have seen, when someone comes back to the game, they frequently post their former name, former guild, and friends they had in game. System falls down when you get name changes like this. People used to be outraged at the thought of name changes because someone could be a complete jerk and just change their name to get a clean reputation. There is also the imposter thing where people could use your name to scam other people. Names are important for people that care about that kind of stuff. If you don't care about a name you use in game, fine, but cut the hate for people that do. The guy who built the game thought it was important enough to code it.

If they aren't active players just log in and make a toon with that name again if that's how it works.

If it's important enough to get up in arms over losing the name, maybe people ought to just log in once during the two months before the servers are merged. They gave you a way to keep the name...

Kinda odd because they announced this well in advance of the mergers. If you've been active on EQ surely you would have seen this and said "o damn let me make sure to log in to keep my name."

The policy seems pretty fair to me.

The last merger was May 2020. And it was announced in March 2020. That gave everyone 2 months in which to log in and get the required play time before the merge.

Remember play time does not have to mean actual playing, you can be afk in the lobby and in fact that is why staying logged into your character 24/7 started many years ago. Actions in the game were based on now long a player played.

And even I logged in all my alts when I heard about this, ones I play once a week, once a month and long unused accounts and characters just to double check their names.

Not a single account I own was going to be merged but I did it anyway.

But if one of my servers had been mentioned in the news blurbs and the forums here (of which you are very active and must have seen all the posts) then I would have for sure logged in my Brekt character.

And then left them hanging in the lobby or baz afk overnight to cement the play time.

From the same notes you quoted it also says you are given the choice of the name you want (if available)

What happens to my character name if someone else has the same name as me and gets to keep it?
If you have to change names due to a conflict, you will be granted one free rename for your character. You will not have to buy a name change potion.

https://www.everquest.com/news/eq-server-merge-spring-2020

If they really did change that name to TaddyO instead of granting you the free potion then perhaps you could petition and get your Taddyx ( if available). BUT you mentioned "It's one of the first things I do when I login on Live servers and get the name change blurb......" so it sounds like you did or do have the choice.

I would have gone for TaddyG lol. Esp if he was a bard...KennyG and all that. Then again TaddyO is kinda old style beatnik like DaddyO.

Not to offend so much as to point out what is: Characters have a last name. There us no need to drop or change the first name of a character with a last name. It is really that simple. I had no idea Taddy would be a popular name as it isn't common at all.

So, I don't care if Taddy Johnston or whoever is in game. No one else cares if there is a Taddy Johnson and a Taddy Gilantis. People can figure this out. It is just an obsolete convention that doesn't make sense with surnames present in game. It makes more sense to reserve surnames and let people have first names that want. Ditto for my Walter Wego<s> characters. I've had a number of people complain via chat that they are named Walter IRL and wanted the name in game. I don't care if they get it! Heck, the more the merrier as long as they don't chose Wego for their last name.

This is about as reasonable as I can get. It just makes sense.

Except that EQ cannot operate with multiple users with the same "first name" at all right now, in fact surnames are largely cosmetic not functional, like titles.

You can't even correctly perform any group or raid invites with names that have the first few characters that match - like Bobby & bobbyded you invite the first & invites to the second fail if the first is in your group as the system simply fails, after reading the name left to right it abbreviates the second player's name to the same characters at the front matching the system considers you to have that player in your party or raid already.

Changing that system to fix the issue with similar names is hard enough, changing it to then recognise surnames on top of forenames seems like it would require a lot more coding as the system cannot do that at the present time.

Sometimes what makes sense to a player does not make sense to the code and its limitations.

Taddy Mason!

No. I don't want to have to type someone's full first and last name every time I send a tell. If you allow multiple players with the same first name, then you have to require people to use the last name every time to differentiate.

I always liked the advantage of being able to use only partial names, someone with a really difficult and very long name is so much easier to find in a who all search when you can use just the first 4 or 5 characters for example.