Hours played is reasonably fair... but people like me are lazy so I have characters I hardly play that I logged in, sat in my guild for hours, even though I really never played the character. I think total quests or total achievements would be a better indicator of how much you play the character.
except I know people that have played for 12 years, and don't do quests unless they are forced to, and don't 'raid' to get achievements either. so a quest-aholic that has less time played, but alot more quest completions, would 'steal' their name, and they'd quit.
you really can't base this on gameplay choices. becuase there are ascpects of the game you can pretty much flat ignore, like raiding, where most of the 'achievements' come from, or crafting, or questing. you can grind to make level and never do any quest, easily. the fairest method is by creation dates and time played. and more so time played. probably both in conjunction. first should be time played. if they are equal, then who was made first.
it's fairly easily to see who was created first if you look up on eq2wire or any number of other sites creation date has always been the factor in deciding who keeps the name and who becomes Namex. so yea, creation date does mean something
I think the point is, if two people have the same name, distinguished only by a suffix, it would be very difficult to send a tell to just one of them, unless you're willing to type in their name and also the suffix which you may or may not be aware of.
Okay, apparently you did not find out the part where Daybreak is making a new target server that three servers are merging onto, and we will have to name our characters again-- no names at all are going to be saved or waiting for any of us on that new server when it launches. It will be a Free For All, Grab a Name First scenario for getting your old names back. If your previous name is already taken by someone else, then you will be stuck having to randomly pick another name to even log on with-- likely stealing someone else's name that they used to have on their previous server. So say, for example, your character was previously on Permafrost and was named Adevil. Well, Permafrost, Freeport and Nagafen are being merged onto a brand-new server and your name Adevil is NOT going to be reserved for you and waiting for you on this new server. You are going to have to log in and claim it first or you're not going to get it. It's first-come, first-serve for getting names on this newly-merged server. If anyone else grabs Adevil before you do, tough luck for you. Then you have to pick another name instead before you can play your character. You can't just run around on this new server without a name. You have to pick another name. And that name that you randomly have to pick so you can log in could likely be SOMEONE ELSE'S NAME they previously had on Permafrost, Freeport or Nagafen, making this whole Free-for-All name grab thing become a hot mess in short order. Now do you get it?
If that were the situation then you would open up your char select screen and all your toons would be called something like ?????? until you chose a brand new name. Somehow I don't thinnk that's what they meant.
No, wrong there. I have been through this before in games like Tera NA and Aion NA. Your character screen still shows the old names, but when you try to log on with any one of them, IF someone else has already logged in and taken your name, then you will receive an error message when you try to log in. You will be forced to pick a new name (until you find one not taken yet) to be able to log in. The thing you are not considering is the hypothetical situation where there is more than one Adevil, for example, between Permafrost, Nagafen and Freeport, there could be 3 Adevil characters sitting on three peoples' character screens. One Adevil logs in first, before the other two, and gets his name back. You and the other one don't. Then you both are forced to randomly pick other names that haven't been taken yet. So you pick Heyjoe and it hasn't yet been taken on this new server so you log in. Then poor Heyjoe from Permafrost, Nagafen or Freeport that hasn't logged in yet is forced to change his name to be able to log in. And away we go: Clusterfluff City. Hopefully Daybreak rethinks this and finds a way to get their old way to work.
Rar's opinion on name collision resolution: Let everyone, through some temporary UI element, designate a "main" or "priority character". Main's then get first priority for a name over non-mains. There will still be collisions within each pool that have to be dealt with another way, but this at least gives everyone a better chance at keeping their favorite.
Would you mind telling me how to find out when a character was created? I've talked to a few people whosaid it's possible, but I can't find it at all.
Look up the toon on EQ2u (http://u.eq2wire.com/). Scroll down the window on the left side. Look at 'birth date'. While it is possible for characters to be hidden from EQ2u, the fact that the information can be displayed there means that DBG has the information for all characters, so THEY can tell which character was created frist. They can also tell which character has the most play time. The information is available to them to do something more sensible then 'free for all', if they have the time, inclination and resources.
If it hasn't been logged in since, I'd hope such toons would be the first to lose their names. It's been years...
My alts mean something to me but I don't necessarily have time to login to all of them. Right now I have very little time to play because I'm busy getting ready to move. So the only time I have to play is the middle of the night and that sucks!
