Dormant accounts; times up.

I know what you mean as I've never been able to use the name Swoo or it's variants as someone snapped it up and then promptly never played the character, or quit after a few days. That said I don't think there is much they can really do as if one of the players wanted to come back and one of the first screens was 'We removed your name via inactivity, please choose a new one' that would be kinda unfair to them and also a poke in the eye.

Warmachine all the way buddy! I loved 40K since I found 1st Ed in Waldenbooks when I was like 7, but once a friend got me to give WM a legit try I was seriously hooked. It is just a much superior game line.

All SOE needs to do is send an email to those who would be effected. If they decide to ignore it, too bad for. Life isn't fair, and neither are videogames, at least they wouldn't be having their accounts deleted because SOE wants more hard drive space. If they can't be bothered to log into the game why would they care about their name?

I totally agree with OP. Any inactive characters under say BR5 should be wiped after a few months. There will be a ton of people who have logged into the game to try it once and then decided it wasn't for them but never deleted their characters. No reason those character names or outfit names should be taken up forever.

In fact if anything something stupid like not being able to find a character name you like can deter people from sticking with a game. I remember last time I tried to create one I went through at least 10 things trying to get a name I didn't hate.

On the flip side, the benefit to them never freeing up inactive names is that the most generic garbage names get used up early, then most stay dormant and we don't have to deal with them. I really don't care if you have no imagination and want to rip off the name someone else came up with; the game is made better for me when the people I'm playing with had to come up with a unique name. Now I just wish they'd do a better job of (automatically, ideally) filtering out offensive names.

Lol true dat

novalogic's joint operations/typhoon rising made you lose your player character and all its progress if you didn't log back into the game after 90 days of inactivity. after that deadline, the char was supposedly deleted from the server.

i guess a similar system may work for ps2 too, especially since free2play usually means that many players just created an account to check the game out, didn't like it and never touched it again, leading to a large number of 'dead' accounts that only clog up the SoE server

Another problem with outfit names/tags is that some outfits/tags from the beta days weren't released when the characters were deleted so you can't use them. I did enquire about 5 game updates ago and they did say they were going to release ghost outfit/tags with the next patch evidently they didn't fix it.

Everyone here wishes inactive players would come back so we could see better pops. Deleting old accounts or outfits is extremely customer unfriendly, and for what? So a tiny handful of people can have a name that somebody else thought up first?

Come up with a more original outfit name.

There's like 14 names starting with Pikachu and 1 of them seems to be active, which is Pikachu.

There have been some but generally modern MMO's don't do it. As one might imagine it's not the best business strategy.

So anyway yes, I would be opposed to this. Get more creative with your names.

So if say somebody goes to fight for their country, or gets hospitalized, or can't afford to access the internet at high speeds for gaming, or their computer breaks or isn't up to snuff or wont work with a current patch and they can't afford a replacement, and so forth, for any given amount of time that's deemed "too long" they should lose their account that they've potentially worked hard on or spent money on, or even just the name... a name they spent time building a reputation into? You are being selfish.

Some outfits have their members in outfits across factions and may swap between them after extended periods of time, and there's always the one or two who may remain logging in on a regular basis. There's nothing they can really do except recycle disbanded names after a month or two to ensure somebody's account wasn't hacked/friend rage disbanded (which would usually be their fault for giving their password away) For rollback purposes.

Aside from the obvious extremes where people literally just make a base level character during launch and do nothing else but maybe create an outfit, they should not clear inactive accounts or outfits. It's never a good idea to do this just because a few guys want some accounts name. You either get there when the game is released or you should expect to have to come up with a unique name.

If a small outfit of friends or an outfit based on a gaming community were ever to put down the game for a 1 or more for any reason and they come back to a "please change name" that's one way to get them to lock right back out again. Assuming I never paid anything and I played for a little while, but had to quit for any reason. If I suddenly came back to my character being deleted or if I had to change my name, I'd be upset as well. Even if it was my BR 20 TR or VS alt I used very little.

How would I feel if my level 0 account, which I have put NO time, NO money and NO effort into was deleted for being inactive for an extended period of time. I'd feel fine.

I used the example of Valves system. It's not perfect for PS2 but it's a jumping off point. If you buy nothing on Steam, and play a F2P game a ton and then go AFK for over a year, you're gone. Done.

Jesus guy get off that high horse. Don't bring wounded soldiers into the mix; I told you I didn't work for Fox News. But since you brought it up. If a player makes an account, never uses it, then goes off to fight in the military, he/she's getting deleted. Come back and make a new player. You'll be level 0, right where you left it.

Again, we're focusing here on accounts that have barley, or as my examples show NEVER been touched; literally created and abandoned. If you're a level 80 with hundreds of hours played, then you're safe. If you're level 2, with 25 minutes played, and you've been inactive for over a year...you're gone.

and why do you think someone would create an account then abandon it? (assuming it has NO effort in it as you said)
My guess is because they want to keep the name for the future

The outfit name H4TZ is also taken but the tag was not. Odd.

the a-hole who bought alpha squad just to get CommanderShepard logged in for 3 days at release and hasn't played since.

I could punch that guy.

I could hug that guy.

Yet another garbage name taken out of circulation. And he contributed money that subsidizes the game (oh so slightly) for the rest of us. He's basically an angel.

someone's a tad angry at life, come here so i can hug you.

Not angry; I just have taste, and copying a character name from another game is pretty much as tasteless as you can get. After that would be copying the name from other entertainment media. And after that would probably be having 420 in your name.