They need to revert the policy to “WoW account activity” instead of “Bnet account activity” if they want unused names to fall off faster / at all.
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Perhaps they don’t?
I personally don’t think they should either.
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There is a finite number of available names. 1 person can make a bnet account, max it out with wow accounts, max their 8 wow accounts out with the 60 character limit each. So 480 names max per 1 bnet account.
Now if everyone with a bnet account did that, that’s a lot of names off the board.
Once all those variant spellings and nonsense/jibberish names are used up that’s it, no more new characters can be created ever. While unlikely to happen, it just highlights a vulnerability and flaw of the design and implementation of the updates to their “policy” and system.
If the names go back to falling off based on “wow account activity” then those who wish to keep names will have to just keep logging into their wow accounts.
Whereas currently those people who got sick of WoW and/or went back to playing CoD ever since the launcher started sporting both titles and intermingled the playerbases, are able to play the new CoD once every 4 years minimum to keep all the wow names they snatched up but abandoned when they stopped playing the game, active on their “bnet account”. Doesn’t seem right. They will never use them ever again.
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How many people do you think are doing ONE of these two things much less both of them? I can’t imagine there is a huge problem with people capping 8 accounts with character names and definitely not also never playing again.
Names have always been first come first serve and the only ones we are entitled to are the ones we get to first. Folks need to get better at coming up with them rather than expecting Blizzard to regularly make a fresh batch available by stripping them from other players.
Nobody knows this. I stopped playing from Cata to Legion and have been active off and on since then. People come and go in varying intervals and it’s good that they can expect to come back to the characters and names they left.
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Between Cata and legion, 6.2 WoD dropped and any inactive characters that hadn’t logged in since December of 2010 had their names up for grabs if someone wanted them.
They did this because so many people stopped playing for such a long period of time they needed to free up more viable naming options.
For perspective, WotLK had 16million active subs. Let’s just say all those subs were only 1 character on the account, that’s still 16million names. Those active sub numbers fell off after WotLK as Cata, MoP, WoD, and so on never grew back to that number. That means that those names would have been left in limbo.
Assume there is less than half those active subs now than there was at peak in Wrath, and assume that now all accounts have at least 3 characters, that’s still close 16 million names.
16million names btw, would equate to 33,334ish people’s Bnet accounts maxing out character slots.
No one knows what others do. A lot of Botnets scoop a lot of names up too, luckily most of those are already the jibberish ones. There are also MANY people who max out bnet accounts with names to sell them to RP players on the RP servers. It’s almost a whole separate RMT industry.
But if someone who came over from cod when the launchers merged decided wow wasn’t for them and left, they would keep those names with them forever now based on the policy change to go off Bnet account activity instead. They won’t come back and by the time they do if ever, they likely won’t remember their character anyway and the level squash or likely playing with a friend will have them thinking of rolling a new one regardless.
The small glimmer of hope that they MIGHT come back to play wow is not enough of a justification to turn away new players or players who want to invest time on a new alt or try a new class/race who need the names freed up.
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So if someone has a perma-banned account(s) on the same bnet as they are playing, those names on banned accounts are still “in use”?
If so, suggestion to Blizzard: perma-banned account should have all names revoked and freed up regardless of bnet account status.
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i’m not sure about the logistics with that one…
I don’t think there’s a surefire easy approach to solving the issue unfortunately. Take me for example. Way back in vanilla I created this druid and named her Aloe. She became my main from the end of vanilla all the way until Cata, so a good amount of time. Towards the end of the xpac my wife became pregnant and I opted to step away from the game until my kiddo got older. I was gone from the end of Cata all the way to the beginning of Shadowlands, so a good chunk of time. I resubbed and my character names were gone. I understood why but it still sucked because I ran with that name for a long time. I added the character name to my friends list because I hoped eventually they’d pop on and maybe I could convince them to swap names at my expense. They’ve never logged on and they’ve been a level 22 void elf priest for several years now (I admittedly looked them up on here). Part of me is like “Man I wish they’d free that name again so I could reclaim it” but then another part of me goes “What if he got hit with a life event like I did?” I think that’s Blizz snag too. They don’t want to just go freeing up names when the people leave for a bit because sometimes life just happens and you have to step back for a bit.
I’ll take you at your word then Mira, you’ve always been honest and provided solid info.
This explains a lot and I support it in that case.
you should be required to log into every character to keep its name at least once a month
Pretty sure the button push is automated.
I’m not sure that’s accurate. I would be very surprised that a game of Hearthstone would be enough to preserve the character names on an abandoned WoW license. My interpretation is that any active WoW license on a Battle.net account will safeguard the names of all WoW licenses on that Battle.net account.
In the words of the Kolbolds " You no take name "
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Should be loosened up a bit. IMO, sure make sure people’s former mains with cherished memories don’t get given away too trivially but free up the low level alts just taking up names on accounts not being played anymore.
IMO simplified version of better rules:
Characters level 40 and up: on the same WoW license must: log into the game itself on a character (can be any character, doesn’t have to be a paid account, can be a newly rolled trial restrictions suffering alt) every 5 years or names are freed up
Characters under level 40: if the same WoW license they’re on has not been logged into and at least one character logged into the game world in the last 2 years then the names are freed up.
Characters at or under level 4 (12 for allied races): the name is freed if they are not individually as characters logged into at least once every 2 years
For the 5 year one I think it would be courteous for Blizzard to send an email 90 days before it happens to the registered email saying like “We miss you! We haven’t seen you in a while, in 90 days some of your character names are set to be released”
Originally the mass release system which replaced the ticket a GM and ask for a name system was stricter. It wasn’t any activity on Bnet, it was you had to have activity on your specific WoW account and license, maybe even log into the specific character or something like that. I don’t recall, I just know after one release wave like that or maybe two the standards changed.
It’s absolutely accurate and confirmed by CS.
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well then be surprised, doesn’t even have to be hearthstone, can be CoD or Arclight Rumble even, just as long as it’s an actively used (recently played game) license on the bnet account.
1 new CoD game match every 4 years is enough to keep all the names indefinitely.
This feels like a particularly minor frustration.
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I can back Sendryn up on this. I was in the thread where the blue told a poster this.
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personally, if you can’t log onto wow once in a 12 month period, you don’t really need to hold your name. i can’t have my unaccented name because of the same thing- it’s been since b4 bfa that our guild moved to sargeras, and i have yet to see a Fooki who wasn’t me log on. i have over 50 characters i’ve collected over the years that i haven’t deleted to make room for new ones until the recent change. (i’ve even tried going back to my very first server and make the OG fooki again but couldn’t… and the hunter who is the OG fooki i made back in 04 is still active on my current server… but named Føøkï.
I want to add for everyone crying for low-level alts to lose their name rights and for all alts to need to be logged into to preserve names, many altaholics (a significant portion of playerbase and also a portion of the playerbase most likely to give Blizz the money for multiple accounts each month) would quit at those rules. They have just as much right to a name as you do, and they got to it first. So long as they are playing somewhere on the game, the name of their alt should (I believe) 100% remain theirs.
Now, the WoW account versus bnet login issue is a different subject-- definitely related to the topic and relevant, but not a priority in this reply. My point in this reply is that players who enjoy alts as opposed to investing in a single character have just as much right to a name, and should absolutely not be at risk of losing their name if they’re leisurely leveling alts during an expansion or season’s downtime and then playing their main during the height of these features. Altaholics who do play regularly but may enjoy certain alts to others should not have to worry about losing a name for a character they’ve been working on because they forgot to log into the character in X Amount of Months despite actively playing the game on other alts.
I’m sorry about your inability to get a name, but when something is ‘first come, first serve’ you can’t demand the person in line ahead of you just give up their claim to the item so that you can have it. The name release system, while flawed, is the best compromise (again, in my own opinion) to free up names while protecting the various players who all have different playstyles.
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