Friday with Means - December 4th, 2009 - Who is not at the company party? ME!

[Colrain]

Today the entire company (Oslo office at any rate...with a remote Skype presentation from Montreal) gathered at a big cinema to present the progress and development of all the different projects in-house over the last year. As a busy group in our own floor of the Oslo office it is always very exciting to get a look at the progress the other projects have made in the last months...we rarely find the time to drop in on other projects. It was very exciting to get a sneak peak at the Conan expansion and a live look at gameplay in the Secret World. (Apparently I am a Templar already...I can't wait to play it myself!). It was great to share some of the progress we have made over the last year with the rest of the building...a lot of Funcom are AO players from long back...some will be back to try out some of the new systems and additions they hadn't heard of...things get as busy on other teams as they are on ours. With the weekly updates of this post often you guys are better informed than the rest of the company...unfortunately that means this week they are still at the company party and I am at home writing this. If a funeral didn't stop me I guess a party won't either. Any typos in this post I am blaming on foreign contaminants intentionally released into my bloodstream. Asking Kintaii to step in for me this week would have been the worst kind of abuse of my position...damn it was tempting.

German Server Transfer Questions from Shooorty and almost everyone else.

Originally Posted by Means

3. Transfering players with identical names will be able to choose new names soon after transfer. The exact method for this transfer has not been fully determined yet as we are early in the process. There will be a "name clean-up" before transfers start to free up some names that have been dormant for too long.

I hope this all made sense.

Have a great weekend everyone

Means:

How will you determine when/if a name has been dormant for too long? Does this mean you have changed your old rule of not deleting inactive accounts and/or toons higher than lvl 5? Do I need to logg all my toons no matter what level they are or they will be deleted? Including toons on accounts that are paid up, but have just not played AO in awhile?

Do you plan to make an announcement regarding this name clean-up? As I have not seen any announcements on forums or otherwise. I know the guild I am active in has many players that are absent for long periods and then come back ... expecting their toons to still be there.

Colrain

[Noxira]

Means:

How will you determine when/if a name has been dormant for too long? Does this mean you have changed your old rule of not deleting inactive accounts and/or toons higher than lvl 5? Do I need to logg all my toons no matter what level they are or they will be deleted? Including toons on accounts that are paid up, but have just not played AO in awhile?

Do you plan to make an announcement regarding this name clean-up? As I have not seen any announcements on forums or otherwise. I know the guild I am active in has many players that are absent for long periods and then come back ... expecting their toons to still be there.

Colrain

If common sense says anything, I'd imagine they'll just delete characters under level 10 or somesuch that have been sitting in froob accounts unused for a year or two. Highly doubt they'd wipe a 220 that's been away from the game for 6 months.

[SSK]

Last time it was chars under lvl5 and unused for an year iirc

[Autohead]

I think they should change it to like level 50 or hell even level 100, it's not like getting there is difficult whatsoever today.

[Gridpain]

I think they should change it to like level 50 or hell even level 100, it's not like getting there is difficult whatsoever today.

yeah.... and how do you attack/defend TL1/2 fields with level 100 toons ? or enter Totw ?

you leave AO for 1 year, and you come back and all your twinks under 100 are gone ?

not very nice ...

[Autohead]

yeah.... and how do you attack/defend TL1/2 fields with level 100 toons ? or enter Totw ?

you leave AO for 1 year, and you come back and all your twinks under 100 are gone ?

not very nice ...

That's why they will send out an email warning people of their pending character deletion unless they come back. It's a win/win for FC, because undoubtedly, some people will reactivate their accounts so they don't lose their characters. $$$

[Gridpain]

then why put a level limit ... delete 220 too...

[Autohead]

Good idea!

[Crowena]

Send out email about deleting inactive toons and in same email offer 30 days free game time. That would cover it.

[Omutb]

Does this mean you have changed your old rule of not deleting inactive accounts and/or toons higher than lvl 5?

Rule? what rule?

The last time there was a wipe, FC chose level 5 as an arbitrary baseline.

The current standing "rule" is

We will not delete your character until the account has been closed for at least 3 months. It is possible that the characters are kept longer.

[Autohead]

Yep, that gives them a lot of leeway with what characters they can wipe...I for one would like to see something way more harsh than the last purge. I think we all know there are tons of characters out there that were made by people that are never (and I mean never) coming back to AO regardless of what FC does to make it better.

[Dagget]

Just deleting any fr00b chars created during last June's 8th anniversary that have not logged in 5 months will clear quite a few 1,000

[dustmouse]

Just deleting any fr00b chars created during last June's 8th anniversary that have not logged in 5 months will clear quite a few 1,000

I have a feeling some of those very old toons that never got wiped would be more interesting, name-wise. I'm not at all interested in any XxD0rkl0rd666666xx's I see these days. Whenever I want a name that's taken, the toon was last updated in auno in like 2005...

Still, why not rename instead of delete? It's the names we want, right? It's not like FC pays big dollar for storing old character info.

[Omutb]

Id have though, depending on the purpose, that a lowbie wipe AND a name wipe would be useful.

Purge all the inactive orgless toons below a certain level, and change others to Default<n> rather than just deleting them.