Devs: Please consider a full wipe when moving from Closed to Open

The current developer mindset is:

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Chris wrote:

When we enter Open Beta, we will destroy all items and characters and remove the current leagues. You will get clean level 1 characters with your current names.

Source

I believe that instead there should be a full wipe, including character names.

There are currently 318,761 characters according to the ladder.

That's 318k reserved names. The game is still 2 or more months from launch and there's more than a quarter of a million names reserved.

Due to everything being hosted on the same "server" every single character you create, no matter what league it's on, has to have a unique, unused, name. I'm seeing more and more xxx and leet names popping up, and it's because of this enormous swath of character names that are reserved.

Please consider a full wipe on character names so that we don't have to resort to adding random letters into our character names.

+1

Could also be on some kind of timer. Keep names for X amount of days before it is deleted, unless you login to it once. Either way, I agree. Far too many names are taken up already and it will only get worse.

Isn't it reasonable to assume that most of those characters would just be remade by the same people with the same names?

I don't think that would really clear up a significant number of names that anyone but the original player would use. The people who rush to reserve "common" names would just do the same thing as soon as the servers opened up for open beta.

That or just delete/archive names/accounts that haven't been played in the past X months. Put an appropriate warning when creating an account that this will happen and go from there.

I agree with you, Rabbit -- some sort of house-cleaning is necessary here.

If they were to do a full wipe, I'd be a little concerned about name-stealing. While we don't 'own' any of our names, I'd be cut to the core if a wipe happened and someone grabbed 'CharanJaydemyr' or 'Charan_Jaydemyr' before me, just to be spiteful.

...Not saying I personally am that popular, but there are surely some in-game names that I think people do 'own'. Regular, productive community members deserve to keep those names.

I agree, there must be many names that are used up in inactive accounts. This wouldn't be a problem if names were not saved cross leagues.

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Isn't it reasonable to assume that most of those characters would just be remade by the same people with the same names?

Thats not the point at all. The point is to free up names that are taken by accounts / characters going unused.

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Charanjaydemyr wrote:

That or just delete/archive names/accounts that haven't been played in the past X months. Put an appropriate warning when creating an account that this will happen and go from there.

I absolutely loath this practice. 3 different times I lost 1,000+ hours D2 character building and items because my job required that I go overseas for months at a time without game access. I would be very upset if I lost all my PoE progress because I had to deploy again. Players should also be able to take a break from the game without the chore of logging in to keep their accounts active for whenever they decide to pick the game up again.

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Lionguild wrote:

Thats not the point at all. The point is to free up names that are taken by accounts / characters going unused.

Yeah, I said "I don't think that would really clear up a significant number of names that anyone but the original player would use." Sure, there are a lot of names reserved, and a lot of them may not ever be played again. I just don't believe that a significant number of them are names that many people would be vying for. If they are, they're probably not very creative to begin with.

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whiteBoy88 wrote:

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Charanjaydemyr wrote:

That or just delete/archive names/accounts that haven't been played in the past X months. Put an appropriate warning when creating an account that this will happen and go from there.

I absolutely loath this practice. 3 different times I lost 1,000+ hours D2 character building and items because my job required that I go overseas for months at a time without game access. I would be very upset if I lost all my PoE progress because I had to deploy again. Players should also be able to take a break from the game without the chore of logging in to keep their accounts active for whenever they decide to pick the game up again.

While I agree it's far from a good solution, at such times when I've been forced offline for extended periods, I just had a friend log on periodically to make sure this didn't happen to me. I suppose it comes down to how many truly inactive accounts/character names you can free up manually as opposed to automatically, at the risk of some genuinely invested people losing all their stuff. And while you may loathe it from a personal perspective, and for very good reason, can you argue against it from a more objective stance? The fact is we may have tens of thousands of dead/unused names in there that will never be used again. What's the best, most efficient way to clear house?

I like EvE's method. I've 'quit' EvE but I am fairly sure there is a way for me to reactivate my account at any time if I so wish. That's why I also said 'archive', not just 'delete'.

There is a certain man who always trys to steal my name. Hopefully this wipe he will fail.

Objectively, I know there are a plethora of reasons why a player may be away from a game for an extended period of time. I don't see the point in punishing and possibly alienating these players for not playing the game on some arbitrarily-decided regular basis.

Archiving would cause as many issues as it solves. You wouldn't be able to reactivate your character if someone else decided to use the name while you were away. In the end, you still lost your character. There is no way to know which characters will be used again in the future, so one must assume that it's a possibility for all of them. On this assumption, none of those names could be used again fairly. If you assume the opposite, you may as well just delete them instead of archiving.

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Russell wrote:

There is a certain man who always trys to steal my name. Hopefully this wipe he will fail.

There will be a full wipe before the open beta character reset?