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Now that blizzard is allowing anyone to change their name for 10 bucks isn't it going to make the data on here wrong for at least 30 days until inactives drop off?

I am assuming there will be hundreds if not thousands of name changes every week for a while, and it could remain constant.

Yeah, I'm not sure what they were thinking with this. Now people won't even have to change their realm to escape their history

Well, I mean I know what they were thinking - another way to milk players for even more money But still...

Yes it will affect the data here. As the data is tracked by the name of the person. But I dont think it will be effected with the activity of the players at all. The only thing I see is that Rollie will be looking at alot more information in his tables that contain the history of the player. But I dont see it affecting the activity ratios of the realms. But it will affect the history of the player as they won't have a history upon changing names.

If you can change names I dont see a reason why my GM request to change Lapriest's face is constantly ignored.

Mmmm, as DM stated activity levels will still be ok, characters seen in last 30 days will get a slight boost, a little more than from char transfers back and forth. The real beneficiaries of this are of course people with really bad reputations that won't have to change server to change name, now they can simply pay the $10 and go back to ninja'ing, spouting racist slurs, scam, double team with someone of opposing faction (PvP server) or whatever other cozy li'l quirks made them famous in the first place.

Character history will still have a use though, unless they pick a name that already has an ok history and is no longer on the server they will end up without history which to me would send up all sorts of warning flags.

Um, and having tried to create a character on an older server recently I would hope they don't charge unless you actually find a name you're ok with changing to... every good name and different spellings seem to be taken already...

double teaming? explain.

on a PvP server you're not allowed to have characters on the other faction, a certain infamous hunter on Bleeding Hollow/Alliance used to team up with a couple of Horde friends by acting as a scout for them and helping them kill alliance... Needless to say it was rather frustrating dealing with it since there was absolutely nothing we could do to him, this guy was actually so blatant that he got a 3 day suspension for it (this was before his account got permabanned for naming his pet the N----- word)... there are other words for it as well i guess and there are a lot of other ways to bend or break the rules, the bottom line is I wouldn't trust anyone without a character history in an MMO, if you were a member of a guild that's well known for racism, cheating, loot stealing etc. I will expect you to show your true colors eventually.

Oh that? I just help relay hateful messages from my nemesis's guild from back in my PvP days. it's hillarious!

- Way to moonfire! That take class
- better than spammin 3 buttons

etc etc... How do the people of the same faction help in killing fellow hordies/alliance? Xfire for the win

xfire:hybuir (of course)

As someone on the official forums pointed out, it's unlikely that the actual name of a character would be the primary key in their database - thus, when a character changes their name it will also change if they're on your friends' list, ignore list, if they've sent you mail etc.

Thus to keep track of someone all you'd need to do is make a level 1 alt, add the person as their only friend, and then keep checking the Friends tab to see what their current name is. Not too much of a burden. I imagine many guilds will 'friend' gkicked players on a bank alt to use as a checklist against futre applications too.

Well, the real problem with the friend list thing is that other guilds wouldn't necessarily know the name change, so the person could still continue their reign of ninjaing or whatever from guild to guild. Although, I assume people could relay information on name changes of ninjas and such on the realm forums or something like that, since most guilds seem to have at least one or two people that can actually stomach the blizzard forums.

As far as the double teaming thing goes, we had quite a few instances of that on Mal'Ganis, particularly when the fishing tournament first came out. I think there were around 15 players involved total, about half from each faction. They would choose one person to fish to win, and the other 14 would kill off the competition. It worked amazingly well for them... it was like trying to fish against the mafia They got reported but none of them ever got any bans to my knowledge, and they definitely did it until all of them had won the fishing championship.

Tartara wrote:As someone on the official forums pointed out, it's unlikely that the actual name of a character would be the primary key in their database - thus, when a character changes their name it will also change if they're on your friends' list, ignore list, if they've sent you mail etc.

Thus to keep track of someone all you'd need to do is make a level 1 alt, add the person as their only friend, and then keep checking the Friends tab to see what their current name is. Not too much of a burden. I imagine many guilds will 'friend' gkicked players on a bank alt to use as a checklist against futre applications too.

I don't think that theory works unless they have changed it. I had a close friend on my premade pvp team back before AB, Eots, etc. We destroyed people all day long. Well one day after some smack talking an alliance guild turned in a report on my friend for having an inappropiate name of PkPkay. He was on my friends list. When he logged back on it showed him online as PkPkay, but when you whisper it said player not available. There was no way to know what his named changed to unless he let you know. His name was changed to Kurei.

Seem like it will only effect one day of activity.

Good part of the mod and website is if not seems to remove data after so many days. I think he keeps name in the database but it will not effect the data as a whole. The 30 day limit change was a great idea for a lot of reasons.

Little off the poster topic:

Sure not the only one here that prunes the mod once a week. This lowers the upload times, In doing this helps the server update data faster.

Just wish the mod auto pruned daily to the set 30 days. Now if only we could make census+ so it stops at lvl 10. 1-9 characters throw the real numbers off on our side. The false data is from when a server is down and ppl flood into other servers. This is just an idea for the next update to census+.
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Dromic wrote: Just wish the mod auto pruned daily to the set 30 days. Now if only we could make census+ so it stops at lvl 10. 1-9 characters throw the real numbers off on our side. The false data is from when a server is down and ppl flood into other servers. This is just an idea for the next update to census+.

The census takes data for levels 1-10 for your viewing pleasure, but if you look at the data, and the disclaimer it shows that only levels 11-70 are recorded in the census stats when you upload them to the site.

Yeah, I usually keep mine pruned to the last 15 days or so (courtesy of /censusplus prune 15) to keep my display accurate. I do think it would be useful to be able to at least prune out 1-9 (or 10, whichever) in game to get the most accurate numbers in terms of class ratio and balance at a glance. I realize that it would throw off the "new" characters statement at the end of the census, but that wouldn't bother me much

I could add in options for both autoprune, as well as not count chars under level 10.

Also, on the name change front. Honestly, I didn't think many people would likely use this service. I mean, personally, I become fairly attached to my characters and their names by the time I've leveled them to 70. Why would I want to change the name? Obviously others do not feel the same though. Since the name change offer has gone in, at least 4 of my guildies have changed their names. That's a lot more than I would have expected.

I'm sure some people have kept anchor characters to reserve their old names.

I don't think name changes are going to be as rampant as you think.

Even with a substantial amount of name changes it will only be periodic; the data will self-correct rather quickly. As stated above, only the "History" will change, considering even my deleted characters are still logged.

Well the influx of numbers is going to be there. As far as how it'll affect character interaction, it will substatially. Of course there will be the people that do it as a novelty or as a midlife crisis per sa.

Of course they'll be more of a temptation to ninjar that one item or go on a rampage. People don't remember players faces, gear can be changed, and ninjas arent always up front about it ... and even if they were there's always the "QQ nub L2masterloot" response from the community.