You would think that, given NCsoft’s history with MMOs, that they would offer their wisdom to the Aion Development Team in regards to the upcoming server mergers. On that thought, Aion could go to virtually any MMO that has run a server merger in the past and see how they accomplished what must feel like an amazing, never-before-performed feat to the Aion team. As much as I hate to say it, the old method works fine, as follows:
- Character creation for existing accounts is shut off temporarily until the server merge.
- Characters without conflicting names are transferred as-is.
- Characters with conflicting names are given based on seniority (age of the character), presuming the senior character is active.
- Characters forced to change their name are offered free name change tokens.
Instead, Aion is opting to require everyone to change their names, with the inevitable result being that the more famous players will lose their names, players who preordered the higher priced editions just for the early name reservation will be out of luck, and the ensuing clusterload to the servers will end up with thousands of people all trying to get their names back at the same time.
The story gets better. Aion wants you to know that they recognize what a name means to a person. It is not just an identifying set of symbols for you meat sacks, but it gives personality and depth to your toon. So instead of making the process more efficient, Aion is adding another layer of bureaucracy to the mix:
“If you’re unable to regain your name after the server merges, and feel that another player took it to consciously harm you or your reputation, we’ll have a way for you to submit an appeal for manual review (‘manual’ equating to ‘live human being’).”
I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to waste hours trying to access the name change service after the server mergers, only to lose my name and then spend a month or two on the line with customer service trying to negotiate and explain exactly why I think I deserve the name more than the other guy. This is of course before NCsoft tells me that the other person did not constitute name theft.
NCsoft should be paying special attention to players who paid for the ability to reserver their names, and those who paid for the ability to change their names. Those players should either be given priority access (characters who reserved their names should be entered into the new database a day or two early), or at the very least compensated for the money they spent specifically for their names.
According to Community Manager Ayase on the AionSource forums, consideration is being given to name change ticket buyers and preorders (collector’s edition), but nothing is set in stone as of yet.
I can only imagine that NCsoft might have something to do with NCWest’s inadequate tools. More on Aion’s Server merger as it appears.
But wouldn’t it be ironic if enough people left over this that another server merger was needed?
MMO Fallout 