Darth_Halford
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Posts posted by Darth_Halford
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For the same reason that chatting with a friend on Facebook isn't quite the same as sitting in the same physical space with them, interacting with surrounding things and seeing the other person.
Except that even if the characters are right next to you, your actual physical proximity is still as far as away as it ever was. There also isn't alot of real interaction between characters. The important bit is conversation.
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All this patent-troll crap and the frivolous litigation that follows should be kept to the real world. There's no way in hell anyone can make money of a trademark/brand name by using the name on a silly little MMO character, and that's what copyrights are all about, isn't it?
If people can get full-time pay by being a League of Legends blogger, what makes it so hard to believe that nobody would make money with a MMO character that's named from a derived source?
That is also completly moot point. Copyright and Intellectual Property Law doesn't discriminate wether you made money off of it or not. If the holder of that Copyright or IP forbids you to use it, than that's the end of it.
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The fault here lies solely with Bioware who should have had the proper foresight to allow characters with multiple names which the cannons supports.
Period.
Easier said than done mate. Legacy throws that all out the window. Game has to keep Legacy unique per server and account, and character names unique so it knows what Legacy to associate with.
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Only two of them speak Basic, which is a dealbreaker.
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The thing is that The Old Republic's setting is all about war and conflict. Having housing and all of this 'social' stuff anywhere outside the capital worlds won't make a lot of sense.
I don't quite get the need for your characters need to be next to each other. Being social, to me, just requires communication, which can be anywhere.
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Picking a name isn't something I do randomly. I'm not even going to play a character that I don't consider to have some kind of identity. For me, that's part of the immersion that connects me to my character and my character to the storyline aspect of the game.
I actually doubt that when you call the traditional route of creating "real" names for characters a "new fangled hippy thing" and when your character list looks like words picked randomly out of a Thesaurus.
you know that old line "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet"? There's alot to that, and again I have trouble really buying into this idea that the only "identity" you can provide your characters is by a name that was spawned from the dictionary. With all of the plotlines, the nuances, and everything that tries to immerse yourself in a Star Wars Universe, the part that connects you is with names that have absolutly no part in the franchise?
I'm not calling you a liar, but that sounds incredibly hard to believe.
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Clearly you're not a fan of Role Playing Games either, because making actual names for your actual characters is not a "new age hippy thign" but a staple of the genre as far back as the pen and paper days.
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The fact that I was able to make the character with the name says it all. I even rerolled the character after patch 1.2 because I had made several human characters, and I would rather level up a different race to get a new legacy unlock. So even some time after patch 1.2, people could still name their characters Bane. It wasn't until the launch of the latest Batman movie that the name suddenly got added to the prohibited list. So what if someone makes a movie next year with the name of one of your own charcters? Must Bioware then add that name to the prohibited list and ask you to rename your character? It all starting to get a bit ridiculous. If someone owns the copyright on the word Bane, what about Reaper, or Grace, or Titan? Nvidia just launched a new series of graphics cards named Titan. Did they own that word? Where does it stop?
It makes me wonder sometimes, just how many words in the dictionary are copyright protected? And how many word-combinations? Why does it even matter what we call our characters in a silly gameworld anyway? Even if my character was named Superman, it's not like I would be earning money off the brandname or anything. Would DC seriously sue some random guy on the other side of the planet for having a character named Superman? I could buy some random.com and make a forum just to call myself Superman on that forum. Would DC sue me over that? It's crazy. I could understand that since this is a SW game, they'd put in rules about not allowing names like Skywalker, but if you're going to disallow every word in the dictionary because someone copyrighted that word, then we'd be left with names looking like encryption keys. I'd seriously like someone to explain it to me why MMO's bother adding all these restrictions. Fear of litigation? That's ridiculous!
A) If you made a truely original name the chances of another source of media creating the same name is incredibly slim
B) Batman film or not, it's certainly not an original name. Even without the film it would still be against policy.
C) It's far from rediculous. It's par the course for the genre and you (apparently) being a veteran to MMO's would know that this isn't just EA's policy or some draconian measure to persecute you.
D) So long as your not using the dictionary to create your character it doesn't matter how many of them are protected. And why, in a Star Wars RPG, would you ever want to do something like that?
E) DC and Marvel both sued City of Heroes about characters named and made to resemble theirs.
F) there's a certain level of immersion that gets broken by these kinds of shenanigans. If it were me, any name that was not "real" or was derived from another source would be against policy.
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They could have simply set up new servers and given everyone a fair chance. First come, first serve. It's that simple.
That doesn't solve a damned thing. That doesn't create fewer upset customers, it simply changes who is upset and who is "okay".
You're not really interested in conflict resolution. Your focus is solely on self.
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For what it's worth, there is no indication that characters are timestamped for when they are created.What I don't get in this is that there didn't seem to be any eye for seniority as in who got the name first but being merged onto an existing server meant that whoever was on that server already got first dibs basically.
This also doesn't REALLY adress the problem for one of two reasons.
A) it is entirely possible that those other characters were created before yours and you still would have had to change your names.
B) It actually makes more unhappy customers. Even if "Seniority" is employed the bulk of transferring players would not be able to save all of their characters. So now you still have upset customers, but now you have players who don't have to transfer and have to change their names to accomadate somebody else.
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I may be a bit judgemental, but Star Wars nerds can be a rather finicky bunch.
There were riots in the streets over wether Han shot first or not. There are people who STILL refuse to associate with the franchise because of that, over 15 years later.
If you take that level of enthusiasm and put it in an MMO, it's like giving speed to someone with anger management problems.
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I can actually sympathize with the OP a bit. I purchased the game before I had even played in beta, just because I was so excited for a Star Wars MMO game (Yes I played galaxies, but quit shortly after the disaster of NGE)
I was pretty angry when I lost one of my name's during that period, as I had my actual, real full name... First name was my real name and legacy name was my last name... I thought it was really exciting to have a toon that looked a lot like me and had my actual name... So yeah, I thought it was really dumb that through no fault of my own, that name was taken away from me (Server transfers opened while I was at work, so by the time I had access to a computer to switch servers my name had already been taken)
This could have been handled a lot better, like a lot of things could have been handled better... What I will say is this to the OP... It was a long long time ago dude... Time to let go... The loss of my name has not in any way effected my enjoyment of the game nor should it have effected yours. Was it annoying? Yes! Was it a deal breaker? Well if it was than you are far to invested in this game and need to get outside for a bit...
Everybod who got "screwed" says that they could have "handled it better"
I would really like to know how this could have been improved, cause I don't see a win-win scenario in this anywhere.
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I'd like to just throw out an observation.
Hoodling is automatically assuming that he made the characters on his server, before the other person on that server, made theirs.
It is entirely possible that whoever owns those characters was also a pre-order guy who did exactly what he did and may have even gotten it sooner and was actually able to level those characters up...
But it's easier to just assume the "me first" mentality that obviously he's the one that deserves those names and not the person who doesn't have to move from one server to another and may value their character names just as much as he does.
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Think theres a lot of us out there still a little sore about this issue to be honest. Lost my mains name ( 5O Marauder ) to a fresh toon whom has since disappeared leaving it attached to a lvl 30 toon that is no longer played. thats friggin infuriating
That person just might come back and play that character some day. I'm not aware of any MMO that goes "well this character hasn't been touched in _____ amount of time, so we're going to open that up to someone else."
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Personal opinion, but a characters name should be a "real" name, and not just a word or swagaussarusrex.
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To speak plainly your character names are crap.
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well if you turn off names altogether than I'm lost as to how this makes any kind of a difference.
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The two key problems I see with that is how do you work that out with Republic/Empire relations, and what about times when individuals are Rival's or Enemy's of the character?
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Since your legacy name is always available to be presented, why not just make a call-out for that Legacy on all of your characters?
It seems the much simpler way of going about things.
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you pay for the game and the content that is available to you at the time that you're playing it and nothing beyond. Since you didn't pay for Makeb specifically, how do you get your money back?
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I just thought of the imperial counterpart to Leia's archetype, Jabba the Hutt. I don't mean physically but story wise. As for gameplay the only way to make them different from other classes is to make them pet classes on top of being able to use companions. Bodyguards for Leia and beasts for Jabba.
That's a good call. They start on the same basics: have wealth and influence to get what they want. Where as the "Noble" route is to use it to benefit the good of many, the Crime Lord is to increase the wealth of a few.
The important disinction to make is how it differs from the Scoundrel class thematically, and the first thing coming to mind is war profiteering. This class wants the war to keep going, and will use the vehicle of Imperial Conquest to benefit personally.
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The type of story that Bioware did in this game is just not that complex though, at least compared to their single player games. That's mostly due to the limits of the MMO genre. There's some pretty good story moments, but the complete lack of consequence and all of the contrivances involved with every character having to go to every planet at specific points in the story make the overall experience into something that's pretty shallow, when all is said and done.
Stories such as the ones that this game has would have little problems being adapted to a more open ended world. The Elder Scrolls series has been doing broad gameplay with a shallow story for years.
Elder Scrolls is also largely a case of content driving story, rather than story driving content. I think it would be an absolute tradgedy (as well as piss poor game design) to make a game that has so much story content involved, and than make it completly optional.
The rigidness of the plot is not that far of a deviance from the norm in Bioware games, particularly the last one. In ME3, the actual story followed a very rigid series of events with a sprinkling of diversions that helped build up the war effort. In the previous games, you were in control of which order you went in, but you still had to go do all of them sooner or later.
The reasoning why TOR doesn't act like those games, or KOTOR for that matter, is that we are dealing with a persistent online environment that multiple people are using at once.
They can't change the level of the mobs on a dynamic level like they did with KOTOR or ME without instancing or phasing EVERYTHING like Guild Wars and its sequel do.
I also can't think of any game that has told 8 completly different, fully voiced and animated narratives at the same time.
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Imagine playing SW:TOR. You join the game as a jedi, level through tython and corusant, learning the basics of the game, learning your "class" etc. but, imagine that after corusant the game simply opened up and let you do your own thing. Imagine quests that scaled to your level and group size. Imagine dynamic quests so if you found somewhere you really liked, you could just keep generating quests and leveling up over and over. Imagine a crafting system with more freedom to choose stats on items when crafted, but that needed replacing rather than just repairing. Make 90% of all hubs and bases neutral to encourage full planetary exploration and crossover between factions. Bioware could even keep their story in there, linear quest routes are not the only way to tell a story, in fact it is the least imaginative way to do so as it removes all control from the player.
It is actually the only way to tell a story in a traditional narrative fashion. I don't know what other games you've played over the years, but you can't have the kind of story that Bioware does and at the same time give the player ultimate control.
There's the difference between the story driving the content, and the content driving the story. Bioware has always been first and foremost about story driving content. Sure, your idea may be interesting and fun to certain people. You could even argue that one method of game design is always going to be "better" than another (which I say is an absolute impossibility). At the end of the day though, if you're trying to make the best story-driven game you can possibly make, you will never get there by using sandbox gameplay.
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Based off the movies? It's based off a time in SW history from books.
While the lore may be,the character archtypes and narrative thematics are all based off of the movies.
Screwed over by Bioware!
in General Discussion
Posted
If the fact that your character names are "epic" is not what you wanted to convey to people than why even put in the original thread? Why even display the names of your characters?
Why post on here if you said before that you didn't care what people said?
What do you REALLY expect to happen? You're not going to get your name(s) back, and there's nothing they could have done to avoid this problem. (your previous idea of a completly fresh server to transfer to would only change who is upset, not make fewer people upset)