This again, last thread is barely necro *sigh* And overall consensus was: Leave our names alone. Think up yer owwn

Nah... Just be creative and don't pick the usual common names. There's no need to delete names from already existing characters.

oxygen_thief wrote: »

i dont understand why should names be unique if we have ids?

It avoids the awkward email-like names... Bob The Builder@oxygen_thief

ESO has some of the most liberal rules on names that it should not be that hard to find the name, albeit with a bit of creative spelling. They allow blank spaces. They allow hyphens. I wanted to name a character Victor, it was taken. But Vic-tor worked just fine.

Just be creative.

IMHO

For the sake of discussion...

You have pointed out that you are not flexible on this issue, so the actual spelling of a name rather than the sound or phonics of the name are what seem to be important. To this I would ask - Why ?

Additionally, what makes you think that even if such a purge is done that whatever your preferred name with the accurate spelling would become available ?

I've had the name I used in my example - Vic-tor - for 5 years. It is not a character I play regularly. When I first started playing ESO you began inside the wailing prison. I saw characters in the prison of level 5 - 10 and sometimes higher and realized that I could simply fight a lot of daedra and increase my level before leaving ( back then the game was Not adjusted to level). The problem - accumulating too much stuff filled my bag. As a new player, wanting to turn everything I could into gold, and finding out I could not mail to characters on my own account, I solved the issue.

I bought a second account. I could fill up my bag, sort what I wanted to keep and mail stuff to Vic-tor to be sold at a vendor. So, Vic-tor is still around. I log in on it every day for the login freebies ( because I just never know when I might want to start playing the account ). But that's it. It's not a character that is active in the game, which is what you want to purge. But your purge would not touch Vic-tor. I would venture that there are probably a lot of players who have second accounts in a similar status.

If someone actually wanted that name with that spelling they still could not get it.

I just don't see how your proposal would have the effectiveness you think it would. After all, Zos is not going to post a list and say " these names in these specific spellings are now available'.

IMHO

I reopened my account last June, after having only played beta + 1 month. Would have sucked to lose my characters name.

So: no. Bad idea.

If you look at my sig you will see how I get around names being used that I want.
Use capital i and a small L

You don't actually need to be all that creative to get around a name being taken. Certainly not as creative as you would in most other MMOs which don't allow spaces or special characters.

In most cases it's as simple as adding a family name or a title. If "Harry" is taken, call him "Harry Jones" or "Cheesemonger Harry". Because of that, even after six years we're still nowhere near having to struggle with trying to create the 957,453rd variation of the name Legolas.

This is not a free to play game. Everyone who paid for this game also paid for keeping character names for the whole game life.

I still wish I had held onto some of the common in demand names on PC EU when I reserved it in early access. I could sell them for a lot of gold now.

As others have said ZOS is unlikely to clear names as it's a massive turn off to a returning players if they've lost their character names. Also there are so many possible names with how ESO's naming rules are set we really are not running out of names.