If a merge ever happens

[Anjou]

Will there be a system in place that allows a player to retain their name if an inactive character has been inactive for a set amount of months/years?

[Mirage]

I hope so. Losing your name to a character which has been inactive for 4+ years would be pretty shitty.

[Anjou]

Yeah hence why I wanna make sure if my server gets dumped into another, I don't lose my name.

That's seriously not cool that we gotta change our names when the other person is no longer paying the bill on their character anymore.

[Sapphire]

Will there be a system in place that allows a player to retain their name if an inactive character has been inactive for a set amount of months/years?

No. They've said repeatedly the name system won't allow for that. I imagine the insane amount of recoding would likely break the game. If you're a source server, you're just out of luck. Their compromise last time was to freeze character creation on target servers to prevent outright name theft but I don't see them pulling anything else off.

[Mirage]

What the first mergers didn't but probably should have done, is to let the oldest character keep their names if there was a conflict. The merger process paid no attention to who had been around the longest, it automatically screwed over whoever happened to be unlucky enough to not be on the target world.

I suggest that in an upcoming world merger, the holders of accounts that have been inactive for more than a year should be sent an e-mail asking them to log into the Square Enix account management system and confirm that they still want to keep their character names. Seeing as SE knows which names are taken on which servers, this process could be started several weeks in advance, so that those who did not respond to the requests before the merger too place automatically lost dibs on their name at the moment the worlds were merged. That way, there would be no players stuck in limbus where they had to wait for old players to make up their mind before they could log in.

To raise the bar for really oldtime players who might just say that they want to keep it "just in case", but have no real intention of actually restarting, perhaps accounts that have been inactive for more than 4 years should require them to reactivate for at least one month if they wanted to keep their character names. Of course, they'd still keep their actual character data even if they chose not to do this

[Brightshadow]

Or they could just delete the character date of any person that has been inactive for the last 4 years that would free up alot of names, and those people are unlikely to come back.

[Dragomair]

Or they could just delete the character date of any person that has been inactive for the last 4 years that would free up alot of names, and those people are unlikely to come back.

Deleting characters is never a solution.
I'd suggest a feature for the first to attempt to log into a character with a name already in use they could choose to keep their existing name (forcing the other to change) or choose to change their own character name.

[Sfchakan]

Did you really need to post about this again already? I mean, I guess it's been a whole two weeks (http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxi/threads/39628-Eventual-Server-Merge-idea) since your last thread about it.

[Anjou]

Did you really need to post about this again already? I mean, I guess it's been a whole two weeks (http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxi/threads/39628-Eventual-Server-Merge-idea) since your last thread about it.

Your point is?