Character Name Policy
This article contains information that no longer applies to the current version of City of Heroes/Villains. It is provided for historical purposes.
Overview
On October 27, 2005, the character name policy in City of Heroes and City of Villains was changed in order to allow names used by inactive accounts to be used by new characters created in active accounts. This was done as a maintenance procedure to cull out the vast collection of idle character names leftover from the past in order for new, active players to be able to use them.
On May 4, 2006, the character name policy was changed again to lift the previous inactment, which once again means all character names are reserved and new characters need a unique name upon creation. Any accounts already affected by this will still have their characters "unreserved" until said character is logged in though.
Policy Details
The policy change affected all accounts that had been inactive for over 90 days. This only applied to accounts that were disabled in some way, such as payment expiration or account suspensions. Accounts that were still being paid for, but simply not used for 90 days, were not affected.
Any character on such an account that was less than level 35 had its name moved over to "unreserved" status, which allowed any new character on the server to be created with that name. In the event this happened, the original character under the name would be prompted to choose a new name upon login. In order to return a character's name to "reserved" status, the user must log the character in question into the game. As such, it was possible that a player could be actively using an account with characters whose names were still set to "unreserved" status.
When "unreserved" status was assigned to a name, the following changes were applied to the affected character:
- A new character name needed to be chosen (if past name had been taken)
- The character's description and battle cry were cleared
- The character's Friends list were cleared
- All Mail received was cleared
- The character was removed from their super group, if any
- Characters affected will be missing from other peoples' friends lists
- Any and all mail that other players have received from an affected character will have reverted to having been sent from "Unknown"