Assign old accounts a Graal# ID.
 

A lot of people will really hate this idea (as servers STILL aren't supporting Graal# accounts appropriately) and people generally seek the older account name style. However, it has become a trend recently for.. well.. everyone to want their account name (aka community names) to be renamed. This is extremely hard to achieve if you've got an old account. However, if we all had Graal# accounts and our (current) accounts were used as the community name instead, people would be able to get their names changed with ease.

Hell, could even introduce a paid name changing system (only let you change it once!) like Ragnarok and other MMO's do.

Please don't change my account name to a crappy Graal# name.

It's also extremely impractical for servers that have databases based on account name, unless you can lookup the account by both the old and new name.

i dont want my account name to be graal#

change it to use your email instead of a graal#/account, then have the "displayed name" something you can pay to change.

If they were hidden (like they are supposed to be) you wouldn't even notice a difference.

That's something that Stefan should add, not a reason against my idea. Graal# accounts already exist, and there's hundreds of players logging on every day with them.

It can't be done, anyway. As I mentioned via AIM, mentioning it here as well so people can follow:
If you changed "TSAdmin" to "Graal133337", then everything such as subscriptions, e-mail association, variables saved on local servers, attributes everywhere, etc would be looking for TSAdmin, but not finding it ever again.

No.. this is how I gauge whether or not UN is attracting new players.

Well like I said on MSN, only if nothing ingame had ANYTHING to do with account names. Even then though, account names have always been like a "permanent" identity. Graal403830093 means nothing to anyone. There's a lot of Graal#'s on Zodiac and I have yet to identify one with a person. :I

no

People are identified by their community names really. These Graal# names are just scripting tools. You'd be able to have your community name renamed easily, and if you had an account name of something like xCronoxIsxLovex for years you wouldn't lose any of your stats either! Unless of course Stefan couldn't find a work around for what TSAdmin has mentioned, but if he couldn't I wouldn't advocate this idea at all.

I can see where Rufus is coming from, however, I don't think it's the thing to do.

I've had this account name for 10 years. No way.

There is only ONE reason that Graal##### are as bad as people think they are: servers have yet to change from displaying account names to community names, rending the whole system useless. Really, start using communitynames for display and account names for saving data and whatnot already, it's been how many years now?

I don't see what changes? Apparently people don't understand the logic of community and account names :(

I just feel that people will be changing their community names a lot, like nicknames really. :(

It does sound attractive if, as suggested, account names would be completely hidden with community names only being shown ingame.

He mentioned it would be a one-time thing

I will know. I WILL KNOW.

As far as I'm concerned, the older players are scared of these new Graal# accounts because they are not supported at all. People view Graal# accounts as a bastardization of the original account system, but it's not really. Coincidently, I also believe servers don't have the motivation TO support them, because it's something that only really affects new players.

My account name is clean, I have no problem with it what-so-ever, but I see people who have issues with what they had chosen every single day. People want to keep their subscriptions, people want to keep their hours, but they want to be able to rename their accounts and it shouldn't take months of bugging Stefan to do so. This should have been done from the start.

The major two problems are:

• Account names can't be changed without losing all your data. (This is why community names were introduced in the first place.)
• People can change their community names, so it may be possible to silently change your identity with no one noticing (if there are no account names shown anywhere).

alexandralove -> Soala
Gerami -> Crono
whatever chris was -> cbk1994

And I'm pretty sure all those people lost their data on their servers. If not, they had to set up some special deal with whatever server to manually go in and rename all information related to their account (and not all servers can do that).

You can do the #2 right now if you've got a new account. I don't see how it is that much of a problem though.

My account name was never changed. I've myself made a 2nd account and made it gold. I then registered on forums and ONLY the forums stuff were merged to this new account. My old account on forums just now shows as Soala, and I believe it didn't take long to Stefan to do that.

For stuffs ingame, I do have two accounts, and the new one doesn't have the stats and server data of the first one.


That's true, but only once.

more i thinik about it the more i kind of like this idea, mostly because it would force servers to get rid of graal# and work with community names only :3

still think it's a "weaker" identity indicator but whatever

Good. Besides, its a pretty terrible idea because I could see it bringing problems such as, for example, people grabbing another person's old account name. Especially when it works by initially resetting the community names and the account names of all older players..

example: Instead of taking the name "Jiroxys7" for myself, I take a different name. Especially the names of admins. like you, TSAdmin or I could steal the name of any other global. Any player would of course have the opportunity to do this, and it probably would happen, and therefore would result in a massive problem.
To go deeper into a worse-case scenario, a player who intends to scam accounts immediately grabs Stefan's name, or the name of another high-up global. Then the imposter could threaten newbies with claims that their account will be terminated if they dont provide their account info. As well as other things too.

Then there's the lesser, but still serious problem of players stealing the original account names of other players, impersonating other people, which would cause confusion and mayhem I'm sure.

If they did do it, current account names would definitely be assigned as their community name to avoid this.

I'm 99% sure that pre-Graal# accounts already have their account assigned as their community name.

hell no.

Internally, you will always have to use accounts (to store data and so on).

It would be nicer if the accounts were like G# instead of Graal#.

Meh, we wouldn't be in this situation if introduction of community names wasn't so haphazard.

I'd agree with Rufus if it were possible. His idea is valid but it's impossible to rename accounts due to technical limitations. Instead servers should continue working toward no Graal### display. I don't see any technical reason the community name of an account can't be changed, so once those are fixed, no one will know if you have a Graal### or an old name.

If "people" means "players", you're correct. Otherwise, you're completely wrong. There is zero scripting support for community names (not even functions to lookup accounts/community names x_x), little/inconsistent RC support for them, etc.


I can't speak for the others but I've always used 'cbk1994'. I used a different account on the forums initially because my main account didn't have gold so I used my testing account. Once the forums were opened up I just had the forum data transferred to this account. The same was probably done for the others.

:confused:
I wouldn't call that zero.

Edit: Or do you mean zero support as in people not making scripts that are community name aware?

"Zero support" was a hyperbole, sorry about that. The support we have is mediocre and requires each server to keep their own database of accounts and community names. There should be functions such as "getAccount" and "getCommunityName", which I've requested multiple times.

In regards to RC, I've reported all the errors I've noticed which need to be fixed, and although I was told that Stefan was very willing to fix such problems, nothing has been done.

yeah but im speaking from a player's perspective

There's no reason why your old name can't redirect to the same account, it's a small and simple modification.

There is no excuse from a scripting POV to NOT use communitynames extensively whenever in-game commands/displaying require that or account name.

Of course not, but changing complex legacy systems can be very difficult and frustrating, which is probably why most servers haven't yet made the transition.

how about this leave it the same or make people name there own account y change it so they can make more money hell no if they did this ill be done with graal completely

I support this idea. My account name stinks.