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Can't bring up my old character name anymore?


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Heya,

Haven't played in over a year... starting back up and now it won't let me start my "Peorth" character again? Says it already exists. Can anyone check if someone really has that character or if the game just forgot that I had that character a year ago?

Thanks,

Peorth
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The character name "Peorth" is taken on another account. How long ago was it that you last played? There must have been a wipe between then and now, otherwise that other character couldn't have been created with that name, although the last character wipe was quite a while ago.

Also, "Vash" seems to be a character on another account as well (different from the one with "Peorth" on it).
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[quote name='C Del' timestamp='1300263616' post='36653']
The character name "Peorth" is taken on another account. How long ago was it that you last played? There must have been a wipe between then and now, otherwise that other character couldn't have been created with that name, although the last character wipe was quite a while ago.

Also, "Vash" seems to be a character on another account as well (different from the one with "Peorth" on it).
[/quote]

Thanks for responding C Del! Appreciate it... I opened up a ticket to discuss this : 829224

I last played about a year ago.

Interestingly enough, I can now play my lower level chars just fine, but my higher level chars (except for one) such as Peorth and Vash are missing in action. Since most of my chars now seem available to play, the issue doesn't appear to be around a wipe. There seems to be something either preventing me from playing these few characters, or somehow, someone physically deleted my chars from the database and that opens up a bigger can of worms.

I listed my accounts on the ticket.

Thanks again for your time!
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[quote name='Tienbau' timestamp='1300335221' post='36721']
there was a player wipe late 2009 I think. It's all a bit of a blur now!

Also I gather 'Peorth' is a fairly well known name so it makes sense someone is wandering around called that - they're a high level char too.
[/quote]

I last had all my characters as of May 20, 2010 as per my chat logs. That is the last day I played the game until a few days ago. So if there is another Peorth besides mine, that one had to be created sometime after May 20, 2010... and that doesn't make sense any if there was no wipe after May 2010.

As per the ticket I opened, there is a file located at : ...\earth & Beyond\Data\client\output\shortcut.ini that has a history of all my chars "hotkeys" since I started playing the emulation and throughout each wipe I can provide as proof if needed.
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[quote name='Peorth' timestamp='1300343024' post='36726']
I last had all my characters as of May 20, 2010 as per my chat logs. That is the last day I played the game until a few days ago. So if there is another Peorth besides mine, that one had to be created sometime after May 20, 2010... and that doesn't make sense any if there was no wipe after May 2010.

As per the ticket I opened, there is a file located at : ...\earth & Beyond\Data\client\output\shortcut.ini that has a history of all my chars "hotkeys" since I started playing the emulation and throughout each wipe I can provide as proof if needed.
[/quote]

If it helps anymore, I also have a couple screenshots of Peorth's ship and equipment taken last year. Unfortunately, you can't see Peorth's name in the pics, but you can see her ship name clearly.
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I'm not really sure what happened. I see evidence that at one time you had a 5th character on your account, although I can't tell what its name was. The only way the character could be gone is if it was deleted through the game.

Tienbau, can we switch to soft deletes? I assume we're using an SQL "DELETE", which seems like it might be an unsafe practice and complicates issues like this a bit.
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[quote name='C Del' timestamp='1300346646' post='36731']
I'm not really sure what happened. I see evidence that at one time you had a 5th character on your account, although I can't tell what its name was. The only way the character could be gone is if it was deleted through the game.

Tienbau, can we switch to soft deletes? I assume we're using an SQL "DELETE", which seems like it might be an unsafe practice and complicates issues like this a bit.
[/quote]

Curious, if there's a "soft delete" and I have to re-roll a toon, absent a player wipe, does that mean that I have to give that toon a different name? Or does that mean that the server keeps a record of the name with the account that had it? If that's the case would said char name be re-usable, but only on the account that originally had it?
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[quote name='C Del' timestamp='1300346646' post='36731']
I'm not really sure what happened. I see evidence that at one time you had a 5th character on your account, although I can't tell what its name was. The only way the character could be gone is if it was deleted through the game.

Tienbau, can we switch to soft deletes? I assume we're using an SQL "DELETE", which seems like it might be an unsafe practice and complicates issues like this a bit.
[/quote]

Well, I know that I didn't delete my Peorth character (or my other missing in action chars : Kenshin and Vash), so I'm not sure what happened. I'm curious, if there is an existing "Peorth" floating around, if I told you her ship's name, can we tell if that character is really mine and somehow ended up in limbo or someone somehow deleted mine Peorth and created another one?

In my ticket, I also mentioned the same thing happened for 2 other "missing in action" characters of mine : Vash and Kenshin... so I'd be curious if you can see if they look like they are in a similar situation as Peorth?

I can also provide my email addresses (outside of this forum) to see if the email address matches Peorth's/Vash's/Kenshin's accounts... though I would need to guess which of my email address pertained to which account... :)

Unfortunately, my ticket on this was closed because the assumption was a wipe, but since there was no wipe in the past 10 months, I don't think that is the issue.

Thank you for your efforts!
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[quote name='C Del' timestamp='1300346646' post='36731']
I'm not really sure what happened. I see evidence that at one time you had a 5th character on your account, although I can't tell what its name was. The only way the character could be gone is if it was deleted through the game.
[/quote]

Actually, my first and fifth slots were erased on one account (Peorth was is the first slot, but when her slot came up empty this past weekend, I created "Peorthsama" in that slot thinking that "Peorth" was forever lost, then someone recommended to me that I really should try to see if I can get my missing chars back) and the fifth slot (if I remember correctly) on my other account. These three slots represent Peorth, Vash and Kenshin.

Thanks.
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WRT to having soft deletes:

I guess you could transfer deleted chars to another separate database, but really, why? Seems like a big waste of disk space. Once you hit delete, the char should be gone.

Also you couldn't just transfer the chars directly because you'd need to support multiple deletes on the same character index. So you'd need to create another table to link a sequential indexing system to accounts.

It's all doable, but I can't see the point. You'd have to delete older records periodically.

[quote name='Peorth' timestamp='1300400137' post='36774']
Actually, my first and fifth slots were erased on one account (Peorth was is the first slot, but when her slot came up empty this past weekend, I created "Peorthsama" in that slot thinking that "Peorth" was forever lost, then someone recommended to me that I really should try to see if I can get my missing chars back) and the fifth slot (if I remember correctly) on my other account. These three slots represent Peorth, Vash and Kenshin.

Thanks.
[/quote]

could you PM me the name of your account, ie the login name you use at the Megan screen?
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Just wanted to let everyone know that I've been in contact with Tienbau and it looks like there is not much that can be done. What seems to hurt the most here is not that I lost a maxed out character in Peorth, but rather that I lost my signature character name that I had through EVERY stress test. Peorth was one of the first Privateers in the game and people know me most through that avatar.

It's unfortunate that now when I log into the game with one of my other characters and someone will mention that they saw "Peorth" perhaps a month ago and wondered why they never got a response when they sent a /tell.

I appreciate the efforts that the devs and GMs did to research the issue. I do think the bigger problem is that there is an issue that characters can just disappear and nobody knows how that can happen. The intriguing thing is that it happened to my highest level characters which I'm not sure is coincidental. I can only hope I manage to get back my Peorth avatar come the next stress test.

Thanks to everyone who looked into this.

By the way, in regards to Terrell's idea... I do think flagging a record as being "logically" deleted as oppose to physically deleting a record has some merit... then perhaps after 18 months - 24 months of non-activity on the account that owns the character, then perhaps a physical delete could automatically be done. Just a thought.
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[quote name='Tienbau' timestamp='1300405107' post='36778']
WRT to having soft deletes:

I guess you could transfer deleted chars to another separate database, but really, why? Seems like a big waste of disk space. Once you hit delete, the char should be gone.

Also you couldn't just transfer the chars directly because you'd need to support multiple deletes on the same character index. So you'd need to create another table to link a sequential indexing system to accounts.

It's all doable, but I can't see the point. You'd have to delete older records periodically.
[/quote]
If it were that complicated, I wouldn't even think about using soft deletes, but I don't think it has to be.

We're going to be using indexed tables for most if not all avatar data now, so those rows in each table stay occupied regardless of whether the character exists/is used or not. We can just add a "deleted" field to avatar_info, then just ignore those characters when sending the char selection packet and when checking for pre-existing character names. When you'd create a new character in that slot, you'd just overwrite the old data. Some special measures would have to be taken to clear out some of the old data, but it wouldn't be too bad. That way we could, theoretically, get accidentally deleted characters back, provided they weren't overwritten. Of course, I wouldn't encourage that as a general practice, as it's far too nanny-like. More importantly, we'd have the ability to figure out what happened here, and we might have been able to get "Peorth" back, albeit with a little name change.

My reasoning is simply that all these rows are being used anyway, so why bother deleting them? We'll have to perform routine database maintenance to clear out unused junk eventually anyway, unless we plan on going all out on a seriously upgraded, distributed database system. :D (Non-Staff: That's a joke - we don't have that kind of cash)
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As an interesting aside, one thing I learned from this... although I only have my chat sessions starting from 1/1/2010... during the 5 months that I played Peorth last year, from the chat log, I can see that she manufactured well over 500 items (got tired of counting)! She's a machine! :D LOL.
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[quote name='Tienbau' timestamp='1300425243' post='36799']
I thought you meant keeping an archive of deleted chars !
[/quote]
:D The very thought makes me want to run and hide.
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Where I work, we have an internal web application that uses a similar type of aliased login (multiple alias can be used with a single login) and if someone deletes an alias we don't actually delete it from the database. We use a char(1) column titled active that has two values, either 1 for active or 0 for inactive. Then any queries we use to pull alias from that database just have to add a simple where clause (where active = '1'). And then we have a module created that if someone wants to reuse an old alias that was deleted, we pull all alias based on their login id and set active back to '1' on the one they want back.
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[quote name='Seeker' timestamp='1300452802' post='36817']
Sorry to hear about your lost toon, Peorth. But about the not deleting until stuff, how would you handle the case of someone wanting to use the same name again.
[/quote]
We would allow the new character to be registered with that name. The character that had been "soft deleted" would be considered gone - if someone wanted to get that character back later, they'd have to rename it. Keep in mind, it's unlikely that we'll make a policy of allowing such character restorations though. It's (usually) easy enough to avoid clicking your character, clicking "Delete Character", and then confirming the decision while your character pleads for his/her life. :P
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[quote name='Seeker' timestamp='1300452802' post='36817']
Sorry to hear about your lost toon, Peorth. But about the not deleting until stuff, how would you handle the case of someone wanting to use the same name again.
[/quote]

Thanks for your sympathy on losing Peorth... Peorth was my signature avatar, but ultimately, I lost 2 more characters besides Peorth and those 3 characters combined is a loss of about 400 levels... ugh.

I do believe there should be some sort of "reservation" date on character names (or even the whole character) after being deactivated... maybe 30 days or such in case there is a glitch in the system that deletes characters without the owner's consent, as we know can happen like in my case. The clock on the 30 days would start as soon as the owner replaced the specific character's slot with another character (meaning if the owner keeps the slot empty, the character name stays reserved under the account so that only that specific account can re-use the name)...

That would certainly have made sure I would have at least have the "Peorth" name when I came back to the game after being gone for 8 months... it would also had made sure I had a Peorth character to come back to if the process was followed for the whole character (as oppose to just the name).

Just something to consider at some point after the next wipe.

Just a thought. Edited by Peorth
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[quote name='C Del' timestamp='1300472971' post='36826']
It's (usually) easy enough to avoid clicking your character, clicking "Delete Character", and then confirming the decision [b]while your character pleads for his/her life[/b]. :P
[/quote]

I Love that when they do that!
I sometime just make a newbie character just to see them squirm when i press the delete button.
Makes me laugh every time.
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