The Director of Community in Rift’s forums posted the following thread:
“Hey guys,
We’ve been listening to a lot of your feedback these past couple days and I have some updates for you.
On Wednesday, October 23rd we are going to be resetting inactive character names to free them up for players headed onto new shards.
If one of your characters is going to be impacted by this change, you’ll be getting an email from us in the next day or two with instructions. If you are one of these inactive characters and want to keep your name, you’ll just need to log in with that character before October 23rd.
I also want to let you guys know that everyone who is transferring off a shard that is part of next week’s unification will be receiving a title denoting where they previously hailed from.
And as a final note: I want to personally thank everyone who has talked with me over the past couple days. I’ve had some great conversations and your words have been invaluable to both me and the entire team.”
This attempt to fix inactive character names, which has accumulated possibly due to, what many call, “reserve-your-names-on-every-server-ever” tactics, may at first seem like an awesome idea, but some of the other members posting on the forums had a few criticisms, largely including that players would be notified if one of their characters would be affected, which would potentially void the process. If inactive players wanted to keep the name reserved, even though they don’t play on that server, or at all, they could log in once before the 23rd, successfully depriving someone else of the chance to get the name, and continue to have the name reserved on their ignored character, perpetuating the inactivity.
Players are grateful for the effort, especially considering the present situation has no right or easy solution. Check out whats going on for yourself in the Rift forums.