I’d love this!
Personally my name would just be xuefei, but that name is taken and the account hasn’t been used for ages!
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I mean, Roblox has the right to take any username and any account at any time. That’s what they signed up to. I don’t see your point when we’re talking about accounts that have no play time and have been inactive for years - very likely to be forgotten. Plus as mentioned, an email would be sent out to the attached email. If they don’t do anything about it, then they are likely to not come back. Even if they do, it’s one username they made years ago and did nothing with. It’d be put to better use, probably.
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I feel like if we were ever going to release unused usernames we shouldn’t have allowed username changing. I personally own like 30+ usernames, and I doubt Roblox is going to take away usernames that people paid for.
As soon as usernames become available people will just buy them to add them to their active accounts and therefore keep them forever.
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Roblox does, but other players don’t. Recycling usernames is effectively some player taking your username at some given time, which is not what was signed up for, as usernames are non-transferrable.
It’s an incredibly short-sighted request anyway, for example: people shouldn’t be allowed to steal the usernames of historic figures such as Are92 or Miked or Clockwork or Koopa etc.
Once you’ve got your arbitrary ruleset as to what names can and can’t be taken, there’s the next hurdle of some guy just hoarding all of them or some guys automating hoarding all of them. Then they’ll make sure to have some yearly chron job log into the account and keep it forever. Which renders the entire endeavour pointless.
It’s okay to be very jealous of early birds. Just wait for the next legalized character in usernames, alright? Surely you’ll get your epic namesnipes then.
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Could also do it like how Youtube does, for popular channels/users you’ll get a check mark by your name
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I don’t really think you’re understanding what I’ve been saying. I don’t want people to take old, famous peoples’ names. I’m sure this can be done in a way that makes it difficult or impossible to hoard names. A few ways I could think of would be a higher cost in ROBUX, only transferable to active accounts or a limited amount of names you can take. I’m sure there’d be other ways, but I’m not one of the web engineers so I wouldn’t know what would be most effective.
Some people do want namesnipes, and that’s fine. A name like Script, or Bean (https://www.roblox.com/users/50488/profile) would be pretty cool, especially seeing it active instead of locked away for nobody to use. That would be an “epic namesnipe”.
In my case, the name Lightlim is taken. The reason that’s inconvenient was described in my OP.
I’m not to say how this feature should be executed, I’m just giving ideas - that’s what the Feature Requests category is for.
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What about required to have veteran badge, and maybe a certain amount of place visits on your account?
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Well, I’ve mentioned a few things that could determine if the name can be taken:
- Low total account playtime/time spent online
- Time since last login
- No 2-step authentication
- No verified email
- Email asking them to log in or the name will be taken
- Can’t be a name someone bought as a previous username change
Also things to prevent hoarding and lots of namesniping:
- High account playtime
- High ROBUX cost
- Verified email
- 2-step authentication
- Logged in fairly recently
- BC only?
- One name transfer per account
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They can give old, inactive accounts (that are verified) a warning that their accounts have a certain amount of time to be “reclaimed”, otherwise their usernames are swept and they have to choose a new username upon login.
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I’d love to see a cleaning of inactive accounts on roblox, this is a great idea.
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Maybe a way to prevent all these name snipes is making a user be able to change a username once if it has already been used. Your account must be active for about 2-3 years, must have 2-step authentication, and must have a verified account.
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I’d like to point out that your poll is useless; many participants are visitors. As such, it only reflects a shared saltiness over missing out on epic namesnipes.
It is fruitless to suggest more arbitrary rulesets as to what names can and can’t be stolen.
You should’ve put that effort into thinking of a sufficiently unique username, or, like I did, a sufficiently unique gimmick.
Again,
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Polls don’t decide whether features get implemented or not BTW. This feature is more determinant on concerns with effectiveness and how it would be implemented without causing negative side effects – not desire for it.
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I think a better idea in general would be to allow taking usernames from terminated accounts under the conditions that:
- The account was not terminated for an inappropriate username
- The account has been terminated for a long period of time (i.e. over 2 or 4 years)
- The name in question is not a well-known username (this would restrict names like “jaredvaldez4” or the infamous “1x1x1x1” from being taken again, since those names are well known.) (Unfortunately this would be a pain to document)
I’ve seen a lot of usernames taken, but upon searching the username I get no result because the user is term’d. (If it’s tagged, I just do the trick of getting profile via username)
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Unfortunately username swapping was implemented such that you can snipe tons of names.
Because of this, unlocking taken usernames doesn’t make any sense. This is a lot of work to implement and will benefit maybe 100 nostalgic power users? I don’t get the point.
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I know, I was just kind of curious myself
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The poll was more for myself to see some numbers. The ruleset I suggested was also just an idea for it, that could potentially help prevent namesniping and hoarding.
Sorry but as I previously said, I wasn’t inspired to make this post by wanting some ‘epic namesnipe’ but because my name I use on everything else is taken by an inactive user. But, I see the point you’re trying to make.
A good example of that is myself - I use the name Lightlim on pretty much everything. My Roblox username would be Lightlim, if it wasn’t taken a year ago and not used since (https://www.roblox.com/users/152827596/profile48). This led to a few complications, like how searching Lightlim into google gets you a lot of my accounts on other websites except Roblox, but searching Lightlimn only shows my Roblox one since it’s ever so slightly different and changing my name to other combinations but looking the same won’t help. Other issues too, like just making things slightly more complicated than they need to be for linking accounts together, just because someone took the name once.
Honestly, I’m not too bothered about this feature being implemented or not, but it would just be something kind of nice. I know other people have suggested it and want it, so I thought it could be brought up again. If there is any chance I can get my original name, I will take it.
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This should specifically be a thing for terminated accounts with no chance of return along with accounts with under X amount of play hours, or inactive for X amount of time.
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I’d like to bump this and give an updated opinion I have on this:
This idea is so that inactive accounts who fulfil some kind of criteria for being inactive (e.g. less than 5 hours played and logged in >1 year ago, unverified etc.) should have their names be able to be taken with the username change system we have now. This would open up many more names, and allow for better customisation and branding as a developer.
A big argument here was that people who want to namesnipe and keep the namesniped accounts will just log on periodically to keep the namesnipe. That’s true, and I guess that should be allowed to happen. If someone really wants to namesnipe that name, then they will no matter what. But for the possibly hundreds of thousands of good names there are, like my name Lightlim which are unable to be taken, it’s unlikely there’ll be many people actually holding onto them. Random usernames people thought of and forgot, stuff like that. They should become free after a set amount of time (6 months, maybe a year).
Another ‘argument’ against this was that it isn’t necessary if you can’t get your ‘epic namesnipe’ and I find that a bit ridiculous. There’s a lot of things that aren’t necessary, like changing of names in the first place but it’s convenient and aids in recognition if you’re a famous developer. If you say the name ‘asimo’, people know exactly who you’re talking about, even random people on the website. It does matter.
The poll I did on this also showed that there are a lot of people who have their wanted names taken by inactive accounts. I’m not saying this means this should happen, but it would be a very nice thing to have.
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re-opening names is always great in theory
but the chaos that it brings with it is never that great
really, I think it’d just be better to allow the “upper-echelon” of members to get names
i.e, if Asimo wanted to be just “Asimo” without numbers. Or CrazyMan32 wanted to drop the 32. That’s all very fine and dandy and allowable, but opening names widely to the masses all over again is problematic.
edit: And maybe one day Roblox will recognize that I’m a good boy and give me “George”
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