Change the Festival Hat Maker?

I think the Fesitival Hat Maker should allow you to copy hats from any character, provided that character was made on your account. The coding wouldn't be too difficult, and this would allow people who deleted characters but kept the festival hats that they earned to copy them to their new ones. Just my 2 cents.

There's no way for it to tell what characters were on your account or not.. the servers don't keep track of that information.

Depends... How long until a deleted character's name is no longer associated with any given account? After a while, the deleted character's name is once again available for public use.

However, even after you've deleted the character, people who friended you under that character's name will still have you under friends (or ignore, I suppose).

It's just a matter of whether or not hats are linked to account IDs. And I don't know the answer to that. Sorry. :|

That's news to me, how do you know?

Ok, let's say the servers did track which characters belonged on which account. Deleted ones would still be impossible unless the servers tracked items based on the account, not the character.

Erm, if they track which item belongs to which character, and which character belongs to which account, it follows that they can find out which item belongs to which account...

Who deletes a character but keeps useless customized items?

/not signed

It's actually not that unusual, a lot of people keep them as proof that they earned it and have been playing long enough to get it. Granted, they could have been given it by someone else, but they may know of your old characters.

The main reason is that perhaps some people were holding out for an NPC that lets you uncustomize them at some point. Which is essentially what this new NPC COULD be.

I'm not saying saying it's a big problem, but I know there are more than a few people in this boat, and it's kind of a pain not to be able to unlock items that you legitimately earned.

The server currently keeps track of a deleted character's name for 1 hour before opening it back up for the public. Changing it for the future doesn't matter because we already have the NPC. They're not going to be able to change it to help any old helms, so you're out of luck.

If anet cannot help people recover items that were stolen from their account because their account was hacked into - for reasons because it is simply too difficult, then its even more unlikely that this feature will become reality.

Your request is alot difficult to make due than youre making it out to be.

That while is about a fraction of a second long. I have many times deleted, then remade a PvP character with the same name.

That's not the reason they can't recover items. It may be one of their reasons, but the main reason they refuse to recover "lost" items is because it can't be proven anything was ever stolen. It'd be too easy for someone to say they lost 1.5 million gold and w/e items (transfering them to another account), and then send a support ticket to have them recovered.

Then you obviously don't know how the system works. A name is reserved for the account it was being used on for 1 hour after deletion of the character. So if you deleted a character, that name can be reused by you instantly if you wanted, but after 1 hour anyone can use it.

who tell you they keep the character inventory slot also?

maybe they just keep the name

Friend's list is tied to accounts, not characters. It will show you the name of the currently used character on that account, regardless of which name was used to list.

But it also shows the name you did add that acount with. So they keep reord of it 1 way or another.

There are 2 ways for this imo:
1: they just add the name statically in the friends part together with an account id. And then when someone from that accountid is online with another name then the one in the friends part they show both.

2: They add the character ID to the friendslist. The character ID keeps record of the name of that character, and the id of the account it belongs to. And also some other things like appearance and or the character has been deleted or not.

Personally i think nr 1 is the fastest way (Uses less resources on the server). Tho nr 2 is more logical cause then you track down or a player really has been cheating. If all history of a character will be lost once it has been deleted then there is no way for Anet to track down cheaters when they remove the character and make a new one real quickly before they start cheating. Ofc there are ways around that as well (bounding an action with a character id and an account id.)

The choice Anet made for storing this will depend on how much balast they want to put on their servers for keeping the history logged. No history logging will make the game the fastest. But then it is IMPOSSIBLE to find out which change to the game had which effect to the gameplay. So there must be at least some history logging going on. The detail level of this will remain unknown for me.

Perhaps I don't fully understand how this works, but isn't the character ID of the character who the item is customized to saved to the item (which is why a character with the same name still cannot wear it)? If that's the case then it is irrelevant if the name gets opened up to the public after one hour, as long as it is possible to identify the account on which the character was made through the character ID, and I don't know if that is possible. If it is possible, I don't see the difficulty with verifying that the item was unlocked on a given account.