Hey, Anet! It's adorable, but...

Hello, Anet!I find it very, very cute that I get my mail from you addressed to one of my characters.Just want to say, though, that you may not be using the wisest way to select what character it gets sent to. I assume that you have some sort of formula like 'most hours played in the past month' or something, to choose which character gets their name on the e-mail. For me, anyway, it always comes addressed to some random key farmer who I map-completed and ranked up like crazy for one week, then deleted. Sometimes I barely even remember their name by the time I get the mail for them. (No, Anet, Tinsel Top Tina doesn't live at this address any more.)I can't speak for everyone, but maybe a different formula would make a more endearing impression: like, say, "character who has been played the most hours overall & has also been used in the past month" or something. Or even pure random selection.My main and permanent characters are getting sulky over all the mail being addressed to temp workers who had one job to do, and did it, and moved on.

And I thought it was just me! Anet already has our first names when we registered, can't we be addressed by that instead of our character names?

Or maybe it should just be addressed to whatever character is looking at the mail at the time. Who it's addressed to really doesn't make any difference, anyway.

@Kruhljak.2705 said:Or maybe it should just be addressed to whatever character is looking at the mail at the time. Who it's addressed to really doesn't make any difference, anyway.

To clarify, not talking about in-game mail, but about e-mail notifications and newsletters.

They probably use the name of the character you played the most for past week or so. Kinda weird, I'd use total time played on a character.

@"mbhalo.1547" said:They probably use the name of the character you played the most for past week or so. Kinda weird, I'd use total time played on a character.Some of my most-played characters over the last 7 years go days, sometimes even weeks or months without being played. My main for example crawls out of his hiding place whenever a new map/story update comes, and pretty much disappears again once he has completed said map and story unless I feel like dragging him out to help a friend or do some guild missions (which rarely happens since I have tons of characters I enjoy playing that still have things I want them to do, like map or story completion).

There really is no way for ANet to know that I still consider this one char® my main and dearest character, despite not playing him all that often these days. Another character of similar age and not much less playtime on the other hand rarely gets played because he simply never "clicked" with me and mostly just exists for his crafting skills and birthday presents. None of the information the servers have indicate to them the level of personal attachment to the characters I have built.

I was "lucky" this time in that the mail was in fact adressed to one of my personal favourite characters, while at other times I'd had it adressed to characters I wouldn't rate highly among the ones I have, but had been playing a lot at that time because they were suitable to help a friend with some lengthy project, or were used for a personal experiment (like the one that was created to answer the question "how many hours does it take to unlock all core Tyria waypoints on a new character").

If you spend most of your time in this game every week on your key farming characters, there's really no good metric to tell ANet that this is not some character you feel attached to. Depending on when the names were selected (it might be a good idea to run a database scan once to collect a list of character names for all accounts, then send out the actual mails in batches over the next couple of days for purely technical reasons - gathering such data in real time for each mail sent might cost a lot more database performance for example) it could even be close to impossible to know if the character still exists once the actual mail is sent (as the database performance cost for that action would be exorbitantly high for virtually no benefit).

@"Cragga the Eighty Third.6015" said:

@Kruhljak.2705 said:Or maybe it should just be addressed to whatever character is looking at the mail at the time. Who it's addressed to really doesn't make any difference, anyway.

Interesting, because all mine are usually addressed to the character that shows up in the first box on the character select screen.

@"Melech.4308" said:And I thought it was just me! Anet already has our first names when we registered, can't we be addressed by that instead of our character names?

I think I'd prefer that - either using my name or my account name.

With me it's a bit weird, my main character I've had for nearly 20 years across different games, I've role-played as her on forums and therefore had accounts in her name (and this account name, which is the one I use most, is a combination of her name and my name) or straight-up used it as an alias when sites required a real name and I didn't want to give mine, so I'm used to getting emails and messages addressed to her name. But with any of the others I find it really jarring, like "Why are you getting email, and why is it coming to my email address?"

But there's absolutely no way for Anet to know that, just like there's no way to know which character names other players would prefer.

The only universal solution I can think of is to add a 'preferred name' box on the account page for them to use in these emails. Maybe a drop-down with a few options like your real name, account name, most played character, last character logged into, most played in the last month etc. or even a free text box where you can put in whatever you want Anet to call you in emails.

They answered this a while ago. I believe they said it was the last character logged in before they did the mail out

@Randulf.7614 said:They answered this a while ago. I believe they said it was the last character logged in before they did the mail out

That seems unlikely when I get an e-mail to a character that was deleted at least thee weeks ago.

@"Cragga the Eighty Third.6015" said:

@Randulf.7614 said:They answered this a while ago. I believe they said it was the last character logged in before they did the mail out

Stop gambling and play more on your "real" characters. Problem solved.