pet name protection

[VMann]

This is what happened: Someone asked in the help channel what to do with a ring of familiar, so i told her the commands. To make sure i remeber them correctly, i tested them. So i renamed my pet, but then i could not rename it back because the name "is not unique". In other words: someone could make a character with the name of my pet, but i cannot give my pet the name it had, because this player's character has it now.
I will need a new name for my pet now, but i will survive that.
To prevent such stuff in the future, the pet names should also be put on the "list of unique names".

Another thing i noticed while changing the name some times to make sure it is not by lag that the server thinks it is not unique: i can add my pet to the buddy list (senseless enough. changing that should solve the following) and it is always shown as offline. But when i rename it after, the old name stays on the buddy list. When i then try to remove the name from the list, i get the message "Could not remove buddy: Character 'name' was not found." in the message tab and in red letters directly in the middle of the screen.


PS: is this message right here or should it be in the wishlist? feel free to move it if you want

[neko kyouran]

how long have you had the name of your pet before you renamed it?  at the beginning, there really wasn't any limitations on names so you could have a pet with the same name as a character when pets were first made.  then a little while later restrictions were put in place.  I wanted to make a character with the name I had given my pet recently, I couldn't until I renamed the pet, to free up the name.

It's possible your pet name was named something the same as a characters name before the restrictions were put on the names, but those restrictions didn't force any pet names to change after they were put in place, so your pet could have been going around with the same name as a character all this time. 

Another possibility is after you renamed it, the game spawned a twin pet with the old name somewhere in the world.  I'm not sure if that was fixed in this release, but under the last release, when you renamed your pet, a clone that never left the world unless removed by GM would appear somewhere around the world, and t would have the old name of your pet.  If it's still a bug in this release, then its possible it spawned a clone after you renamed you pet, then when you tried to rename your pet back, the game saw this clone with this name already in the world, and wouldn't let you switch it back becuase of name conflict.

[VMann]

My pet had it's name for at least 6 months now, so i guess your first idea is the correct one.
The second thing (with the clones) also seems unlikely to me as i changed my pet's name between two different names several times to check on the buddy list issue i wrote about, and there were no problems with that.

And thank you for letting me know there is a protection for the pet names (it's one of the things you will have trouble to find out using the search button).

* VMann grins remembering pets named after players near them