On most sites, I really like the unique name thing and have to admit that I'm proud of my name collections (including here). That said, on many of those other sites, the whole unique names thing makes a little more sense. It's still outdated, sure, but it's at least feasible. For example, on Neo, names may be hard to come by. But even with their side accounts and a premium account, users are more or less restricted to 30 or so pets total.

Not to mention, purges are rare and happen over the course of several weeks or months (rather than at one predictable time daily). And your account has to be super inactive to even have a chance at being purged--and it still might not be. It's so unpredictable. So when purges do happen, people have to be selective about the names they do go after--because they really do have limited slots, and once you create a pet, you are stuck with it for a week.

In other words, the same dozen or so people can't exactly hoard EVERY good name. Yeah, there are lots of people with tons of great names. But again, because the limit is more or less set in stone unless TNT decides to change it again, they have to really want a pet. And finally, you can trade names and pets on Neo, so you can theoretically get good names if you break into the horror known as pet trading. Not really an option on Subeta.

I've found that on Subeta, nobody really cares what color or species a pet is. There are no status symbols like UCs or super exclusive LEs or colors (I mean, there is angelic, but sP and even CSC are pretty easy to come around here). Right now, names are the big status thing (apart from custom pets, art, profiles, etc.) Which brings me to my next point. The Subeta pet scene has always been about creating detailed characters or fan pets. That's what ends up setting apart one pet from another. As a result, unique names just doesn't really make sense for Subeta's overall structure as a pet site at this point.

Don't get me wrong, I used to love doing name clearings and even skipped school once in high school to make it to a name clearing (not my proudest moment, but anyway). It made somewhat more sense when pet slots were harder to come by and we had to be selective about the names we went for. Now though--I understand why it's probably not sustainable.

Also, just as a side note, I have a lot of my rl pet names here. However, there was one that was very special to me that I could never get and probably wouldn't want to, because the name has been with the same person for so long. So I had to go with Fable Jerome. I didn't mind, but it would be nice just to have Fable.

Just my $.02.

Oh ok. So the ID would still be unique to the user, like the pet IDs we have now

I really like your post! It would be fun if we could let trade and have exclusive colours (I thought about that too). I also bought about why accounts can’t be purged and deleted. Only keep the accounts of deceased users. Users who haven’t been seen in 5 years... delete the account. It’ll free up space.m

I’m on mobile and auto hates me. Forgive typos

Yes, the pet IDs would continue to be used like they are now but in a slightly different way. That's all that would change in a non-unique name situation. There would be no extra numbers, extra letters, weird symbols, etc at the end of names.

A nickname system would be a little different, but I would be genuinely shocked if that included any weird extras at the end of names either as that seems like something that would go over very poorly in the community.

I post this here, cause I know that the Subeta Staff is watching this topic;

I would also really appreciate if we could use letter which are not existing in the english alphabet, such as ä, ü, ö, ß, é, etc.

So for example I could create an pet with the name "Süßölgefäß" and don't have to replace the ü, ö, ä and ß by ue, oe, ae and ss. "Suessoelgefaess" looks stupid.

Don't know if this is possible.

I posted this in the comments of the news post, but... hopefully this will be a good decision for the longevity of the site.

That said, I am horribly disappointed with how staff had handled this change in regards to communication. This is a big change and for a year and a half, we had very little communication with staff other than few scattered posts about it (some not even on the Non-Unique Pet Names discussion on forums...), an update not terribly long ago about a proposed nickname system and promise for a poll to be held to see the userbase's options on it (especially since not everyone is going to be social, especially on something that is frankly on a very outdated platform), and we never even got the promised poll.

I guess the legacy pet names is at least something (especially since that still gives a "point" to adopt out pets for people who may wish to do so), but for such a big part of the website, I had hoped for far better communication and I am really disappointed how this was ultimately handled in that respect.

On the bright side, at least hopefully this will mean that people will be a lot less hostile and entitled to other people's pets. I dealt with a lot of harassment over my pet names some years ago, so hopefully this will eliminate that kind of impact on the userbase and help create a more positive environment.