DCUO Forums melted down, I survived to tell the tale

DCUO posted at the beginning of the year that they were doing a purge of all names on accounts that hadn't been logged into since July 20, 2013 sometime this month and that it would free up some 10-20 million names (characters weren't deleted, just had an addendum put on their name).

People cheered.

The date for the change was to be a week ago, but come about 6pm there was no downtime and no announcement until Mepps posted the change would be next week (ie: today). People grumbled, but were content.

Today the magic day happened. Names were released and all looked to be right with the pixelated world... until people started getting odd error messages about cross-platform issues.

Mepps (SOE's community relations person for DCUO) made an off-handed comment in a complaint thread that the error was due to the PS and PC name databases were being consolidated by region (ie: US & Europe) so both platforms would be trying for the same names.

And that was when Hell was unleashed on the forums.

People typed in all caps, posted angry rants and pics, made all sorts of wild claims, gnashed teeth, beat children and molested puppies. It was chaos.

During this time Mepps was making very quick answers to various posts, and probably getting his arse chewed for inadvertently releasing info that wasn't supposed to be released yet. So now he had to save face, not just for him but for the game and the company.

He made another post to explain why they did this: they are working on merging the game servers so that FINALLY PS and PC people will be playing together.

And suddenly there was joy.

tl;dr - gamers can be highly bi-polar.