Yesterday the name reservation for players who pre-ordered Wildstar started. Or rather, it didn't. At least the first two attempts of opening the name reservation failed miserably as the website just crashed. And that happens not only to NCSoft. Blizzard's website for buying Blizzcon tickets had exactly the same problem. Basically by giving things out on a first come, first serve basis you set up your own website for a distributed denial-of-service attack of your own making.

Now I don't consider first come, first serve a particularly fair system. For example the Wildstar name reservation started on a Tuesday at 11 am US time. Why would somebody who is usually at home at 11 am on a Tuesday have more right to his name than somebody who is working regular hours? The Wildstar name reservation system caused a lot of anguish because that reservation isn't server-specific. So the first one to reserve the name "Cupcake" blocks that name on all server (at least on all servers of one region, not sure whether US and EU are linked in that respect). As it is the name went to whoever was lucky with getting a reservation in before the server crashed, or while it was up for a minute later, and presumably people with a faster internet connection had a better chance to get their name reserved than others.

A much better and fairer system would be a lottery. That would work especially well for items like Blizzcon tickets. Everybody who wants a ticket should have a sufficient time period to declare that he wants one, and then the tickets get distributed by lottery among all takers. A modified version of that could also work for name reservation, e.g. everybody writes down a list of his top 3 preferred names, and then every contested name is decided by lottery.