In any case, the current system isn't really working.

I think they have a cream for that.

But yeah. Kill the dead corps. Finding a ticker that isn't taken is a b***h

1. inactive players which never subscribed from their trial are deleted from the system permanently after 1 year.

2. corporations automatically suffer a tax to remain open and 'valid', which is tied to the corp at the time of their creation from an office - those who don't pay are automatically annulled and the corp is freed for re-birth somewhere else.

4. POS remain in space as they're actually attackable

OP wants resubbers to lose their stored characters just because he cant think of an original Corp Name

For me the problem has always been tickers... there are only so many to work with given the limits.

Day 1: Spy alt created, infiltrates target company, AWOXes everything in sight. Tears collected, alt is biomassed, as per standard ritual.

Day 366: CCP resets name so that it can be used again. New player grabs the name. Gains ten billion bounty before ever undocking because that name has been on an Alliance executor's watch list the entire time, finds self hounded through all of low/null by "vengeance fleets" and has no idea why.

He's just having a sad because someone else already took Darth Vader

It's not a new idea anymore - this is the general discussion of something that's been around for years and years.

Including only alphanumeric characters there are 916,132,832 possible tickers available.

Finding a ticker that isn't taken is a b***h

GÇ£I wonder how many ways there are to create a unique license plate given an alphabet a and a format for the plate?GÇ¥ LetGÇÖs go through and figure this out.

First, define the alphabet. That is, the possibilities for each character that we can put on our license plate. For this example, letGÇÖs use 0-9 and A-Z. There are 10 digits and 26 letters so that gives us an alphabet of 36 characters. (a=36)

The next thing we will do is define the format for the plates in question. Assume that a license plate, for simplicityGÇÖs sake, can have 6 characters, either numbers or letters. LetGÇÖs first figure out how many possibilities for a license plate with only one character there are. There are 36 characters in our alphabet, so there are 36 possibilities for one GÇ£columnGÇ¥. Now there are also 36 choices for each of the remaining five spaces. So we have to do 36*36*36*36*36*36. ThatGÇÖs one time for each of the spaces. To write that simpler, we can generalize this to a^c, where a is the alphabet size and c is the number of characters on each GÇ£plateGÇ¥.

Now, this problem was assuming that we could repeat characters on a license plate. For instance, this assumes that 333333 could be a valid license plate. What if we had a rule that we couldnGÇÖt repeat characters?

The first column remains at 36 possibilities, but when we get to the second column, weGÇÖve already used one of our characters and we canGÇÖt repeat, so we only have 35. Then we have 34 for the next column. So for this weGÇÖll need to use a factorial (!). However, since we have 36 characters and only 6 spots, we will still have 31 possibilities even in the last spot. We donGÇÖt need the whole factorial. Thus, we will use only a!/(a-c)! where a is the alphabet size and c is the number of GÇ£columnsGÇ¥ on the license plate.

Hope this was a good simple combinatorics problem and displays a way that a mathematical principle can be used in a real life problem.

... if in fact this is a problem.

Day 1: Spy alt created, infiltrates target company, AWOXes everything in sight. Tears collected, alt is biomassed, as per standard ritual.

Day 366: CCP resets name so that it can be used again. New player grabs the name. Gains ten billion bounty before ever undocking because that name has been on an Alliance executor's watch list the entire time, finds self hounded through all of low/null by "vengeance fleets" and has no idea why.

How exactly do you attack a high-sec pos belonging to a deleted corp that cannot be wardecced? You thought this through real well...

Inactive players aren't a huge issue, but they could certainly toast inactive corporations.