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Turbine may delete Lotro toons if you cancel!!
iduums
Member Posts: 205
just canceled my account today and get this message
"You have successfully canceled your The Lord of the Rings Online™ subscription. We are sad to see you go, but you can come back again in the future, but you may lose your existing characters."
I have not seen a company even attempt to do this in a VERY long time. Very bad decision on Turbine's part
Comments
On top of that you cant really blame them. After you cancel your account, your characters really arent your property anymore.
In America I have bad teeth. If I lived in England my teeth would be perfect.
I just tried to get back into EvE after being gone 1.5 years and they don't even have either of my 2 accounts, let alone the toons, still available. And their website states your accounts may not exist past 6 months.
Really, once you stop paying the money I don't know why you'd expect them to save your place. Yes, it's nice if they do, but they're under no obligation.
Because if you, as a customer, considers to return, it's more likely that you change your mind when you discover that the toon(s) you have used LOTS of time/work to improve, are gone. I see this as both a service and a marketing issue.
None of the major MMO's have ever done this. But there is always the chance they might. They are just covering their butts if they ever have to do it.
I just think you misinterpretted the message, but it was not worded well either.
This does not mean you will lose your characters. Only that they want to cower their side, if some server database wipe happens. Or
there is just to many saved characters , than they might delete oldest innactive accounts...etc
... transmitted on 100% recycled electrons ...
All mmo companies have that rule in their ToS it covers server wipes or removal of inactive accounts. the main thing to remember is even if you pay money the account and characters are not yours they belong to the company whos server your playing on. basicly your renting server space to hold the data for the character.
with current computer hardware life terms alot of DB servers do crash and wipe without desire by the companies. inactive accounts are the last thing to be backed up or replaced. so if your inactive for over 5 months your more likely to lose the account then come back and find it waiting. most sites do keep them because DB files are only about 100kb to 1mg in size so really not an issue for most TB server drives.
But that msg did not mean they will delete only if they have issues that caue your account to be deleted they wont replace it.
Difference is Turbines just letting you know, kinda decent of them actually.
However, I played AC for 2 years, quit for 2 years, came back account and toon was there. Just signed up for lotro havent played AC in a while, my account and toon is still there waiting for me to activate it.
There is hardly ever a wipe in any game, believe DAOC did one of toons level 10 and lower that hadnt been played in a year...
Take your tin foil hats off and relax. If your toon means that much to you, keep playing, if it doesnt then dont worry about it.
I find it amazing that by 2020 first world countries will be competing to get immigrants.
yeah i went back to D&D Online recently (the game was £4.99 in gamestation) to see what had changed and it was the run up to LOTRO early access.
Amazingly my Beta toon was still there intact...
same happened with Auto Assault (yeah £4.99 again) sue me.... i like seeing what's changed from beta after 4-12 months in retail
In many cases good names are held by characters that not only are inactive, but never got past level 20..... so I'm all for those sorts of characters being wiped..... but it would be nice if the companies could hang on the the characters that folks put some time into.
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Then don't cancel, Turbine offered a founder's special that you would lose to if you cancel as well, Its only 9.95 a month for founders. Turbine is just looking for loyality for a very good game.
SOE has just raised their price for to 29.95 for their Station Pass for all of their games which is the cost of 2 subs of just about any other well know premium MMO out there and who has the time to play more then 2 MMOs at one time. I will enjoy my 9.95 a month game , but why did you cancel in the first place?
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Then don't cancel, Turbine offered a founder's special that you would lose to if you cancel as well, Its only 9.95 a month for founders. Turbine is just looking for loyality for a very good game.
SOE has just raised their price for to 29.95 for their Station Pass for all of their games which is the cost of 2 subs of just about any other well know premium MMO out there and who has the time to play more then 2 MMOs at one time. I will enjoy my 9.95 a month game , but why did you cancel in the first place?
I'm sorry but this is an extremely poor business decision. The only MMO to ever formally delete inactive characters was FFXI. Deleting inactive toons, or threatening to delete them is a horrible business decision on so many levels. For one, knowing your character is still there will make it a huge incentive to come back and check the game out again later on. One poster mentioned that a game should tell you they will never delete your toon, and that is the wiser business model. There's been a few times I've gone back to older games I have quit because I knew my character was still intact.
If your worried about character names then chances are your name is unoriginal, and bastardizing the spelling looks absolutely silly. How many times have you seen Legoloass, Legolaz, Legollas, Leggolas, Leggos. Most serious gamers who quit an MMO still continue to follow the changes they make afterwards to see if its worth coming back. Delete their old characters and it makes people more bitter like a bad break up with the person who got dumped threatening to put sugar in your gas tank.
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How much space and money can it actually cost them to keep at least the high level characters that have quit for up to 2 years?
I know I would probably have played some games longer if they hadn't destroyed my high level chars
It's just a disclaimer. From my experience with Turbine, assuming you've actually invested any time in your character, this is nothing to worry about. I went back to AC1 for a couple months after not playing in almost 4 years. Guess what? My characters were all there. They even retreived my account from the old MSN billing system and rolled it into my Turbine account for me, and gave me a free month's play to boot.
I think it's more to cover them when someone wants a particular name and petitions a GM about it. You can add a name you want to your friend's list in LOTRO and see when the last time they logged on and what level they are. If there's a level 3 toon that hasn't logged on in 6 months they should be able to delete it so the person wanting the name can have it. After all, if you're only levle 3 and haven't played that long then you've lost what... 15 minutes? However, if you had a level 30 toon that hadn't been online in 2 years I would be VERY surprised if it were to be deleted.
Others have posted MMOs that have done this and I also know that City of Heroes had for a time this policy, FFXI is not the only MMO to formally delete inactive characters.
Starting today the City of Heroes and City of Villains character name policy will change.
Previously, names for characters under level 35 on game accounts that were inactive for over 90 days were changed to unreserved status. Data mining has determined that this policy is not needed on an ongoing basis and the program has been suspended. If we need to reenact this policy in the future to free up names then we will give all players 30 days notice before enacting the policy again. We thank all players for their continued support.
Any questions about this policy can be directed to cityofheroes@plaync.com
Source
your arguement is so persuasive, so filled with knowledge and insight. You back up your argument very articulately, with suggestions of improvements and raising examples to glorify your position....oh wait, you didn't
Then don't cancel, Turbine offered a founder's special that you would lose to if you cancel as well, Its only 9.95 a month for founders. Turbine is just looking for loyality for a very good game.
SOE has just raised their price for to 29.95 for their Station Pass for all of their games which is the cost of 2 subs of just about any other well know premium MMO out there and who has the time to play more then 2 MMOs at one time. I will enjoy my 9.95 a month game , but why did you cancel in the first place?
I'm sorry but this is an extremely poor business decision. The only MMO to ever formally delete inactive characters was FFXI. Deleting inactive toons, or threatening to delete them is a horrible business decision on so many levels. For one, knowing your character is still there will make it a huge incentive to come back and check the game out again later on. One poster mentioned that a game should tell you they will never delete your toon, and that is the wiser business model. There's been a few times I've gone back to older games I have quit because I knew my character was still intact.
If your worried about character names then chances are your name is unoriginal, and bastardizing the spelling looks absolutely silly. How many times have you seen Legoloass, Legolaz, Legollas, Leggolas, Leggos. Most serious gamers who quit an MMO still continue to follow the changes they make afterwards to see if its worth coming back. Delete their old characters and it makes people more bitter like a bad break up with the person who got dumped threatening to put sugar in your gas tank.
Unfriendly companies will always do what unfriendly companies does the best: treating their customers poorly.