They will NEVER delete characters. Ever. No matter how long you cancel. It costs them nothing and nobody is going to come back if they cancel. Please post actual news :(

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@1

Sometimes, there just -isn't- any news.

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Then make some up! :)

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I canceled several times in the past couple years. The first time, I deleted my toon and canceled. This account however was un-cancelable. It was an account that does not expire for 20 years, or require payment ;-D. So I gave it to a friend. Six months later I came back and had my friend restore my toon. I then created another account and toon (1st account toon was 60 warrior, 2nd account toon was pally).
Leveled him to 60, deleted him and canceled that account. Re-enabled that account, restored pally and had first toon (warrior) character transferred to this account. Leveled pally to almost 68, and then canceled said account.
Wife agro = account cancelation. ;-P

Le Sigh.

Currently on permanent(?) hiatus from wow.

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If WoW deleted characters when you canceled your account, the first time I got bored with WoW would also be my last. I would simply stop playing permanently.

They pulled that shit over on FFXI when my friend canceled, he lost all of his characters forever. Later on, he wanted to go back. But he never did. The grind that was staring him in the face to get back to where he had been before just wasn't worth any amount of fun he felt he could get out of the game.

Deleting characters permanently is a very very very good way to lose members - permanently.

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@4: What the hell payment plan are YOU on?

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To me, it seems as if the Curmudgeons are noting that a few spelling errors snuck into the description.

Warning the customers that policies may change is nothing new...

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I've cancelled my accounts many many times (I pay for a few friends and cancel right before the renewal day if they haven't payed me yet). Every time I do I put the "too expensive" reason in hopes that they'll lower the price :)

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@1: I don't remember WOW Insider being a news site, but hey, maybe I got it wrong.

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Whenever I come back to play from school or work, I will renew my account for 1-3 months and immediately cancel it.

Since I paid for the months, the account will stay active until the paid period runs out. This way, I can re-evaluate my feelings about playing WOW every 1-3 months and decide if I want to keep playing instead of forgetting about it, not playing for 4 months and being out that cash.

If Blizzard deleted your characters every time you wanted to take a break without paying for a service you aren't using, I definitely wouldn't play.

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@1 it does cost them money not to delete characters, I dont know how much space a toon, or an account takes up, but it cant be negligible, a toon holds alot of information, its position, what items it has, talents, what quests, rep and so it has done. Also take into account people could have 30 chars (levels ones and so on) spread over servers and you can see cancelled accounts eating space on servers.

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The total amount of information about a single character that must be stored is extremely small. Sure, there's name, location, gear, durability, enchants, rep, quest completion, and so on, but at the end of the day it's only a few thousand numbers. The amount of money it costs to store that information essentially forever is completely negligible compared to the value of allowing people to pick their characters up again after they canceled. I've canceled three times - not out of anger, boredom, or dissatisfaction, but simply because I only play at certain times each year. If they didn't preserve my characters after I left, I would never come back. Since the cost of preserving characters is so very low, even if preserving someone's characters only increases the chance that they'll return by 1% - and it's almost certainly larger than that - that's almost certainly worth it.

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I played from month to month, as a hold over from SWG, so I always pay for a month and cancel right after, paying the next month a few hours after the current month expired. Just so I don't get overcharged just in case my bank funds get hit hard. It's no big deal canceling. I always say "Too expensive" too, and the responder thing basically says "We have financial plans for those in a hard situation, call us!".

While it's canceled, your account is frozen, and you can play until the specific time it expires, a month after you paid for the month, roughly, even down to the time, say 5:42PM PST.

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As much as I have een off and on WoW, I would have been screwed, although once I do get back home I plan on starting from total scratch on a new server and go from there. Yeah, I am glad they don't and I hope they never do!

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@11: that’s not ‘a lot of information’. That’s a few bytes. I’d be surprised if it’s 10kb in total, probably less. And to put that in perspective: on one 100GB harddisk (€80 orso, in a RAID setup), that would mean you could store 10 million characters.

€80 / 10^7 = €0,000008. That’s about 1/100000th of a euro.

If one out of 125000 canceled accounts would return for one month, they would have their money back.

If all their 9 million subscribers had 4 characters, and quit their account, it would only cost Blizzard 288 euro to keep the information for all of them stored.

So no, it really does not cost them anything to keep that data.


~Grauw

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If I deleted a toon out of sheer stupidity, they will restore it?

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I've cancelled my account twice over the last year and a half, due to disinterest or lack of time to play, and certainly wouldn't have come back if Blizzard had deleted my characters. FFXI was doing this for a while--if you were cancelled for 3 or more months, they would delete your character (they've stopped doing this, finally)--and all it did was make players less likely to return to the game after a hiatus.

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As much as I enjoy this blog, this particular blogger has the habit of making up news for it. Granted, we do have slow news weeks, and that's to be expected. But this is the second time I can recall in about as many weeks where this particular writer apparently really had nothing to write about so she posts a column about something that's likely never going to happen!

What's the next column? I hope I don't spoil it, but here's my guess. "What if your uncle played WoW without his socks on?" At least it would share the actual news value with this blog entry, very little if any.

C'mon, Ms. Harper! You can do better than this!

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No offense, but is this a story at all? TBQH if you had ever played another MMO besides WoW this wouldn't even occur to you to ask. Nobody even mentions deleting characters any more when you cancel because the entire industry wants to keep its customers, and I can't think of a way to ensure that you'll never be back quite as effective as saying they'll erase your characters if you cancel for a month.

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If Blizzard deleted my characters, I'd never go back, pure and simple. Heck, the mere threat of City of Heroes releasing names that were already in use if an account had been cancelled for more than 90 days was enough to ensure that I never returned to Paragon City.

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