Content ID Reactivation

[Corin Gedaliah]

Would it be possible to have a program to reactivate old, expired content ID's at any time for a fee? (The alternatives being: waiting for a Return Home to Vana'Diel Campaign or simply accepting the fact that your characters have been "deleted").

Trying to return to the game recently after having missed the recent "Return" campaign has been traumatic and a bit shocking, to say the least. I never deleted any characters but cancelled my content ID around November 2004. After returning to the game and trying to reactivate this content ID, no content ID's were found. After some research, I found out about the character deletion policy but was given hope with "Return Home to Vana'Diel - Plan B", where previously-expired content ID's could be reactivated. But, I was told I had to wait an indefinite amount of time for another one of these campaigns to be run.

The 12-month deletion policy seems a bit stubborn and out-dated, and I really don't know of many other MMO's that don't have a more reliable form of character recovery. For example, I recently checked the status of my EverQuest account that I haven't played in 4 years and my characters are still alive and well. Any input from S-E or anyone else on this subject would be greatly appreciated.

[Feyda]

This seems like a reasonable request seeing as many people come and go from MMORPG's all the time. Square-Enix's policy for character restoration is very much so outdated and needs to be changed, what's wrong with restoring characters after the 12 month limit and tacking on a small fee to that? I'm sure plenty of people who wish to come back to the game would be more than willing to pay up, and plus... it's more money for SE if they switch their polcy to something more lenient.

[bungiefan]

It's not an indefinite amoutn of time to wait for the campaign again. It's an annual event every May, for North American accounts, and something like June or July for European accounts. Japan has no such program that I've heard of, but they also don't have Buddy Passes.

The "delete old unused, unpaid for account" idea makes a sort of sense, if you're going by the usual efficiency mentality of a Japanese company. Your old character and account information takes up space on the data storage media in their system. Since they run backups, it also takes up space on the backup data media. If they kept every inactive character and account data for everyone who ever played the game and just quit, it would take up a lot of additional space, which means they'd have to spend more money for the media, and more time making backups. If they run statistics and figure out the maximum amount of time that a certain percentage of their ex-customers are likely to come back from, they can decide when to delete unused data. This saves them money on data storage and people monitoring backups, because anyone who's been gone that long is likely to never return regardless of if their character is still there. Many people that quit habitually move on to the next new MMO, or just break the addiction completely. There's not much reason to keep the data if it will most likely never be used again, and they're not being paid to keep it. It's actually pretty wasteful of resources for the western MMO companies to retain all of that data for free for so long.