I was wondering, I used to play LOTRO, but my account is inactive right now.  If I were to put another subscription on it, would I still have my characters from before?  And if I let the subscription die at the end of the summer, could I renew it at Christmas break for a month and have my characters back again, where they were in level and stuff?  I am a college student without much time during the school year, but I love LOTRO and want to be able to play during breaks and save my characters.  Is this possible?  Thanks!

Yes, you can start subscribing again, and your characters and your gear will all still be there.

What MMOs delete your characters after a period of inactivity these days?

The most recent one I can remember is FF11.

Originally posted by Xiaoki

What MMOs delete your characters after a period of inactivity these days?

The most recent one I can remember is FF11.

Even they must have had them archived somewhere, because I read the other day that they recently announced new functionality allowing you to resuscitate deleted characters.

Yes and yes.  I am sure they have them saved as the back up their player servers.

I still had a toon I created almost 2 years earlier. For some reason, it had never "clicked" with me and I basically played only a couple of months at launch. For some reason, when I started in December I really liked it. Anwyhooo, I would bet your stuff will still be there.

Pooks

Of course your characters will still be there, exactly as you left them. MMOs don't delete characters. Every cancelled subscription is a potential returning customer. Destroying that potential by deleting accounts/characters would be a very stupid business decision on their part.

Even UO didn't delete characters and that was years ago. Mind you they did allow your house and items to degrade while you weren't playing so you might come back to a pile of stuff in the middle of a wood after your house fell down, unless someone had stolen it all. A nice idea i thought and it reminded you that while you were away there was still a virtual world going on in that game. No one should be forced to resub though just to maintain stuff thesedays. MMOs are far more casual and on/off than they used to be, good and bad i suppose.

When I left Asheron's Call, and Turbine ended up buying it back from Microsoft,  they offered a free migration of characters, which I took them up on.  Unfortunately, my characters were not migrated over, so now MS is charging $100 to migrate characters to Turbine.  I was not willing to pay the $100 for a game I last remember as being bot infested, with maybe 3 actual players.  So maybe my characters are somewhere, and maybe they aren't, but $100 was simply outrageous.  I had some pretty awesome collector's gear though. :(

Most of the games as has been already stated never delete any created characters even pretty low level ones.

Though as populations reduce on servers you might not end up back on the same server you used to play on as server merges, moves and consolidation is not uncommon.

While some people aren't fans of SoE they have been pretty clever about rewarding people that kept their subscriptions paid up by giving them veteran rewards and special items like 10 year cakes. Eve online using a skill training system and you used to be able to pick a skill that would take months to train and let your subscription lapse and then renew a month or two later to find it had finished training but now they stop training when the subscription ends. Bah.

Personally, I think it's a bad idea if you are tired of a game to give away all your stuff and/or delete any toons as you just never know when you will get bored and some of the old games out there like EQII are really still a lot of fun to mess about in.