Originally posted by caalem

I can't believe people are seriously crying about this.

You can go 1-20 in ~4 hours. They're only deleting sub 20 characters that are over 7 months old.

 

Cry more, seriously.

/couldn't agree more

its not hard to get to 20, apart from that, characters over 7 months old, THATS OVER HALF A YEAR!

What a bunch of babies.  You havent played the damn character in over half a year and it takes 3 hours to replace it and people are uninstalling?  People are just retarded...This is why no one plays games for years anymore.

I see trolls don't make it past level 20, seriously if you couldn't make it to level 21, I doubt you would come back to the game and I can't wait to get my hands on one of those reserved names that has been rotting on a level one alt of someone not subbing to the game anymore.

Originally posted by Zorvan01

Originally posted by Deewe

 While I understand the technical reasons and even it can free up some names for new players deleting characters is a no no in the MMO world, unless you don't care for you players.

 

However with a good PR and a nice bait for players coming back, like faster XP tokens + bonus vanity items automatically given to player whom characters have been deleted, it could be accepted.

 

Both Anarchy Online and Age of Conan have a 3 month policy. After 3 months, your toon can be wiped. FC however does not enforce that policy for the most part and only wipe every couple years at the rate they've done so far.  So perhaps you would prefer they enforce their 3 month policy instead of only doing it when it's needed?

And as far as being a "no no", I suggest you check the fine print for most other mmos out there. You'll find the same policies. SOE has a 3 month policy on their games, yet like FC rarely wipe any toons. SquareEnix has a 3 month policy for FFXI and they DO wipe the account after that three months ( although you can call them and they will SOMETIMES be able to bring your account back ).

ive been inactive for over half a year (and that two or three times) and never had a single character deleted ^^

edit: thats for AO

Originally posted by misterdurp

Originally posted by Zorvan01

Originally posted by Deewe

 While I understand the technical reasons and even it can free up some names for new players deleting characters is a no no in the MMO world, unless you don't care for you players.

 

However with a good PR and a nice bait for players coming back, like faster XP tokens + bonus vanity items automatically given to player whom characters have been deleted, it could be accepted.

 

Both Anarchy Online and Age of Conan have a 3 month policy. After 3 months, your toon can be wiped. FC however does not enforce that policy for the most part and only wipe every couple years at the rate they've done so far.  So perhaps you would prefer they enforce their 3 month policy instead of only doing it when it's needed?

And as far as being a "no no", I suggest you check the fine print for most other mmos out there. You'll find the same policies. SOE has a 3 month policy on their games, yet like FC rarely wipe any toons. SquareEnix has a 3 month policy for FFXI and they DO wipe the account after that three months ( although you can call them and they will SOMETIMES be able to bring your account back ).

ive been inactive for over half a year (and that two or three times) and never had a single character deleted ^^

edit: thats for AO

They only deleted level 5 and below that were inactive for over a year the first "purge" they did a few years ago when Sil was Game Director. The one coming up (they'll be sending out e-mails before it's done ) will be for level 10 and below. I've never had a toon deleted in AO either.

But many people did have their toons deleted, and they cried for a bit until they realized they had no grounds to cry, and then they moved on. Same as will happen here with AoC.

Yeah, got their fun little message as well. Kinda depressing, although I'm not even sure I have any characters below level 20. Mostly just depressing because I've been waiting till they offer another deal (ala the Secret World beta access/free expansion) before resubscribing.

Still, bloody messed up way to get people to resubscribe.

I've just joined this game recently - 1 month - and I have already gotten 2 characters to 45 or better - and have tried many, looking for the right class for me.  I like this game alot - just seems to be more fun and have less whiners in the ingame chat channels than most of the other games I've played(EVE would be the exception). 

After reading the complaints against this move I have formed a conclusion: most of those who are complaining have quit and didn't seriously intend to come back, unless Funcom got down on their knees and pleaded. All Funcom really did was affirm that if you have not played in over 1/2 a year you are probably not coming back - and even then it is only characters UNDER lvl 20 that are being deleted.  Now I don't agree with the 4 hours to make level 20 - even with double xp it took me like 8-10 hours to get through Tortage - I consider myself an average player - but 8-10 hours of gameplay? That is not much, in fact this is the easiest game I've played in a long time to level. 

To you who are complaining - hey you gave up on this game long ago, FunCom didn't give up on you - you gave up on Funcom.  There are things I would like to see fixed in this game - especially the moronic bug that has you occasionally running on your horse - and unable to get off it unless you relog or zone.  I think perhaps you should try playing it again before you spill your bile, but you would rather cry that the low-level toons you abandoned over half a year ago are being deleted.  Funcom doesn't owe you anything, stop crying.

Well, if you dont want play/subscribe AoC Why the hell u want a level 20 or below char? Funcom is right. If you is a subscribed active member, all your chars will be certainly more than 20 levels in... 2 days? or 1 day perhaps? level 20 char is very very very easy to reach. so... if you want to play, just play. if you dont want, just leave and have your useless char deleted. (maybe i want your char name for my char too, leave the name free for use). :P

I agree that on the surface this isn't that big a deal. Most people probably don't even remember what characters they have under level 20... I know I don't. And the low character wipes don't bother me.

The problem is that this move comes from a company with very little "good will" in the bank. And by very little I mean none in most people’s minds. Other companies could do this, and it wouldn’t hurt them much if at all. Funcom though, can’t make these kinds of moves. It just refreshes people’s memories of why they left this game in the first place.

Unfortunately for Funcom they’ve put themselves in the position that any decision they make, no matter how seemingly insignificant, will be highly scrutinized.

It seems like every time the waters start to calm a bit for Funcom, they make a decision like this. It's frustrating and entertaining all at the same time.

Originally posted by caalem

I can't believe people are seriously crying about this.

You can go 1-20 in ~4 hours. They're only deleting sub 20 characters that are over 7 months old.

 

Cry more, seriously.

First, props for linking to Massively.

Second, I received this email too.  Frankly I found it hilarious!  They are essentially saying "resubscribe or else".  I closed the email while laughing and I made a comment to the effect of, "Yeah, that's a great way to bring me back as a customer: threaten me!"

Whatever their actual reasons are, that's the way that the email came across to me.  There's less than zero chance for that to work when I'd already written the game off.

Maybe they're role playing?  "Give us your money or we cut off your...! ..er... delete your newbs!"

Originally posted by MikeB

In preparing for the upcoming Age of Conan server merges,

Nice link. How are the server merges done back a year ago "upcoming"? It seems Google was not your friend. They haven't announced which servers are being merged into other servers yet for this round.

Yeah I think deleting toons is plain stupid. They can not back up characters on disk? Is this the stoneage? I was thinking of resubbing in the near future when things were a little more stable financially since i like playing several sub MMOs but I am not resubbing just to save my toons. Therefore, AoC you lost me bloody business forever. You sure do know how to stay successful. One of the reasons I switch off and on EQ2 and WOW is because they never delete anything of mine. So guess what? they both get my business. I just alternate. Happy Gaming people.

Originally posted by MikeB

Massively.com contacted Erling Ellingsen for comment on this development who informed them that the deletions are being made in order to "free space in the database."

I can see why Funcom would like to free up some names on inactive accounts for their actual subscribers, but if this is the real reason they must have serious problems on a very basic level.

To elaborate on why I think this sounds like a problem: A characters recordset in the database (name, items+amount, coin, stats, appearance etc.) will of course occupy a certain amount of space. Most data will be integer values represented by one or two bytes of data.

Example: A character has 10 pcs. of "Basalt" in his inventory. That would be: Amount (10) = 2 bytes, Item/ressource index (Basalt) = 2 bytes and location in players inventory (Bagslot) = 2 bytes.
Even with charname, stats, attributes etc. any given character should be representable within 4Kb. (Thats 4096 bytes of information)

Erling told us about the "800.000 accounts created" at one time. Let's imagine that all of those accounts created 10 characters each. Let's even imagine that Funcoms database structure was far from optimal and as an example requiring a massive 10Kb pr. character. To make things completely impossible let us put ALL of that on ONE single server (database)...
Our database (yes this is simplyfied) would need: 800.000 * 10 * 10Kb = 80.000.000Kb.

Sounds like much? Well that is about 80.000 Mb or 80Gb of data. Now tell me how big your personal datastorage is? (That would be your harddisk).

Yeah I know (hope) that this is a cheap shot, but so was Erlings. Just the usual smoke and mirrors from that front it seems.

(To see an example of "realtime performance testing" on databases have a look at www.tpc.org/default.asp, current benchmarks are done on 1 terabyte databases, thats about 1000Gb )

Originally posted by Temet_Nosce

 

Still, bloody messed up way to get people to resubscribe.

Yeah, hahaha. Initially it does seem like a sorry attempt at getting ex-subscribers to panic and re-subscribe, doesn't it? Maybe they thought: "Well if we get even a few of them back, good - the others won't ever come back anyway."

But I think there's actually another, semi-valid reason for this move.

I remember one of the Bioware devs (Gordon Walton, I think) saying deleting inactive characters is a good idea, because new players get turned off if they have to try too many times while creating their character. Now, if you merge servers like AOC has had to, from way too many servers to just a few, and keep the characters, that will make a lot of names unavailable. So, yes, it'd cause noticeable problems in namespace. Probably they sat down and pushed some numbers and found the potential gain (new players not turned off at character creation) would be higher than the potential loss (meaning: players who see this as a kick in the nuts and decide to not come back ever). Either way I suspect the gain would be little, but - oh, well.

Originally posted by Radiotree

I agree that on the surface this isn't that big a deal. Most people probably don't even remember what characters they have under level 20... I know I don't. And the low character wipes don't bother me.

The problem is that this move comes from a company with very little "good will" in the bank. And by very little I mean none in most people’s minds. Other companies could do this, and it wouldn’t hurt them much if at all. Funcom though, can’t make these kinds of moves. It just refreshes people’s memories of why they left this game in the first place.

Unfortunately for Funcom they’ve put themselves in the position that any decision they make, no matter how seemingly insignificant, will be highly scrutinized.

It seems like every time the waters start to calm a bit for Funcom, they make a decision like this. It's frustrating and entertaining all at the same time.

 

 

By who? A bunch of whiners,forum trolls who did not play beyond level 20,who has never played all the new content that has been added post Gaute era.You must be kidding.

This game belongs to Funcom not the other way.

I don't really have a problem with this.

I'm on a hiatus from AoC anyway, so if they delete my lowbie characters to free up names and such then so be it. Though, I'm not sure how many names they'll actually free up by deleting my lowbie characters, since my names are, for the most part, made up on the spot.

Besides, it's not as if getting to level 20 takes any significant amount of time.

Originally posted by mikenet707

Yeah I think deleting toons is plain stupid. They can not back up characters on disk? Is this the stoneage? I was thinking of resubbing in the near future when things were a little more stable financially since i like playing several sub MMOs but I am not resubbing just to save my toons. Therefore, AoC you lost me bloody business forever. You sure do know how to stay successful. One of the reasons I switch off and on EQ2 and WOW is because they never delete anything of mine. So guess what? they both get my business. I just alternate. Happy Gaming people.

Backing up your character on a disk would then require them to port it over when you would like to get that character back. That means a person has to individually move the character over, making sure that none of the data was lost, the files are intact, must be updated to be compatible with the current version, working out the bugs, and moved over to an open slot. This is assuming that it doesn't end up being so old that it is no longer compatible. These people cost money.

Star Wars Galaxies has a similar operation, but it costs $50 to transfer a character from a closed server, to cover the cost of paying someone to do the above. Who in their right mind is going to pay $50 to revive a newbie character on Age of Conan?

If none of your toons were over level 20, and you were inactive for over 7 months, then I highly doubt you were ever going back. Sounds to me like you're just trolling the boards and looking for a reason to whine about Funcom. Considering you likely had no intention of starting/returning to Age of Conan in the first place, Funcom sees you as no loss.

First of all I am no troll. I have toons over 20 but that is not the point. I bought the game initially and put many many hours in gameplay (not power leveling). Therefore for them to delete is not just insulting the customer(me) but telling me how much they care. All of us do not have free time to just blow playing games all day. Soms of us are military,some of us just had babies,some of us just have to work and make a living,etc.etc. And I play many MMOs and can not pay subscriptions for all at one time. It is nice that, you who think you know everything ,don't know much at all about real life. Wow has my business,EQ2 has my business,and some others. I guess AoC is too poor to manage or they just don't care. It is one or the other. Neither works for me the consumer. SO who is losing? me or them? Happy Gaming to all except people with no sense to think about other people before talking. And Blah blah blah to any replies.

I don't see it as a reason to complain. Inactive account, under level 20, no big deal.

However it is some penny-ante stuff that makes FC look like they're having problems. Its not good PR. Doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the longevity of the game.