Will accounts be 'mothballed' if you decide to not pay for a period?

AngryNord

Say someone runs into financial dire straits, and may decide to forego monthly payment for a period - or just want to take a break. Will accounts be "mothballed", or will one have to register again from scratch?

Severan

Not sure what you mean by mothball. But if you take a break for a bit, your account and everything on it should still be there as you left it.

Arsenic_Touch

Your account will still be there.

AngryNord

Yes, that was my point, you could take a month or two, or perhaps even half a year, off, and still not lose everything?

Perseas

normally it must stay up to 2-3 years, after that, no warranties. Not for the account, but mostly for the characters. An example is my world of warcraft, I dont know if they deleted them, but when I log into wow forum, it says : you cannot post because you dont have any character... maybe they deleted them, but NOT my account. Your account saves your purchace.

I have to play WOW since 2008

Seneschel

if you stop paying your subscription then your account will just lose access to the servers. You won't lose your characters or items, etc.

Severan

AngryNord wrote: »

Yes, that was my point, you could take a month or two, or perhaps even half a year, off, and still not lose everything?

Correct.

Korva

Would be bad press to "mothball" any accounts, ever. until the game is officially shut down. No matter how long you are away.

babylon

And the golden thing about the megaserver means there'll be no merges (no losing names or guild names or anything because you're not subscribed at the time).

Perseas

They cant delete your characters if you take a more than a year off... but if years pass, they may freeze your characters nameless... And when you unfreeze it, you have to pick new names... who knows. But not for 2-3-6-12-+ months.

Auric_ESO

It's in thier best interests to just freeze your account instead of deleting an account. That way former customers can come back easily instead of being out off by having to start over again

darkkterror_ESO

I've never heard of a MMO that deletes a player's account after a certain amount of inactivity. They want people to be interested in returning after having left for whatever reason. Deleting accounts would seriously dissuade players interested in coming back.

Furthermore, there is a reply about this type of thing from a ZOS employee in this thread: http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/discussion/66472/failure-to-pay-subscription-and-how-it-matters-to-my-account#latest

dpgirl

Of course they will not remove your characters or account... they want you to resubscribe. Deleting all your stuff pretty much makes many people not want to resubscribe. Anything they can do to try to get you back... its not like it takes that much storage space to worry about your characters.

SkOODaT

some games use to do that deactivate accounts if you didnt stay active IE Final Fantasy 11 (thats 11 not 14) .... NO games now adays because its not a good business practice

Auric_ESO

dpgirl wrote: »

Of course they will not remove your characters or account... they want you to resubscribe. Deleting all your stuff pretty much makes many people not want to resubscribe. Anything they can do to try to get you back... its not like it takes that much storage space to worry about your characters.

Darn you dpgirl. You said what I said but you said it better. /emote hates on dpgirl

waadoya

AngryNord wrote: »

Say someone runs into financial dire straits, and may decide to forego monthly payment for a period - or just want to take a break. Will accounts be "mothballed", or will one have to register again from scratch?

i am an old player, few months after game launch i complete all dungeons then get bored, deactivate my acc.
yesterday i want to activate my account. i complete my new subscription download game and logged in game.

my account name and password was same.

but i cant see my characters.

that was a bad feeling. i create a ticket. hope i can get my character, bank, guild bank, inventory back.

Rosveen

waadoya wrote: »

AngryNord wrote: »

Say someone runs into financial dire straits, and may decide to forego monthly payment for a period - or just want to take a break. Will accounts be "mothballed", or will one have to register again from scratch?

i am an old player, few months after game launch i complete all dungeons then get bored, deactivate my acc.
yesterday i want to activate my account. i complete my new subscription download game and logged in game.

my account name and password was same.

but i cant see my characters.

that was a bad feeling. i create a ticket. hope i can get my character, bank, guild bank, inventory back.

Make sure you dowloaded the right server.

Kragorn

SkOODaT wrote: »

some games use to do that deactivate accounts if you didnt stay active IE Final Fantasy 11 (thats 11 not 14) .... NO games now adays because its not a good business practice

I've played FFXI since April 2005 and several times have simply stopped paying then months/years later picked my characters up again simply by starting paying.

Time was if you deleted characters you couldn't get them back, unlike other games which offered an 'undelete' service, but SE finally made that possible in FFXI last year or the year before.

Kragorn

Perseas wrote: »

normally it must stay up to 2-3 years

Perseas wrote: »

They cant delete your characters if you take a more than a year off.

On what are you basing these apparent assertions of fact?

I don't doubt ZOS wouldn't do both things but you're clearly inferring ZOS have legal obligations which I don't believe exist.