I some how doubt that. Early on in EQ they said, and still say that your characters will be deleted after 1 month. Well I have been on again off again on that game for the last 4 years since its release. Once for over a year. And guess what, they never canned my character because had they, I wouldn't have come back and they made more money by holding on. Are the characters dynamic? yes. But with the cost of memory these days I would be hard pressed to believe it is not cost effective to keep the characters around for at least a couple of months to get most people to sign up again. Since SWG Beta I have canceled my EQ account, but I bet you anything my character is still there ready to play. I suspect this whole thing is just a strong arm tactic. The fellow who mentioned he wont beable to reup his account....let us know what happens in 2 weeks would you.
Q-3PO's July 28th Q&A
Here is the Q&A Q-3PO posted in the official forums. Feel free to add your comments:
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I’m not going to touch profession issues right yet. We’re in the process of reviewing all of the top 5 issues and getting some responses back to the correspondents. Here are a couple of other questions answered. I’ll post a bit more later today.
How long will my character be saved if I cancel my account? Currently the answer is 5 days. Our intention is to have it be for at least a month or more, but that won’t be changing in the near future. As many of you know, every character in SWG takes up an order of magnitude more database space than other MMOs. That is because we have so many unique variables per character (millions of character customization possibilities, every player made object having several unique attributes, large storage space in banks and houses, etc.). When we have a solution worked out for saving these characters longer, I’ll let you know. Believe me, we want to save these characters. There are a significant number of people who, after leaving an MMO, will return at a later time if their character is intact still.
i've noticed over the last 2 weeks that a lot of people have either quit SWG, or have gone on vacation. its a lot more empty around cities, yet somehow the lag is worse. even in the middle of a barren planet, the lag is horrible. anyways... just wondering if i'm the only one noticing that this place is starting to get a bit empty.
Airstud32, our simultaneous user numbers continue to break internal records. In fact, we will likely be bringing up additional galaxies soon. While there is expected “churn” (industry term for people who have decided the game isn’t for them and left), we’re seeing decent retention rate so far. What you may be experiencing is other players moving on to more challenging planets. As for the “lag”, hopefully you will see that getting better, not worse, at this point.
Where are the game cards?
Still planned but no date yet. I'll bug the Powers That Be again about this.
Kevin "Q-3PO" O'Hara
SWG Community Relations Manager
Tags: News, StarWarsGalaxies