When are the toons of people that never migrated from Codemasters to Turbine deleted?

[FelaX]

I noticed that many toons of people that as far as I know never done the migration from Codemasters to Turbine still exist to this day. In my opinion these toons should be deleted by Turbine to free up those names considering theres no way they can ever return using their old Codemasters account.

[wachkussen]

Almost certainly a lot more trouble than it is worth. Identifying them (with 100% accuracy) would be a nightmare, for starters. Especially considering I read a post not so long ago from a long-time-away player enquiring as to the possibility of finding his old Codemasters characters again. The deadline for that passed long ago so the response to him from the other players wasn't particularly hopeful. Bottom line, every large system is going to have 'orphan' data entries that no-one is ever going to look at again, because the costs of cleaning them up would be way in excess of any value gained from such an exercise. Fact of I.T. life, I guess.

[Cambruin]

From what I've heard it's become impossible to regain access to the lost chard/accounts. Codemasters handled the rights to them, allowing a period for people to make the move to Turbine themself. The accounts which failed to do so are out of luck, since everything connected to those accounts was Codemasters' property.

[Witchchild]

City of Heroes had a good system for freeing up names. Every so often, they'd send out email notices that people had three months to log into a character before all non-used characters were renamed to GenericHero ###. This freed up thousands of names for general use.

[mjk47]

City of Heroes had a good system for freeing up names. Every so often, they'd send out email notices that people had three months to log into a character before all non-used characters were renamed to GenericHero ###. This freed up thousands of names for general use.

That would be very irritating. I have multiple accounts that I almost never login to. They exist simply to own houses for storage. So, although the characters aare not logged in to, they are definitely "used.

[Rajax391]

That would be very irritating. I have multiple accounts that I almost never login to. They exist simply to own houses for storage. So, although the characters aare not logged in to, they are definitely "used.

If you couldnt be bothered to log in within 3 months to hold a name of a character you dont play does it really matter what generic name the toon has?

[Sapience]

If you read through the forums you will find posts from people coming back after a couple of months, a year, or in a recent case five years. Their characters are there waiting for them. Right where they left them, right where they stopped.

We do not delete old characters. As someone mentioned above, the effort required to go back through every character and determine it's status as a former CM orphan would be significant.

[angryhands]

If you read through the forums you will find posts from people coming back after a couple of months, a year, or in a recent case five years. Their characters are there waiting for them. Right where they left them, right where they stopped.

We do not delete old characters. As someone mentioned above, the effort required to go back through every character and determine it's status as a former CM orphan would be significant.

Sapience, your clarification is welcome, of course, but in fact it doesn't have much to do with the OP/thread, since they were specifically asking about Codemasters characters that were not migrated in time. Those characters most certainly are not saved or "waiting for" anyone in any sense, let alone "right where they left them". So that reasoning would not explain why the non-migrated former Codemasters characters' names are not made available for reuse.

I just wanted to make sure no one was misled by your comment.

[Yula_the_Mighty]

Sapience, your clarification is welcome, of course, but in fact it doesn't have much to do with the OP/thread, since they were specifically asking about Codemasters characters that were not migrated in time. Those characters most certainly are not saved or "waiting for" anyone in any sense, let alone "right where they left them". So that reasoning would not explain why the non-migrated former Codemasters characters' names are not made available for reuse.

Sapience addresses the Code Masters orphan situation in his second paragraph stating that identifying and deleting these character is too expensive.

Although Sapience does not address this issue, you are never sure exactly what is going to happen when you do the deletion. It is very unlikely to get all the orphans and nothing else. It much more common to get some of the orphans and some non orphans. In which case you have a customer relation nightmare. The corrective action is to restore the database back to the last full save before the deletion was performed. Or some lesser alternative - too bad. Here is a few gold. We will try to partially restore your character because things like your house are gone forever.

It hard to convince management to authorize a long outage while you do the deletion. Followed by the pray that the application will work when we restart it. Hopefully we will not have made too many customer mad because they are collateral damage.

Microsoft did a charaacter purge on Turbine's Asheron's Call game back when Microsoft was the publisher - operator. Microsoft took the position - we will do this purge - we do not care what any of our current or former customers feel about. There will be no recourse if you are part of the purge. I have no idea how many customers or dollars the purge cost Microsoft.

[Ssolar]

I have a friend that was inactive durring the migration, and so lost her account. We contacted support and got the reply that the account (Characters, ect) can't be reactivated due to Privacy-laws. (As far as I know, that is the personal information of someone linked to an account)
This lends me to believe there is a way to see from wich accounts the personal data can or can't be accessed. (BUT, I also know that most (easy) sollutions in IT aren't that easy or cheap at all!)

A purge would indeed be bad. There is simply too much that can go wrong with that. (Tough she is a good friend, I would hate to loose my account so she can play again on hers and leaving me to start over. :P or worse, loose my account to people who will never get back to lotro)

[mjk47]

If you couldnt be bothered to log in within 3 months to hold a name of a character you dont play does it really matter what generic name the toon has?

Actually, all the characters concerned have names that appear to be unique across the complete set of servers. Clearly no-one else wants those names. Why should they be changed just because they haven't logged in for a while.

[Schlepp]

If you read through the forums you will find posts from people coming back after a couple of months, a year, or in a recent case five years. Their characters are there waiting for them. Right where they left them, right where they stopped.

We do not delete old characters. As someone mentioned above, the effort required to go back through every character and determine it's status as a former CM orphan would be significant.

I think what would perhaps be more helpful, would the new char name generator not giving names that are already in use...

[Torwin]

If you read through the forums you will find posts from people coming back after a couple of months, a year, or in a recent case five years. Their characters are there waiting for them. Right where they left them, right where they stopped.

We do not delete old characters. As someone mentioned above, the effort required to go back through every character and determine it's status as a former CM orphan would be significant.

What about characters who have been created, then maybe put through the introduction quests and left unused for a couple or more years? I understand that the older characters, with a bit of work put into them by the people who own them, need to be preserved, but a toon somebody spent half an hour with then left it to just sit there for years and years surely wouldn't have too much of a value to anybody? Other that holding up the name, that is.
I for one would be very much up for an unused low-level character clean-up every now and then...

[LethalLethality]

What about characters who have been created, then maybe put through the introduction quests and left unused for a couple or more years? I understand that the older characters, with a bit of work put into them by the people who own them, need to be preserved, but a toon somebody spent half an hour with then left it to just sit there for years and years surely wouldn't have too much of a value to anybody? Other that holding up the name, that is.
I for one would be very much up for an unused low-level character clean-up every now and then...

I have two characters I've created I don't intend to use, or that I intend to get to out of the intro at least. They are there, solely as place-holders should I not be able to resubscribe next year. Otherwise, I'd lose two of my nine original characters and lose access to two of the classes. But should I resub for another year, I will play them and I will want the names I have for them. I will then buy two more slots and create two more characters around the end of next year as protection again.

I wish there was something in the store that lets you remove the disabled characters penalty for not being VIP so I don't have to have place-holder characters, but since there isn't I will do it this way.