Character Reactivation Service

[Alhanelem]

They should really say something about this, they advertise the service.
And on the website, there is no news about it being down like this.
I know they must be busy, but it's been almost a year, they could give us at least something to go with.

I'm itching to come back to this game, and I deleted my character knowing fully well about the restoration process back in 2010.

They don't need to advertise it (or if you say they are advertising it, they really aren't- the only sign it exists is a small icon on the official website), because it's not as applicable as it was when originally implemented. Characters are no longer auto-deleted for inactivity, and people who quit the game without actively deleting their characters don't need to use this service anymore. It is very likely still offline because they haven't bothered to fix it since very few people used it around the time it went down (for the server merge, IIRC).

Most people who deleted their characters specifically did so to remove the temptation to come back- SE is practically doing them a favor.

[Saefinn]

(But if you value your character for the hundreds of dollars you spent on it, why did you delete it?)

I think the post above mine gives a good reason for this. Surely if the character reactivation service exists and is advertised then people are going to delete their characters thinking they'll get them back.

[Stronia]

It still exists, I can understand if they didn't offer this service, but they do.
But judging by the posts and threads about this, I can easily say there are quite a few people wanting this service back online.

And about the characters not being deleted, it's been like that for many years.

[Alhanelem]

It still exists, I can understand if they didn't offer this service, but they do.

A page describing said service exists, but effectually, the service itself does not exist at this time. Therefore they do not offer the service at this time.

[Dsherman]

A correction of sorts:

The Character Reactivation Service went down on March 7, 2011 in preparation for the World Merge. The World Merge was originally supposed to be around March 16, but was postponed to coincide with the next major update scheduled for mid-April.. which then got postponed to May in reaction to the Earthquake in Japan.

They got the Character Reactivation Service back up and running on June 8, 2011.

And then it went down again as of when the maintenance started on the evening of July 25, 2011 that was done to start cutover to the new billing methods on the SE account. It has not been up since then.

So it has only been since July that it has been down, though it is still true that it was down more than it was up in the period from March to July.

[Stronia]

^ Ah I see, thanks for the information.
So it IS their new billing system.

[Vasch]

Personally, the wait for the character reactivation service to return has been driving me nuts. I loggged in one day and my character had magically vanished. I contacted SE and set up a rollback to try and fix the problem. To my dismay, they found that nothing was wrong and they wouldn't restore my character with over 87 days playtime. All I can assume is that someone who was in my house that day got on and deleted it for whatever sick reason. So here I am, patiently waiting so that I can pick back up and get going again.

[Stronia]

Personally, the wait for the character reactivation service to return has been driving me nuts. I loggged in one day and my character had magically vanished. I contacted SE and set up a rollback to try and fix the problem. To my dismay, they found that nothing was wrong and they wouldn't restore my character with over 87 days playtime. All I can assume is that someone who was in my house that day got on and deleted it for whatever sick reason. So here I am, patiently waiting so that I can pick back up and get going again.

That sucks. Yeah, hopefully this thread will eventually be fruitful as time goes on.
I'm not going to make any serious decisions until we get more word on this service.

[Alhanelem]

only 87 days? just start over, you'll be back where you were by the time they bring this back.

[Vasch]

only 87 days? just start over, you'll be back where you were by the time they bring this back.

While I know it's not as long as some people have been playing, I spent the five months prior to my character vanishing going at it for almost 12 hours a day (some days went as high as 16-20 hours) and having that work disappear really hurts. Had my character not vanished from my account, I'd probably still be as hardcore as ever. Since then, I've started working on a new account so that I'll have a backup healer for when I can hopefully get my character back. I realize that it probably wasn't my best decision to leave my password and such on my xbox and that I probably had it coming, but I have faith that SE will come through and put the service back up eventually.