""The Future of Our Characters"

[DonMega]

For those not willing to pay the monthly fees for Final Fantasy 14 when it starts will our characters be kept when the Final Fantasy 14 2.0 free trial starts?

[Eldaena]

For those not willing to pay the monthly fees for Final Fantasy 14 when it starts will our characters be kept when the Final Fantasy 14 2.0 free trial starts?

Good question...

[Medura]

in xi, characters lasted for 3 months, then pooof gone. Was hell annoying, but at the same time, it made the servers clean, though it forced you to play ... id guess xiv have the same system, but i dont know for sure, sorry.

[Misteyes]

Barring an announcement to the contrary, I cannot imagine they will wipe character data, even for inactive players. Hard disk space is not expensive, and I highly doubt each character is more than a handful of kilobytes of data. It's the industry standard for MMOs to keep characters forever, now, too, and they're big on industry standards.

[Choyi]

in xi, characters lasted for 3 months, then pooof gone. Was hell annoying, but at the same time, it made the servers clean, though it forced you to play ... id guess xiv have the same system, but i dont know for sure, sorry.

idk how true that is, I stopped playing XI for over 2 and a half years, came back, found my account info and my chars and all was still there once i logged on, thats after not paying for the account or anything connected to XI for over 2 years.
Granted its almost 2 years since I left XI again, maybe it changed.

[Loony_BoB]

Incentive to play to avoid losing character vs. incentive to come back someday because your character still exists.

I'd say the latter is more customer friendly and with that in mind, I can only imagine that SE will do everything they can to keep those customers at the moment. Hopefully that ends up being the case, many of my friends will have accounts they don't want to lose and I want them to come back eventually!

[Daniel_Hiroshi]

This is a good question and is something I would like to know about, because right now I think I would rather wait for FFXIV the good edition, then pay for FFXIV the alpha. I would be sad to lose my data, but starting agian would not stress me out too much, as I could play through the mid game content when it was challenging not has an r50 where I just burn everything instantly.

[Lucinda_Lecore]

To clear things up, I purchased 2 copies of the game. One a couple of weeks after release. Played it and got fed up (like many did). A couple of months later I wanted to give it another try, but couldnt find the game disk, so purchased a new one.

After about 8 months the caracter from my first account was still active, despite not touching it.

I hope that clears alot of concerns

Lucinda x

[Fear]

in xi, characters lasted for 3 months, then pooof gone. Was hell annoying, but at the same time, it made the servers clean, though it forced you to play ... id guess xiv have the same system, but i dont know for sure, sorry.

In FFXI accounts never got deleted, I quit for 3 years then logged back into POL 1 day and was fine, they used to remove character data from the activate database after 1-2 years and all you had to do to get access back is call up SE with your info and they'd reinstate it.

[Vaer]

idk how true that is, I stopped playing XI for over 2 and a half years, came back, found my account info and my chars and all was still there once i logged on, thats after not paying for the account or anything connected to XI for over 2 years.
Granted its almost 2 years since I left XI again, maybe it changed.

They don't delete data anymore. They even have a service to recover characters/accounts that had been removed due to inactivity. I can't say of the success rate, as I've never used it. You can even flag your POL account for deletion and even that doesn't work anymore.