Would you cancel your account if....
by Elizabeth Harper 
Jun 1st 2007 at 5:20PM
I've never canceled my World of Warcraft account, so I can't give you any first-hand experience of the process. However, I do know that Blizzard never deletes characters, so if I were going to go on vacation for a month to someplace without internet access (ha!), I could cancel my account and pick up again later without any real consequences. But what if Blizzard deleted characters when you canceled? Over at Curmudgeon Gamer, they note that the cancellation screen seems to change depending on the reason you choose for canceling. When choosing an option for needing more time for school, family, etc, our curmudgeony friends were given the following message:
We are proud that we were able to make a sucessful [sic], enjoyable game. And as much as we'd like you to keep playing, we understand that there are certain cirumcstances [sic] which may prevent continuous game play. Currently, we have no plans to delete World of Warcraft accounts regardless of their activity history. Provided that the characters do not get deleted by the account holder, we will retain all character information on our servers indefinitely.
So you're safe for now -- but next time you try to cancel, who knows! It seems like it would be a PR disaster for Blizzard to start deleting character accounts at this point, if you cancel, they still hold the threat over you.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Xzin Jun 1st 2007 5:43PM
They will NEVER delete characters. Ever. No matter how long you cancel. It costs them nothing and nobody is going to come back if they cancel. Please post actual news :(
Corrodias Jun 1st 2007 5:47PM
@1
Sometimes, there just -isn't- any news.
Freehugz Jun 1st 2007 5:49PM
Then make some up! :)
nomdeplum Jun 1st 2007 5:57PM
I canceled several times in the past couple years. The first time, I deleted my toon and canceled. This account however was un-cancelable. It was an account that does not expire for 20 years, or require payment ;-D. So I gave it to a friend. Six months later I came back and had my friend restore my toon. I then created another account and toon (1st account toon was 60 warrior, 2nd account toon was pally).
Leveled him to 60, deleted him and canceled that account. Re-enabled that account, restored pally and had first toon (warrior) character transferred to this account. Leveled pally to almost 68, and then canceled said account.
Wife agro = account cancelation. ;-P
Le Sigh.
Currently on permanent(?) hiatus from wow.
Coherent Jun 1st 2007 6:14PM
If WoW deleted characters when you canceled your account, the first time I got bored with WoW would also be my last. I would simply stop playing permanently.
They pulled that shit over on FFXI when my friend canceled, he lost all of his characters forever. Later on, he wanted to go back. But he never did. The grind that was staring him in the face to get back to where he had been before just wasn't worth any amount of fun he felt he could get out of the game.
Deleting characters permanently is a very very very good way to lose members - permanently.
Dracula Jones Jun 1st 2007 6:35PM
@4: What the hell payment plan are YOU on?
James Jun 1st 2007 6:42PM
To me, it seems as if the Curmudgeons are noting that a few spelling errors snuck into the description.
Warning the customers that policies may change is nothing new...
Freehugz Jun 1st 2007 6:47PM
I've cancelled my accounts many many times (I pay for a few friends and cancel right before the renewal day if they haven't payed me yet). Every time I do I put the "too expensive" reason in hopes that they'll lower the price :)
Anon Jun 1st 2007 6:55PM
@1: I don't remember WOW Insider being a news site, but hey, maybe I got it wrong.
Zachary Lewis Jun 1st 2007 6:56PM
Whenever I come back to play from school or work, I will renew my account for 1-3 months and immediately cancel it.
Since I paid for the months, the account will stay active until the paid period runs out. This way, I can re-evaluate my feelings about playing WOW every 1-3 months and decide if I want to keep playing instead of forgetting about it, not playing for 4 months and being out that cash.
If Blizzard deleted your characters every time you wanted to take a break without paying for a service you aren't using, I definitely wouldn't play.
oshin Jun 1st 2007 6:58PM
@1 it does cost them money not to delete characters, I dont know how much space a toon, or an account takes up, but it cant be negligible, a toon holds alot of information, its position, what items it has, talents, what quests, rep and so it has done. Also take into account people could have 30 chars (levels ones and so on) spread over servers and you can see cancelled accounts eating space on servers.
Dave Jun 1st 2007 7:43PM
The total amount of information about a single character that must be stored is extremely small. Sure, there's name, location, gear, durability, enchants, rep, quest completion, and so on, but at the end of the day it's only a few thousand numbers. The amount of money it costs to store that information essentially forever is completely negligible compared to the value of allowing people to pick their characters up again after they canceled. I've canceled three times - not out of anger, boredom, or dissatisfaction, but simply because I only play at certain times each year. If they didn't preserve my characters after I left, I would never come back. Since the cost of preserving characters is so very low, even if preserving someone's characters only increases the chance that they'll return by 1% - and it's almost certainly larger than that - that's almost certainly worth it.
RogueJedi86 Jun 1st 2007 10:35PM
I played from month to month, as a hold over from SWG, so I always pay for a month and cancel right after, paying the next month a few hours after the current month expired. Just so I don't get overcharged just in case my bank funds get hit hard. It's no big deal canceling. I always say "Too expensive" too, and the responder thing basically says "We have financial plans for those in a hard situation, call us!".
While it's canceled, your account is frozen, and you can play until the specific time it expires, a month after you paid for the month, roughly, even down to the time, say 5:42PM PST.
bwest0526 Jun 2nd 2007 1:20AM
As much as I have een off and on WoW, I would have been screwed, although once I do get back home I plan on starting from total scratch on a new server and go from there. Yeah, I am glad they don't and I hope they never do!
Laurens Holst Jun 2nd 2007 4:02AM
@11: that’s not ‘a lot of information’. That’s a few bytes. I’d be surprised if it’s 10kb in total, probably less. And to put that in perspective: on one 100GB harddisk (€80 orso, in a RAID setup), that would mean you could store 10 million characters.
€80 / 10^7 = €0,000008. That’s about 1/100000th of a euro.
If one out of 125000 canceled accounts would return for one month, they would have their money back.
If all their 9 million subscribers had 4 characters, and quit their account, it would only cost Blizzard 288 euro to keep the information for all of them stored.
So no, it really does not cost them anything to keep that data.
~Grauw
Ogrish519 Jun 2nd 2007 8:35AM
If I deleted a toon out of sheer stupidity, they will restore it?
Jack Spicer Jun 4th 2007 4:32PM
@16 Yes they will, as long as you don't make a habit of doing that, and if you contact them pretty soon after you've done so.
imtraum Jun 2nd 2007 9:44AM
I've cancelled my account twice over the last year and a half, due to disinterest or lack of time to play, and certainly wouldn't have come back if Blizzard had deleted my characters. FFXI was doing this for a while--if you were cancelled for 3 or more months, they would delete your character (they've stopped doing this, finally)--and all it did was make players less likely to return to the game after a hiatus.
Mark Jun 2nd 2007 9:00PM
As much as I enjoy this blog, this particular blogger has the habit of making up news for it. Granted, we do have slow news weeks, and that's to be expected. But this is the second time I can recall in about as many weeks where this particular writer apparently really had nothing to write about so she posts a column about something that's likely never going to happen!
What's the next column? I hope I don't spoil it, but here's my guess. "What if your uncle played WoW without his socks on?" At least it would share the actual news value with this blog entry, very little if any.
C'mon, Ms. Harper! You can do better than this!
Genius Jones Jun 4th 2007 2:18PM
No offense, but is this a story at all? TBQH if you had ever played another MMO besides WoW this wouldn't even occur to you to ask. Nobody even mentions deleting characters any more when you cancel because the entire industry wants to keep its customers, and I can't think of a way to ensure that you'll never be back quite as effective as saying they'll erase your characters if you cancel for a month.