What if ... you delete your character?

A day after Christmas, I went for a walk outside. I had exited the game to the <resume, start on world map, back, delete> screen. When I came back, my son told me that he had done "something bad": he had accidentally deleted the online character I have been playing/levelling for 4 months. He had followed the "nice music" from the living room to my office, clicked on a couple of buttons and found his favourite colour: red. So he pressed the red buttons, twice. Though he can read, but English is not his mother tongue.
POOOF, all the self made gem-socketed, mastercrafted and enchanted gear I have been slowly accumulating (a heal-proc-Armor, a Dex-proc Armor, other mastercrafted&enchanted stuff, an astrolabe, a Citrine Crimson pine/fustian bow, ...) went away. Well, his new character was named something like "llnmlmln mkliiollmn" and was stuck on the Isle of Storms when the music stopped.

I will describe the technical aspects of deleting an online character and then move to the emotional impact it had on me. Speed levelling my new avatar is described here.

A deleted online Avatar loses all gold, all gear, all XP and everything he/she was carrying with the following exceptions:
- you keep reward items associated with pledges, purchases etc. This includes reward items that were bought with in-game gold from vendors. I kept the Artisan Scissors I bought from another player's vendor for 20000 gold.
- you keep any housing/lot deeds you were carrying
- you keep your Cotos, though I cannot say if this is only for reward-cotos or also the in-game-drop-cotos.
The above refers to the stuff you had on your avatar. All your bank stuff remains in the bank. Your house, basement, decorations remain. Your merchant sales continue. Most importantly for me, you keep all your recipes (your skill is too low to craft them, but you have the recipe).
So should you ever plan to intentionally delete your character, go naked first.

The emotional impact of losing the online character I played for 4 months was huge: first disbelieve, then despair with frantic emails to support and forum messages, checking my mail 10x a day. All this after X-mas when most of Portalarium's staff were on holiday. Fortunately, Se'an of PaxLair offered support and, if neccessary, gold to help out which was very comforting to know.
In January the dreaded answer from Berek: "undeleting the character is not possible". While waiting for the answer, I felt a weird nervous emptiness bordering on withdrawal. This was the moment when I had to ask myself whether I was still playing the game or whether the game started to play me. Try stop playing SOTA for three days (no oracle visits!) and observe your mental reaction to this.
Despite the sometimes kafkaesque NPC dialogues, SOTA rewards you with a tremendously immersive gaming experience, both fighting and crafting. The latter is so deep that I often spend more time crafting and decorating than level grinding. The downside of such an immersion can be an unhealthy obsession with the game bordering addiction. Pausing the game for a couple of days is one way to counter this, as is making a to-do list prior to logging in and then logging out once you completed your list. Portalarium could also add a flexible timer that notifies you once your pre-set gaming time is over. The DarkStarr Metronome comes to mind: once time is up, a faint tick-tock gets louder and louder until the reaper appears out of the mist and points his finger at you: "TIME IS UP!". I think such a timer-functionality would put Port on the right side of the gaming-addiction debate.

Anyway, on the positive side I got a lot of time back to finish my tax-returns, play with the kids and become more aware of the negative effect the game had on me. I would be interested to hear your own experiences on your relationship with the game.

Cheers,
Silberfarn

 

probably an "external" event is necessary to escape from these type of game...

for me..exiting from UO was when i started my own unofficial server.. and all UO magic .. vanished.

 

One thing Port could implement is:
- as soon someone clicks on delete in the client, you get an confirmation e-mail with an link to really delete your character.

That way, nobody but you can delete your character.

It would also prevent possible hackers to just delete your character (they still could rob your account ofc.).

 

I feel very sorry for you

 

Oh I'm so sorry to hear about that. I only know small feelings on this. I have a game on my phone and sometimes I let a young child play games on it when at a restaurant or a place they need to be entertained and one day a 7 year old was doing something on my phone to one of my games. I was hearing a repetitive noise and I looked and up and said ummm what are you doing little one? and he said 'I'm making us some money'. So I went over and took a look at the game he was making money at and it was in my sometimes phone game called Midnight Castle. He had sold off all my hard earned inventory and quest items, some items you could only get once, and True we did have a lot of money now, game money that is but some quests could not be completed now and I had to restart the game. Now I had to make a mental choice who do I love more the game or this little 7 year old, hmmm lol, well that is easy. He is precious and a game is just a game. So anyway anytime if I can help let me know and thank you thank you for sharing your precious story. It is so important to remember relationships. Oh and when all is said and done grab a good quote and hang on for dear life I'm so happy I read your story. It was uplifting A few quotes to start the day well for me

If you can find a path with no obstacles, it probably doesn’t lead anywhere.”

— Frank A. Clark


If you only look at what is, You might miss what could be!
-by unknown
*cheers everyone* have a great day.

 

Thanks for your story, Majoria, that was a similar situation.
When I broke my story to a close friend, she said: "it is difficult to stay zen, then". I had some time of getting over this and in-game friends help me by babysitting me in 5-skulls, though I still miss my silver-earned mastercrafting skills.
I fully agree with the confirmation email.

Cheers,
Silberfarn

 

In Eve Online there is a 24 hour timer if you want to delete your character. This would've prevented this to happen. Would be awesome to have it in this game

Sorry for your loss.

 

Like a random encounter - perhaps there could be a scene where you must sacrifice yourself for the sake of immersion. A ritualistic decent that offers a true perma death. Maybe a dungeon filled with gory medieval torture devices, or a room filled with rare and exotic poisons... after choosing your method of death - you slowly die in agony; your ears filled with your very own screams and pleas for life and mercy by which you have a fixed amount of time to abort... and then, once it's all said and done - your corpse must be destroyed in a way that even the Oracle cannot resurrect you. 3-step process

1. Select method of death (can still abort)
2. A terrible and agonizing death sequence that lasts for a set amount of time - cannot be sped up (can still abort)
3. Complete corpse destruction (complete perma-death)
---
4. New Character

 

First off, sorry that happened to you man. I don't know what I'd do if that happened to me.

However, I'm surprised that you were able to keep items that were on your person (avatar) when the character was deleted, even the pledge reward stuff. I'm especially surprised you got back something you purchased from another player! In the past, only things in your bank and/or on your account owned properties were kept.

Did you have to re-claim rewards at a bank to get them back with the new character?

 

Sorry to hear of your situation. The silver and effort to raise mastercrafting skills are prized indeed. It would be nice if accumulated adventure and producer xp were returned to the pools if the character gets deleted then the xp multiplier gets applied similar to how it worked pre-wipe. Perhaps the xp could be refunded on the account level, or just on the character slot itself?

 

Wow, not sure what I would do if my 3 or 2 year old did that! I always Windows key + L when I leave the laptop on the off chance they start pushing random buttons. Why? Let's just say they have been known to do the same thing as your youngling... they love to play with Daddy's grown up toys.

Good to know that the pledge items and add-ons are kept. That would be horrible to lose not only in-game time spent on your toon, but real-life money as well.

 

If someone is sitting at your PC clicking on the delete character button then most likely they also have access to your email, it would stop some accidental deletions (like this one).

I would prefer if character deletion was not allowed if there is anything at all in their inventory.

I would propose an additional step 1a) Talk to this conveniently positioned banker.

 

If this and if that
Ofc. nothing is ever 100% secure...

And your son/kid should not know what your email password is. And normaly you don't give your son/kid such an important login info.
If you do, then sorry, your own fault in the end.

 

@Daxxe Diggler: the artisan rewards associated with my pledge and the artisan scissors I bought in game from a player's vendor were stored at the bank. It was not possible, however, to pick another artisan tool. So I had the carpentry hammer and not the green bag with free choice of one tool. I did not have to click the "claim reward" button, I just picked them from the banking list.

 

If there is access to your email from the same PC you access the game from then it's not really this or that, just a relatively straightforward extra step for any malicious attacker.

 

Only because someone hacked your game account doesn't automatical mean he has access to your entire PC to hack your email account/software/cookies/saved passwords whatever lol...

 

@Wintermute of CoF

really now? first you talk about someone sitting at your PC.

Then you talk about attackers (which means hacker to me atleast)... like a hacker ever would sit on your PC...
Or are your kids/family or friends attackers to you?

 

No, all along I talked about someone sitting at your PC.

Noted. Not to me.

They wouldn't need to, there's plenty of hacks/scams which involve tricking people into giving remote access. Aside from that, PCs get stolen.

You're the one that said not to give them your password (which is advice I agree with).

 

There's a more serious issue here or something is amiss. If this is indeed true that character deletions cannot be undone -- whether it was accidental or malicious -- then I think we need to raise the issue again about increased account security, such as an optional two factor authentication for all accounts.

I thought it's been said that the server DB is backed up and can easily be restored. Perhaps an all or nothing operation for the entire world vs. individual accounts?