I came home tonight to the following email from Pearl Abyss:
I can't remember the last time any game sent me a notice like this. A year seems like a very short period to be flagged "inactive" for an mmorpg these days. Just because I'm not playing Black Desert at the moment doesn't mean I'm never going to play it again.
Most companies like to make it as hard as possible for you to delete your
details. ArenaNet pretty much require a doctor's note before
they'll scrub your name from their files. It's not that unusual for me to log back into games I haven't played for a decade and find the account still works just fine.
It did occur to me it might be a scam so I navigated my own way to the official Pearl Abyss website but once I got there I couldn't find any way to log in. I took another look at the provencance of the email. It looked legit enough.
After thinking about it, I decided it wouldn't make all that much difference either way. I never re-use passwords and I have dozens of email addresses of which this is a fairly minor one. If someone did steal my Pearl Abyss login details I'm not sure what good it would do them.
In fact, I'm not sure this is even my main BDO account. It might just
be the one I made for BDO Mobile. That one I almost certainly will never play
again. If anyone wants to carry on from where I left off after one session, good luck to them.
I went ahead and followed the links, logged in, changed my password. It all looked legit but I guess we'll see. Or not.
I had nothing else to post about tonight so thanks, PA, for giving me an excuse to put up some old Black Desert pictures and waffle on about nothing for a few paragraphs. Otherwise I might finally have missed a day.
It was
looking bad until now!
Posts
That seems really counterproductive. I always assumed that the reason that most MMOs keep your characters around is because whatever small chance there is you will log in again drops pretty much to zero if all your characters get deleted while you are away. Further, I can't imagine that storage is at such a premium that it makes even the tiniest bit of difference to their bottom line to keep everyone's characters around, "just in case."
ReplyDeleteI also have the vague memory of FFXI claiming that they would delete all your characters if you were away for a certain amount of time, and then later when Square changed their policy it turned out they actually kept characters for longer than they had been claiming, and mostly ever character that had ever been rolled was still there. I'm too lazy to go digging for that, perhaps I made the whole thing up.
It's probably right. It's what EverQuest did in the early days. There was supposedly a set period after which your account would be deleted along with the characters but as far as I recall they never actually did it. It was more like something they had the option to do under the EULA and it was always clearly meant to stop people unsubscribing for periods then resubbing later. I think it would have been standard practice for sub games then, when no-one ever imagined the games would just go on and on and on.
DeleteAfter a few years, when it became apparent a lot of mmorpgs were going to last way, way longer than anyone had expected, it became at least as important to keep the door open for ex-players to come back than to keep the ones already there from leaving and all that implied threat went away. That's why it was so strange to get the email from Pearl Abyss. I still have my suspicions about its veracity, even though I've been to the genuine PA website and logged in using the new password.