Can I go on hiatus?

Someone recently told me that I can do just that - mark my account as on hiatus and not needing to pay monthly sub fee. Then when I decide to come back to WoW, all I need to do is to start paying the monthly sub fee and all my characters, gold, inventory, etc will still be there.

Is this possible? I only remember (I’ve been here since 2008) that once you stop paying monthly sub fee everything is gone. Has this changed?

Thanks in advance,

Taka

We don’t have an ability to mark an account as on hiatus or otherwise frozen, but you can always cancel your subscription so you won’t be billed and then reactivate it when you return.

You’ll want to make sure that you don’t have any outstanding mail or auctions, as those will be purged from the system when they expire, but otherwise, your characters should remain the same as when you left.

We’d recommend that you make sure your account is secure, add an Authenticator and SMS Protect if you didn’t have it. That way your account is as secure as you can make it before you step away. :slight_smile:

Just to be clear, that has never been a thing. If you stopped paying your subscription or otherwise discontinued adding game time to the account, from 2004 to present, your account and characters would be basically unchanged (assuming the game itself didn’t change - i.e. Level Squish from Shadowlands) until you returned. The only danger was if your account security was compromised.

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I always thought that once you cancelled your account or stopped paying your subscription, your account and all your characters were lost. I have no idea where that came from lol.

Thanks, Vrakthris, for clearing this up for me.

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to extend on what vrak said, as far as ingame things go, your characters wont be wiped off their respective servers, however any pending auctions either on the AH, or in the mailbox are temporary and have a duration.

Depending what you posted your toons auctions for in increments of 12 24 or 48 hrs those if they dont sell will revert back to the respective posting toons mailbox which is then held for 30 days after which if still unclaimed is then removed/Lost.

it is my understanding after that point any remaining items i dont believe are anything gms can assist with retrieval of through the means of item restorations which are also limited i think on a 7 day cooldown maybe longer between whats being restored.

as for toons deleting, they wont delete off a server, and any character beyond lvl 25 is kept permanently in blizzards record for your account, it used to be where if you deleted a character under lvl 60, after a period of time that specific characters data after the time period had passed would be wiped from the server but those are no longer the case as you can restore deleted characters on a given server in 1 week cooldown increments.

long winded reply to answer your question though, and hope this gives insight for you or anyone else who may be reading. your toons dont delete themselves unless some odd chance you get hacked or log in randomly an delete one. anything else on your account- pets mounts transmogs items toys etc all stays regardless if youre a paying sub or not, by not i mean free to play account in starter edition limitations.

it’s 50 not 25
https://us.battle.net/support/en/help/article/15312

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There are a few games out there that do that, so perhaps that is what you were thinking of? Many of those have some kind of grace period, like 6 months, etc… but we’ve never been one to purge full accounts.

The only account purge that I can recall is one we did several years back where we removed a lot of old trial only accounts. Those that never had any game time or other purchases. I don’t believe we’ve done any since.

Glad to help, Takamurasaki.

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Thanks Vrakthris, Articskoll & Rufflebotton.

So I’ll just go ahead and “cancel” my account knowing all my characters (all over 50 except one) will be available if I decide to reactivate my account in the future.

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If you don’t delete any, all your characters, including those under level 50, will be there if you decide to reactivate your account.

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The only thing that you could possibly lose (other than outstanding auctions as others have mentioned) are your character names. If you have not logged onto that character in awhile (I do not recall the timeframe), then it triggers an automatic forfeit of the name and you will have to rename the character

If you don’t subscribe for two total expansions, then they’ll get released.

For example, if someone was gone for all of BfA and SL, their names would get released in DF.

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Yes this is it, thank you :slight_smile:

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