I have been trying, in vain, to find out where my very first ever WoW character went to. He had multiple removed from the game items on him and I was interested in looking through it again for memories so I went to the realm he was supposed to be on to find that he’s not there anymore. I checked restore deleted character thinking maybe at some point when I’ve been hacked (twice in the last few years) he got deleted and wasn’t restored yet from what happened but again, he’s not there. I put in multiple tickets to see what can be done and had a support specialist redirect me to this article, and confirm, that this is what happened.
“If a character doesn’t appear on your list, it means it was purged from the database because it was below level 50 and it was deleted too long ago. Purged characters cannot be restored by any means.”
And I have to ask then, why this is a policy. We know, because it’s been said numerous times, that Blizzard do not ever delete characters or remove them themselves for any reason including giving someone that name. A person took the name “Legolas” on Dalaran in 2007 and you’ve never been able to have it since but that person hasn’t logged on since 2013? That’s unfortunate but you’re not getting the name. So I truly have to ask again, why does this policy exist? To echo a question our game director recently said to Preach, “Who does this benefit and what is the point of doing it?”. If you’re not going to purge characters from the game that haven’t been logged into in 9+ years or even force name change them then why in the world are you force purging people’s characters from the database if they’re under a certain level. I have multiple MULTIPLE non level 50 characters that have been deleted over the years (previous to the level squish) and yet they still remain in the database and haven’t been touched. This warlock could not have been deleted more than a year ago and was purged from existence. In your files right now he never existed.
I am not overtly angry at the customer support agent who had to relay this message to me nor the agent who had to write that article. I am angry at a team that implemented this policy for absolutely no reason at all and went out of their to ensure that if a character is targeted by this system there is no chance of ever correcting or reversing it. This policy should not exist. There is no reason for it to exist. It is severely flawed very obviously and has no benefit for anyone. And I know some will argue “Well they did it so names get freed up” and once again I will reiterate that this policy does nothing for that level 27 hunter Legolas on Dalaran that hasn’t logged in since 2013 and is clearly not coming back. It only targets current players and that is what is mind boggling to me.
Please reverse this policy. Get rid of it. Abolish it entirely. I’ve no idea how many others this has happened to for no reason but it is beyond frustrating and infuriating.