theworldofdreams.com

I started playing on WoD 6-12 months ago, and although I enjoyed it I ended up having to quit after just a few weeks due to real life. Being the game junkie that I am I couldn't stay away, so I reinstalled UO and the WoD files to see if my account was still available. It was! I'm quite happy about that. However, when I went to the character selection menu all of my characters had been deleted. I was hoping someone on the board could tell me why that happened.

While I'm at it I do have one other question since I'm going to remake my characters, and have no idea of what they were named before. The name Aedammair is (I think) a fairly common Irish name. I've never seen it in a book or game, but I have heard of it before. If you google it you come up with quite a few results. Can I still name one of my characters Aedammair [some last name here]? Or will I log in one day to find myself renamed to Sue?

--edit-- Wow. I guess it's been more than six months, according to the date I joined the message boards. Time flies.

I would say if you put a last name on it you'll be fine, but honestly you should be fine without a last name, there are several people running around with very common first names and nothings been done about them so I dont see why you would be any different! As for your characters being deleted, I could of swore I read someplace that if you dont play for so long your account gets deleted, maybe they deleted the characters and havent gotten around to deleting the account and you more or less caught it before it could be deleted!

Accounts are almost never deleted (I believe that its only happened 2 times in the history of WoD, and the last time was probably about 2 years ago.) The reason is pretty simple: Its a horrible, horrible pain to do in POL - you have to shut the server down, then manually go through and delete them (or try to write a program that can do it automatically, though I don't know of any such tool at the moment.) Accounts take up very little data anyway, though, so its really not too much of a problem, though if and when POL adds a way to easily delete accounts, we'll probably nuke some of them just because having to check literally thousands of accounts whenever you're searching for something definitely does slow things down somewhat...

The information stored on an account, though - characters, houses, bankboxes, etc - take up a whole lot more data, which slows down world-saves, restarts, etc, and basically clogs everything up. Because of that, they're subject to deletion after 60 days of inactivity (though usually its 90 days, but we only 'guarantee' 60.)

As for the name, if it is a common Irish name, then it sounds OK to me. Of course, you still might want to consider adding a last name: they have benefits such as tying your characters together, which can help other players get to know you and recognize you easier. But of course, that's up to you.

Thank you both for the response. I'm glad I should be able to use that name. And I'll be sure to log in every 60 days from now on, though I doubt I'll have to worry about it too much now. I don't plan on taking any more breaks for awhile this time.