Guild Wars 2

Another player asked me yesterday if I knew if he could have a character he’d deleted (and changed his mind about the deletion) restored. And you know….. I can’t find anything that says either you can’t or you can. So I’m assuming you can’t, but could someone confirm that for me, please?

Not allowed unless the account was hacked, and the player qualifies for a rollback.

I think theonly possible way to getit back is to have is account back in time, it’s something the dev can do when you get hacked and someone steal all your items.
You need to send a ticket to devs, but I don’t know if they will do it for this reason.

According to Anet there is no way for them to restore a deleted character. They can perform a roll back on your account – but that’s like doing System Restore on Windows – it resets everything to a previous state, so you’d lose everything you’d done since the character was deleted. And they’ll only do that once per account and only if you were hacked.

I imagine the reason they can’t is because it would require them to keep a copy of every single deleted character in case the creator wants it back. That would be a huge amount of data to copy and store for a relatively niche service (I think in the entire time the game’s been out I’ve seen 3 or 4 people ask for this).

Hopefully your friend saved all the valuable/one-off/hard to get items from the character before deleting them. So they could re-create them by making a new character with the same appearance, name, profession etc. and use tomes and/or a level 20 scroll to level them up quickly and then return the items they were using.

A friend deleted her character with the legendary staff on it by mistake, didn’t get the character nor the weapon back. And we did send many emails and explanations about a genuine mistake (another of her characters looked very similar in name and appearance).

ArmoredVehicle.2849:

A friend deleted her character with the legendary staff on it by mistake, didn’t get the character nor the weapon back. And we did send many emails and explanations about a genuine mistake (another of her characters looked very similar in name and appearance).

What do we learn from this?

• Always check the Inventory of the Character you want to delete before you delete it
• Don’t name one Character xXxKillerxXx and the other xXxKilIerxXx (one of them has a capital i as an “L”)and make them look the same and have the same Profession.

Danikat.8537:

I imagine the reason they can’t is because it would require them to keep a copy of every single deleted character in case the creator wants it back. That would be a huge amount of data to copy and store for a relatively niche service (I think in the entire time the game’s been out I’ve seen 3 or 4 people ask for this).

No software company is doing hard deletes in databases. Everything is saved with a deleted flag.

NapTooN.6283:

ArmoredVehicle.2849:

A friend deleted her character with the legendary staff on it by mistake, didn’t get the character nor the weapon back. And we did send many emails and explanations about a genuine mistake (another of her characters looked very similar in name and appearance).

What do we learn from this?

• Always check the Inventory of the Character you want to delete before you delete it
• Don’t name one Character xXxKillerxXx and the other xXxKilIerxXx (one of them has a capital i as an “L”)and make them look the same and have the same Profession.

Agreed.

I make, and delete, a lot of characters and the only thing I’ve ever lost is some karma back before it was account bound.

My method is to strip everything out of the equipment tab, even stuff you don’t want to keep, because it’s easier to look at an empty tab and confirm it’s empty than to look at one with stuff equipped and work out what you do and don’t want. Condense their inventory down to the starter backpack (by banking, selling or salvaging items) and remove all extra bags.

Then go through the stuff in the inventory, carefully read the name and deposit, salvage, sell or delete each item individually until there’s nothing left. Then double check I’ve done everything above.

I do a similar thing when actually deleting them. I click the character I want to delete, double check it’s the right one (it’s pretty clear, since they’re the naked one), type the name in, double check the name and then delete them.

Although I have to admit I’d never made a temp character with a name that was virtually identical to one I wanted to keep.

Just wanted to pitch in and say that Danikat’s response is excellent and is correct- you can’t get an account rollback unless your account was hacked.

I don’t think it’s a database/memory/history issue though, but more of a CS time issue.

If CS told players they could get characters un-deleted and account rollbacks almost whenever, a lot more time would be spent on avoidable problems. Moreover, people would use it as a safety-net and take the consequences of their decisions less seriously. E.g.

“Oh well, if I chuck all of my money into the mystic forge and don’t get anything good, I can ask for an account rollback using excuses X, Y and Z”
“I’ll delete this level 80 character and make a new class- it doesn’t matter if I don’t like it because I can get my old character and stuff back anyway”

OK, thanks, all – I kinda thought that was how it worked. He kept saying it has to be possible because you can do it in Wow. But this isn’t Wow (thank goodness!).

Crimson Clouds.4853:

Just wanted to pitch in and say that Danikat’s response is excellent and is correct- you can’t get an account rollback unless your account was hacked.

I don’t think it’s a database/memory/history issue though, but more of a CS time issue.

If CS told players they could get characters un-deleted and account rollbacks almost whenever, a lot more time would be spent on avoidable problems. Moreover, people would use it as a safety-net and take the consequences of their decisions less seriously. E.g.

“Oh well, if I chuck all of my money into the mystic forge and don’t get anything good, I can ask for an account rollback using excuses X, Y and Z”
“I’ll delete this level 80 character and make a new class- it doesn’t matter if I don’t like it because I can get my old character and stuff back anyway”

That sounds brilliant and the sad thing is people excactly would to this