"Houses and items" is not what we speak of here. We speak of characters, their skill points, their bank accounts.
I
have been discussing characters, if you didn't notice, but I brought up houses and contents as the same principle:
if you don't want to lose your stuff, then pay for the account. You can't give even a simple answer as to why EA or anyone else should continue to maintain data for free.
To EA, it's all data with no distinguishing between what the data represents.
Should such 'simple solution' be enforced, it would require line of thinking from EA/Mythic that displays absolutely zero grace towards people who have invested significant amount of cash on their product and, more importantly I guess, are ALL potential returning customers.
This line of thinking would co-exist with Free To Play MMOs that treat customers who have never paid a single dime with more respect and grace than folks behind UO would treat their former monthy subbing customers.
You're talking about people who spent a little money
once upon a time. "I used to put a lot of money into your business" has no weight when the customer hasn't shown up in a long time and may not return again. These aren't people who still drop tens of thousands at a hardware store, or still patronize a restaurant restaurant so often as to get preferential treatment.
The odds of someone who quit in 2010 are already not that great, and the odds against return increase exponentially with years, to where someone who quit in 2005 probably won't return, and someone who quit in 1998 has a definite asymtote of zero -- and would have such outdated characters and items anyway that rebuilding skills is preferable.
And we get back to that simple thing again:
if you don't want to lose your stuff, then pay for the account. You can't give even a simple answer as to why EA or anyone else should continue to maintain data for free.
I 'm unsure what the argument here is tbh. There is no evicence for such purge ever having taken place or ( that I know of) any evidence of such ever happening on large scale.
Do you argue on it's behalf? Do you want it to happen? Would you sleep more peacefully if you knew a person who once upon a time paid..let's say, 200 dollars for playing UO has gotten everything erased since he dared to end this commitment for few years?
I'm not sure what
you are saying. I've already made my position clear: not knowing if it actually happens, a purge makes sense for very old characters if an account hasn't been active in years. Do I have to repeat myself for you? It doesn't matter to me, but if that's what EA has directed and/or the Devs have decided, I can understand the business reasons behind it.
A couple of hundred bucks isn't even two years. Big deal. That barely gets the lowest-level vet rewards.
If storing all this precious character data is so exceptionally costly and dififcult in UO, imagine what an **IMPOSSIBLE** concept it would have been around, say, late 90s or early 00s! Typical hard drive costing, say, 200 bucks has...what, one or two hundred times the storage capacity of one in late 90's. This development reflects all the related costs of server farms as well.
It's not as simple as EA buying its own hard drive. It's a matter of longer items causing longer server maintenance times, or didn't you know the purpose of the original 1999 cleanup? It's a matter of things being stored in the cloud, being charged by a unit of storage, with the guarantee (ahem, Atlantic, December 2012) that when something screws up, there are redundancies to save the data -- and redundancies with backups.
When you understand data storage, then come back and talk to me.
