Out of character-post!
I've been thinking a lot of what happends to players accounts when they leave the game for one or another reason.
In most cases I suppose the account will be left to detoriate such as in the monthly clean-ups. In EVE-Online they say that characters are guaranteed to remain for 6 months but I've noticed that characters stay for far longer than that. In other MMO's characters only stay for as short as 90 days.
What reasons would there be for a player to leave? Maybe he just got bored, I suppose that's ok in such case. But there are a few cases where people who play an MMO dies IRL, which means that the password and username might be lost if he left no notes.
This is a thing I'd consider very sad as a fan of MMO's considering that the person who has played the MMO has spent countless hours on the character. Perhaps in the future we will be including the username and password of our online accounts & assets in our will, or leave a list of usernames and passwords in a bank-account.
I certainly would.
Short list of my online-assets could be...
Ultima Online, Planetside, Anarchy Online, EVE-Online, FFXI Online, Steam accounts, e-mailaddresses, permanent webserver & shell access, authorship-sites, paypal & other payment sites and tons more.
Sure it's different to real-life assets but it's still time I've spent on all of this which I'd find disappointing if it were left as a virtual-reality remnant. It's just a guess, but I think that in the future online-assets will be valued as much as offline-assets even if it's not in monetary value.
One famous example in the eve-community would be the eve-kills.com site-owner who died in a car-accident (I may be wrong about details) whose site was left to detoriate since nobody had his account-credentials and his family didnt have the knowledge or the interest to keep the site going.
What will happen to the site now? The domain will eventually expire and may be snapped-up by a domain grabber.
However a few days ago I noticed the domain got renewed, it'd be pretty sad if it was an automatic withdrawal from an online account which was left-over by his family. I dont know with any certainity at all, but I'm hoping it's renewed by someone who will put it to good use.
2 Comments
tas devil·
evekills.net is the new eve-kills it works just like the older one ... and its obvious it has been 'borrowed' from the old one... I am not sure of the details... but evekills.net surely works...
Ander·
They ripped the design off eve-kills.com while it was still online but it's not the same author.
The database of eve-kills.com is used on almost any of the killboards nowdays.