I’d say 6 months of inactivity – which exempts anybody who hit level 2. I’m really just talking about level 1 re-res with 0 cred here – occupying a name I’ve used on other sites and would make a good gimmick rp alt here and blah blah whine complain…

I don’t really care about people’s inactive alts taking up names that other people would like. I’m really just concerned about accounts that will never be played again taking up rows in the database. Aggressive DB shepherding as the game grows is important for keeping lag in check without throwing tons and tons of money at hardware.

As the game grows, at some point we’ll be in a position where the “number of people who have played the game in the past, but are now inactive” will dwarf the “number of people who are actively playing the game”. At or before that point, some kind of pruning will be reasonable.

Plus, since eventually some sort of pruning inactive account policy will seem like some combination of necessary/useful, it’s probably better to implement something like this while the game is young and small. Personally I would suggest on February 7, 2009 implementing a policy that if you are inactive for the period of 1 year and neither you nor your (legal) alts have ever owned a BP, your account will be deleted.

Auser Posted:

I wouldn’t want an inactivity policy. People have lives. I mean I’m moving to Australia next year so it could be a while before I get settled enough to play regularly again. Tubs had the best idea imo, 5BP for a slight name change and whatever else he said Log in to see images!

Except that the Log in to see images! next to your name means you donated for BP, which means you HAD BP, which means you’d be exempt anyway.

How about some clearly defined rules?

The account in question:

*Has or has had BP at some point.

*Has completed Episode 1.

*Has been active within the past 12 months.

*Is level 10 or higher.

If ANY of these statements are true, the account will not be purged.

When an account fails to meet ANY of these criteria, it will be destroyed in the following purge cycle.

Alternatively, rather than deleting the account it could instead be moved from the live database into a cold storage database where it will sit until somebody emails or TMs ET asking for it back. That gives the performance benefits of purging the users without actually having to delete anything.

I vote yes but only for 0 cred re-res.

SimplyTHEBEST Posted:

You get 7 cred for completing the tutorial, and that doesn’t even cost a forum visit.

It did for me just recently.

You can also no longer select further threads, so it’s not possible to complete Denture Chat from the tutorial any more.