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Inactive Characters

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Character Inactivity

Hello there, Defender! This article is to inform you about the rules and regulations of character activity in Defenders of the Cross. There may come a time where you do not log into the game for an extended period of time. This can be due to a variety of factors, such as a vacation, a busy time period, or simply to take a break! The question may come up, what will happen to my character?

The answer, in the majority of the cases, is nothing will happen to your characters. Especially if your character has running story lines and accumulated Reputation, your character will stay on your account, unchanged. Given an extended period of inactivity, however, your character’s reputation will slowly go down (this does not removes your character’s story line, it just brings down your position in the reputation list).

In the case of characters who have less than 10 reputation (such as some alternate characters) they will only see something happen to them if they are not used for any story line purpose for an extended period of time. Should they go several months without involving themselves in any story line event or interacting with a prompt (such as a resource drive), then they might be relegated to a side character, deleted or used for any specified circumstance.

1. What a side character means is they have their name removed and replaced with “D.####” where #### is their ID number. These characters can still be used, but cannot carry independent story lines.

2. Deleted, but why? When the server undergoes a major change such as a transfer, information is changed as well. Because the information in our servers gets so big (thanks to all our various systems) we need to clear out unused or neglected content. This includes characters, items and even accounts. Luckily when something like this is about to happen in the DOTC Servers, an email is sent to all members of the community. An email to help them claim their accounts before the purge has been completed. (If you didn’t fill out the claim before the new server opened, the information will be lost forever).

3. What does “used for a specified circumstance” mean? If this was a character that was of importance to a story line (not necessarily the main story line, it could simply be a character with a well developed personal or side story line), they may become involved in a story line event as a form of closing out the things they were involved in. It is a form of retiring the character while still providing an impact in the game world in accordance with what they did.

 

Character Deletion

Let’s continue with a little more on certain rules and regulations, this time on Character Deletion in Defenders of the Cross. The world of DOTC is in essence a “living and ever changing world”, it’s a story and as players you take part of it. One of the most common practices of the community is deleting a character, who they no longer like or find to be a failed attempt at what they wished to do, sometimes they erase the character to allow another one to gain Main Character status. There may come a time where you do not log into the game for an extended period of time and just decide to start over. This can be due to a variety of factors, such as a vacation, a busy time period, or simply to take a break! The question may come up, what will happen to my character in the story?

Retire – The character hands in their Defender license, and will not longer be playable. In the future they may appear as parts of story line events tied to themselves, but this will be as SNPCs, if it were to happen at all. This is the most common occurrence when deleting a character.

Suicide – The character takes their own life, therefore is no longer usable by any means (unlike retirement, where they may still be used as a M.O.B. entity). Their past actions, achievements and reputation still endure in the game world, but they have been essentially removed from taking a physical part of the game world. When this happens, it usually depends on the situation a character was in before they died.

What happens to my Reward Points?

If you have Reward Points left over and are considering to delete a character, make sure they are spent before this is done, as RP cannot be transferred to another character. There are various services, consumables, and equipment that are sold in the Item Mall which can be used to benefit your next characters, so spend them in whichever way you understand will help them the best. Remember to deposit those purchases in your account storage as they will not be passed if a character was deleted with those items on them!

**REMINDER**

Item Mall Insurance DOES NOT COVER CHARACTER DELETION! So make absolutely sure your character’s belongings are stored away. There are some Item Mall items which cannot be stored, if you absolutely want to keep these items and have item mall insurance; then you should consider having your character die via story line means instead (there are many ways in which to achieve this, such as a duel to the death for a simple example).

How to delete a character? First in-game, empty the character (this way it can be deleted much faster and it won’t clog the database). Then press delete in the character selection screen. It will have a timer before the character completely gets erased. You can cancel the character deletion during this timer, however once it finishes counting down, the character is now permanently gone. The timer for this is 3 hours.

 

The Cleansing

Once a year in the Defenders of the Cross Worlds an unspoken and unannounced event occurs. This is known as the Cleansing. What happens is that characters who weren’t used are deleted. Erased from the DOTC Universe. These characters are all those below level 70 and belong to accounts that have not logged in for 2 years. The Databases of DOTC get overcrowded with character creations, information, prompts, and items. In order to maintain a proper working database, the Cleansing occurs.

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