Announced today is the introduction of the “Character Undelete Paid Service” where you can request to restore a deleted character for $19.95 per character. This is only payable through a credit card transaction (not Turbine Points). There are no limits as to when your character was deleted as they say that most can be recovered.
You can request a Character Undelete by:
- Going to http://support.turbine.com
- Click on the “Support Center” tab
- Click the “Submit a Ticket” link
- Select the Game and the Paid Services team
- Select “Character Undelete” for the type
- Complete the rest of the form and submit.
According to the FAQs your character will be restored to the server it was deleted from with all its gear, experience, rank and vault items.
Things that will NOT be restored include:
- Friends List
- Ignore List
- Kinship/Tribe information and status
- Money and Items not yet detached in mail
- Outstanding auction items and bids
- Player-owned housing
- Player-owned housing items left inside a player-owned house (this includes decorations and items inside the storage chests, as well as items left in escrow)
- Items in Shared Storage bound to the character being restored
- Skirmish history
Characters that were transferred are currently out of luck:
Unfortunately we are unable to Undelete characters who have previously been transferred between servers.
While I am not personally in the habit of deleting toons, I can see how some people would appreciate this option. Someone who figured they were done with this game forever and deleted their characters only to come back and regret their decision. Or a sibling fight that results in your little brother deleting your character. Now these players can restore their characters to where they were.
I hope this technology was developed to help those affected by hacks and the hacker deleted their toon. I’m not saying that I think Turbine created this option to cash in on hacked characters at $20 a pop. I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt and hope that a happy side affect of this new system is to better serve hacked players.
What I mean to say is I truly hope that Turbine can use this service (for free) to assist accounts that were maliciously attacked by a hacker and deleted a character. That would be a real bonus and grant them some extra gold stars from me.
I have not been able to find any details on hacking and this new service yet (the question has been asked) but let me tell you I would be greatly annoyed that their “solution” to someone who was hacked and had their toons deleted was to make them pay for their access back. I will update if new details emerge.
This is a good additional service Turbine is providing and while may not be useful to everyone, will have it’s place and make some very happy. I just hope Turbine plans to use this new system to go the extra mile with their customer service as well.
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February 14, 2011 at 5:17 pm
I can’t imagine that they’d require someone to pay to undelete the characters from a hacked account.
To me, this has all the hallmarks of some engineer running down the hallway shouting “GUESS WHAT WE JUST WROTE A MOTHER EFFING ***SCRIPT*** TO DO MOTHER EFFERS!!!!!” and some dude in Finance heard her.
Like you guys have never seen that jubilant Database Administrator Jog of Fame before… Psh…
February 14, 2011 at 8:13 pm
Well the thing that strikes us is that it specifically does not mention hackers and they have yet to state that this is something that they will do for people who are hacked. What we hope is that they will use this for such a thing.
But yep, it does sound like they figured out the procedure of how to restore stuff accurately; which is great. And then someone thought of how to make money of if first without addressing that players would want this for hacked accounts; which was bad. We suspect that someone will speak up soon.
February 14, 2011 at 5:21 pm
I like the Idea, however I would also like it if turbine would let me transfer a toon to landroval. The reason is becuase of my two main toons on my old server, I once deleted them and both were at level 60 and 52, which is cool. Still an interesting idea.
Do you know if they show you what toons you can bring back?
February 14, 2011 at 8:09 pm
It sounds like they will allow you to undelete any character from any server as long as you have the character slots open.
February 14, 2011 at 6:50 pm
My friend who plays WOW could use a service like this, he deleted his hunter so many times last year he got in trouble with the Blizzard GM’s. As for LOTRO I don’t really have any toons that I would want to restore.
February 14, 2011 at 7:51 pm
I’m glad they started this, BUT my kin leader had his account hacked a couple weeks ago and he lost his champ that he’s had since beta, Turbine told him over the phone that it was “impossible” to get his character back. Given that and this coming out not 2 weeks later makes me wonder where LotRO is going, it seems like we’re paying for everything now.
February 14, 2011 at 8:07 pm
This is what struck us odd about this too. It seems that restoration of characters is not a technology issue, but rather a policy issue.
February 15, 2011 at 9:50 pm
I’ve seen anecdotes from players on the official forums reporting that they’ve had characters undeleted and rolledback in the past. Which, naturally, leads me to believe you’re exactly right. They made the decision to stop offering this to players at some point.
February 14, 2011 at 11:29 pm
WOW 20bux? World of Warcraft does this for free…
February 14, 2011 at 11:33 pm
…and i got my toon back, with everything they had, at the time of the deletion
February 14, 2011 at 11:38 pm
The only issue i see here is that for getting your toon back from a post-hacking experience u gotta pay 20 dollars which is basically good for turbine the fact accounts are getting hacked and toons deleted.
February 15, 2011 at 8:19 am
I’m pretty sure Turbine has had the ability to restore deleted characters for a long time now. They’ve done it for free in the past on accounts that have been compromised. (I assume they will continue doing it for free on compromised accounts.)
It sounds like Turbine is just taking this pre-existing service and monetizing it now for accounts whose login credentials technically haven’t been compromised. It’s a smart move by the company.
February 15, 2011 at 9:53 pm
But Turbine stopped restoring deleted characters even on hacked accounts at some point.
I had a friend and kinmate get hacked last summer. He was very, very casual (we’re talking a guy that would log in just to play in the Shire waterfall) and only had one character at 65. Turbine refused to restore any of his characters. Instead, they gave him 20g, which was far more than he had to start with and was something he’d never use. He gave it away to kinnies and hasn’t logged in since.
February 15, 2011 at 9:07 am
Yesterday a Kinmate of mine had to use this policy to return his deleted characters from a malicious hacker. He was hacked not once but twice. The second hacked had then thought it funny I believe to delete all his characters so when he logged on the next time he was staring at the character generation page with no exsisting charcters and he had 4 65 level characters. He is happy for this as he had rerolled new charcters and has been leveling them significantly however there is nothing like having that charcter who you put sweat and tears and its own blood into. Just my 2 cents, however I do believe this needs to be offered free of service to the victims of hackers.
February 15, 2011 at 11:14 am
Sapience replied in a thread that an announcement about compromised account policies is coming next week!
http://forums.lotro.com/showthread.php?&postid=5233718#post5233718
February 18, 2011 at 4:32 am
Everyone keep your fingers crossed that you aren’t a victim between now and the announcement.
My account was hacked last week. They closed all my tickets today and sent me on my way with just shy of 140g to replace the inventories, crafting supplies, and 10 legendary items across 6 characters at cap. The new policy is too little to late for me. I’ll be passing out that coin to friends and I’m gone.
February 16, 2011 at 10:16 am
I feel like If my char. that I spent countless hours playing got hacked and deleted, I’d gladly pay 20 to get him back. Don’t tell Turbine but I’d prob pay 100
! Glad there offering this and I hope they make it apply to hacked acct.
February 16, 2011 at 11:53 am
You are in luck, Sapience stated that next week they will have an announcement regarding revised hacking/restores.
February 18, 2011 at 12:36 pm
All this talk about hacking and being hacked seems like a great time to point out a super article about how to choose (and remember!) great (and, most importantly!) *UNIQUE* passwords.
It doesn’t matter how strong your password is – if you use it more than one place, you’re vulnerable, as a site might be compromised, and then your strong password doesn’t have to be guessed…
http://lifehacker.com/#!184773/geek-to-live–choose-and-remember-great-passwords
http://www.howsecureismypassword.net
FWIW, in places that allow more than 12 characters for a password, I use a (memorable, and unique) password that would take 6.0 x 10^21 (6 sextillion) years to hack.
…that’s 436 billion times the age of the universe, for those who are counting…