Came Back, Characters Gone!

I had taken a break around September due to work having us do a lot of overtime. Recently I've had the time to play again so I figured I would play for a bit. Went to the playonline website and accessed my SE account to activate one of my content IDs. After all is said and done, I hop on and get the updates downloaded and make it to the character screen.

I was a little surprised though to see all there was selectable was the 'Create Character' button... Anyone else have this issue of characters going missing after some time off?

Without jumping to conclusions, is it possible someone accessed your account and deleted your character?

You should be able to see the list of characters when you log into square enix account. Did you see any characters under active options when you activated your account again?

I'm with Spirachub on this one, I think you might need to manually reactivate the character(s) on the account management system page.

SE account management page -> select service -> Playonline/FINAL FANTASY XI -> options list. Here you should find the list of your cancelled characters, with the option to reactivate, and that's what you need to do. Only reactivating the service account will not automatically reactivate your characters. Hope that helps.

The thing that concerned me was the fact that he was given the option to create a character unless he's had a spare content ID as well as his character's content ID all this time.

The normal error message I've seen when trying to start up again after stopping payments for a few months is a no active content ID found when you try and enter FFXI.

Might of just paid for a new content ID thinking that would reactivate his character more then likely.

Even if you don't have your character's content id's registered it will still show them grayed out in the same account.

It looks like somebody deleted them, whether it be a person or SE themselves.

Sorry for the slow response. I'm at work and am a little pre-occupied. No one else has access to my account so someone else deleting characters is out of the question. Even more so that my mules are also gone and were never reactivated. I took a screenshot last night of my activated/deactivated content IDs which can be seen here: http://i.imgur.com/18GE6M8.png


The deactivated ones were my mules, the activated one used to say the deactivation date was sept2013, which was when I took my break. Last time I looked at that page, those IDs had the name-server of the characters.

This. I'd call SE and see if they can be restored.

The "character" you see there should have your character names on it under normal circumstances. This does look like you deleted your characters when you quit last time unless SE did some sort of character data archiving (which is also possible!). So you have an empty content ID reactivated which explains what you see there. The only chance you could get it back would be to call up SE support... or try this : http://www.playonline.com/ff11us/crs/

Sounds like the same thing that happened to a lot of people back in October'ish? There's a thread about it somewhere. (Long story short, you were hacked.)
Basically you're gonna have to do the paperwork and wait the 2-3 months to get your characters restored. Start now by calling SE or using the online chat service.

Being hacked doesn't make sense to me unless they are able to delete characters without the account being active. I imagine SE deleted them for some reason. I've been playing off and on for 10 years and this will be the first time I've had to personally contact them.

Needless to say, I'm not looking forward to it after what I've heard throughout the years.

Honestly I've always used the online chat support (never phone) never had a problem with them as long as I had all the information I needed.

Now that I'm back home from work, I can start looking into this. I've heard from a few people that it has taken roughly a month for their character to be restored... What am I supposed to do with the reactivated time I have?

My worry is if I make a new character to mess around on til the 'one' character I need is restored, it will mess something up since I hear they restore all characters.

I think you're worrying about apples and oranges. They'll look at it like they're restoring an old service and you've started a completely new service. The new character, to them, has nothing to do with the restoration process (even though to you it's sort of related to the same account, etc).



*edit*

I see- your "new" character will be on the same content ID as the one you're having restored, you're not buying a new content ID to create a toon while waiting. I'm going to guess you can't do that, but I have no prior knowledge. Just makes sense that you couldn't be using a content ID while they are modifying it.

Depends if you either reactivated a content ID or created a new one, if you want to make a new character then your best bet is to create a new content ID to link to it.

Going through the Character Reactivation Service now, one of the first boxes shows this;

By the looks of it, I have the option to restoring just my main character if I so choose. I have two that I care to restore, other two where trash mules. Probably end up requesting for the two and just making a new on the 3rd content ID and playing around with that.

from what i can tell from your screenshot, you can already tell your chars are gone from SQEX account. In my account i have the actual names of my characters and not just 'character', like you have.
i'd say contact them and hope you get your character back.

So.. that was pretty quick. They told me when the characters were deleted. Main was deleted on Dec2013 when account was inactive. So I'm assuming SE deleted them all for some reason.

http://i.imgur.com/XKFd9RO