Howdy doody

I have been making mule accounts and characters with unique names (e.g., zig_asdfghjk) on USEast recently. The characters normally expire after 10 days, but since the names are at no risk of being taken, they always come back.

After a few weeks break, I logged onto multiple accounts (e.g., *zigmule1, zigmule2, zigmule3...) and all characters were deleted. On some accounts with permed mules (played for 2 hours that will expire after 90 days), only those characters remained with a timer of “expires in 56 days.”

I am trying to figure out if I was hacked or if blizzard deletes characters that expire. I’m very casual, none of the gear was exceptional. The kicker is that none of my main toons were deleted (separate accounts), and the permed mules were never accessed because the character expiration timer was never reset. On one account, only expired chars were deleted but there were 2 or 3 chars that still had “character expires in 2 days” remaining, also unaccessee because although i was on a break, i did access one account to do a few trades on those mules.

Anybody ever heard of anything like this?

Blizzard does indeed remove expired characters, however I don't know the circumstances.
It's been going for a while now.

Yeah alot of people lost a shitton of items

Do you know if this was a one time thing, a scheduled event, or som sort of unexpected bug on the servers?

It is a relief to know I was not hacked!

Its new as of last ladder i believe

Yes unfortunately it's true. I don't know what prompts them to delete certain expired characters and leave the others, but I lost all my sorcs multi-spec gear (lost my perfect blizz set, zeal set, fire and light sets).

Shitty. Blizzard has something new for us every day, eh?

blizzard deleted expired chars/accs several times yes (main reason why specific items
become even more expensive).
one cannot say when they exactly delete them but its definitely not a circulated thing.
as example, blizz once deleted expired chars after they fixed some public dupe methods.
i assume they did that because people used it and duped tons of stuff keeping them on mules
obviously so most mules get deleted.
then there was another deletion upon new 1.14 patch (i dont know why) and another which also seemed
totally random to me (that time when blizz applied silent fixes, for example ww "fix", fhr related stuff,
server improvement etc), and maybe even some more i missed.

tldr you can never know when blizz will delete expired chars again so you should better keep all your chars updated : /

This post was edited by OnChair on Feb 18 2019 08:16pm

yea they re added in the expired for 7-14 days days then auto deletes method again last season or two alot of people lost chars and or names because of it

Yea they jewed me hard lost 2 full accounts of stuff i think it's bullshit you pay for a game and they dictate when your hours spent is deleted i think it's bullshit