I wanted to share some thoughts and concerns about the recent Terms of Service change that allows accounts to be deleted after 3 years of inactivity.
I started playing War Thunder way back in middle school, and I kept playing all the way through my senior year of high school. It was one of the games I always enjoyed coming back to. But once I got into college, I ended up taking a long break — probably more than 3 years — just because life got busy. I didn’t stop liking the game, I just didn’t have time to play.
Eventually I came back, and over time I’ve spent a decent amount of money on Golden Eagles and premium vehicles. But with this new policy in place, I’m honestly nervous about the long-term future of my account. There may be other periods in my life — like when I’m raising kids or working full time — where I won’t be able to log in for years. That doesn’t mean I’m done with the game; it just means real life takes priority sometimes.
And what happens in extreme cases? If someone is deployed overseas, hospitalized, or if there’s a major global event that disrupts access to internet for long periods, do they just lose everything?
The idea that my account — and everything I’ve invested in it — could be deleted just for being inactive for 3 years makes it harder to justify supporting the game financially. I understand server space is a concern, but I hope Gaijin will reconsider this policy, or at least give players a way to opt out or flag their account for preservation if they know they’ll be gone for a while.
I want to keep supporting this game long-term, but only if I can trust that my account will still be there when I come back — even if it takes a few years.
36 months is a long ass period for you to find 10-20 minutes of free time and login in the game.
Where do you get deployed overseas for 36 months straight ?
Second part is a justified concern.
Mankind without internet connection for 3 years, that’s a good plot for a movie actually.
i mean
for say CAF(Canadian Armed Forces), contract usually last between 3-9 years, with lowest being just about 2 years 10 months(outstanding performance, etc… may shorten, but also make contract longer)
say sth happen, deployment last about 1-3 months for short conflict or 4-12 months for longer conflict
id say if u get drafted or running a military contract, 3 years gonna pass by very quickly
Yes, they’ll always send you back way before 36 months has passed.
Not being able to login for that long is definitely a pretty extreme case of something.
To be honest they should just look at the player’s total hours played, as someone playing for 20 minutes and then uninstalling for 3 years should be different than someone with 3000 hours.
I was just giving some examples, the overarching point is that life happens and can be unpredictable. It’s hard to justify spending any more money on this game if my account can be deleted based solely on inactivity.
I agree with this. Also, even though it wont apply/help everyone, the total amount spent on the game should be taken into consideration too. Like, over $100, give those accounts 5 years or something. Over $500-$1,000? Probably should just be fully exempt from deletion.
I would hope that they are able to clear enough old accounts out by looking at “low hour” players and/or those who have never spent much money on the game (like, less than $50 or something). But those who have a lot of rare/old/premium vehicles OR who have pumped a lot of money into keeping the game and company in business should probably get special treatment/privileges.
Before deletion, they should send out a few emails with an 5-7 month grace period because life happens and there should be a button to confirm that you’re still interested in the game, clock will tick another 3 years.
Fwiw, the “new”/current terms do state “with notice”, but I still lean towards giving players with a lot of hours and/or lots of purchases more time, up to being fully excluded from deletion.
It only takes 20 minutes to install the game and about 2 minutes to log into your account. Are you sure you can’t do this once every 2.5 years? You will receive plenty of advanced notice.
It has nothing to do with server space. The text data of your account only takes a few kilobytes of data which could almost fit on a floppy disk. The problem is that accounts have passwords like “password123” and these can be guessed very easily by a bot, and your account could be stolen.
I think it’s bad for players to have accounts deleted, but I guarantee that Gaijin will send multiple warnings by email. If you want to keep your account, simply log in every couple of years. If you can hold down a full time job and raise children, surely you can keep your email address up-to-date with Gaijin, and receive messages, and log in months ahead of time to preserve your account?
Having inactive accounts means your account could be stolen and sold by criminals. The only problem here is the playerbase. Microsoft announced severals months in advance that they would delete people’s video clips from the Xbox servers. They also announced that clips will auto-delete after 90 days, unless players downloaded them through One Drive and onto their hard drive. People knew this for months, but still cried rivers when several years of pointless videos were deleted. Nobody even watches most of the videos because every kid is uploading hours of videos every week, thinking that Microsoft is a charity. Despite endless warnings that the policy would come into effect, there were still threads on reddit complaining that users had lost years and years worth of videos (that they didn’t bother to back up).
Ultimately the responsibility for account security and preservation rests with the user. If you’re unhappy to spend thousands of dollars, knowing full well that the game won’t exist forever, then please feel free to not spend money on the game.
I don’t think they should. Inactive accounts are a security problem (see my other post) and the more you have on your account, the more value there is for criminals to guess your password, then sell your account.
These two statements conflict with each other. Your argument for deletion is moot if you think that it is the responsibility of the player. You can’t argue both of these statements at the same time in good faith.
If you cause yourself zero free time, you should love yourself better than that.
Even my father who’s a workaholic has over 40 hours of free time each week, 32 come from the weekends.
always is an overstatement, id say it depends whether or not you did great or terrible at camp or not, having a borderline mid performance, u will always get a notice and are to improve it. It depends on the person and the circumstance, u will NEVER ALWAYS get send back way before 36 months past.
this i agree, they cant just delete account that has thousand hours and maybe hundred of dollars compare to some account that has only 3 hours playtime