I decided to take a long break from World of Warcraft and decided I would like to do it this month.

Two issues arose that needed looking into.

1. My subscription still has some months left on it.
2. My characters took some time, effort, planning by to set up and help from other players - especially GMs

So, I did not want to waste the money for the remaining period of my subscription AND lose all my characters.

I did some research.

I found a useful page on the World of Warcraft support web site that tells you how to cancel your account. It partly explains how to do that.

Here is that page:

In a nutshell what happens immediately is that:

a.) Your credit card information is removed/forgotten from your account

b.) You lose ability to log into any Forums on the website because authentication on web site stops working as soon as you cancel

c.) You can still access your characters in the game right through the day before your auto-renewal date.

What the page fails to explain is what happens to your characters once the auto-rewnewal date is reached and you have cancelled your account. People who have been playing or a year or two - or perhaps a lot less - really want to know that.

So I called Blizzard World of Warcraft technical support and posed my questions. Mostly, they were good news. Note these are not exact quotes, I am just conveying the gist of the information in a FAQ-like format.

Q: Are my characters deleted when I cancel my account or when my subscripton runs out?

A: No. All the characters for the account are preserved. Blizzard has accounts with all the characters owned by that account still around that date back to when WoW first came out. Auto-deletion of characters does not occur.

Q: Will items my characters posses in ther bank, bank bags, being worn, or held in equipped bags be deleted?

A: No. All those items are kept intact just like the characters themselves.

Q: How do I restart my account when I am ready to begin playing again with those same chararacters I had before?

A: There are two ways. One you use if your subscription has ended in the last 90 days, the other if it has been more than 90 days. (a) Go through process of creating a new account on web site but make sure that you use BOTH the same user name and password as before, (b) Use the Scroll of Resurrection feature. [I forget which you do in which case but it is probably obvious when you are on the web site. -johnnysofware]

Q: Will the contents of the Inbox for each character be preserved and still be there when I renew again.

A: All ingame mail is subject to the 29-day auto-deletion feature regardless of whether the account subscription has ended or not.

So there you have it. When you are really busy with other things or just tired of playing WoW you can take a long - even really, really long break from the game - and then pick up where you left off at some distant date in the future.

Your characters and their items will be kept intact. Whatever mail they had in their mailbox is still going to expire subject to the 29-day auto-deltion feature. So it behooves you to bank, bag, vendor, auction, give away, or disenchant any items attached to emails in your email box.

As part of your account cancellation planning process, you probably want to include time to respond to emalis you have received from other characters, respond if necessary, and delete them. If you have a very full inbox, they could be hiding some messages. You can only see 100 or so messages at a time.

Something that just occured to me is Bliizzard does some weird, miscellaneous stuff from time to time. A good example of this is the times they have made a drastiic change to the talent tree of a class. They might completely reset your talent points. This makes your character totally forrget what people refer to as your character's spec or build. I remember vividly when this happened to my Shaman class character in early or mid-2008. Lucky for me, he was specialized pure Enhancement talents so it only took a few minute to get his talent tree rebuilt.

You can view and then print your talent tree out from Blizzard's wowarmory.com web site and even some other web sites. You probably want to do this before you cancel your account. The longer you are away, the greater the possibility of this happening. I have a hunch that when WoLK comes out in 2008 or 2009, this could happen to some classes.

The only other loose to address is your social connection to other players in the game. I am not a GM and have never contemplated being one so I will not address the extra issues GMs face. I will just touch upon things regular players might contemplate doing before they leave and having happened when they return to the game in the future.

Chances are, as far as most or all of your characters go - you are in a guild and you have a few friends you talk to regularly outside of your guilld.

To prepare for your eventual return, and avoiid anhoying them even if you probably will never return, it would be a good jesture to inform the GM and maybe a couple other people in your guild of your intentions to not renew your account and absent yourself from the game. Ditto your closest friends in the game who are not in your guild.

If you have anything you want to read or print that is in the Forums, you better do that before you cancel your account too.

That is it. Assuming there is nothing special about your situation like you are a GM, have a permanent spot in a raid group you need to relinquish back to your fellow raiders, and you are not holding any items for anyone - you are ready to cancel your account.

Resuming the game is the next thing you will face, if you choose to do so someday. I have already covered the mechanics of getting your account reactivated - and with it, your old, familiar characters.

What you need to be prepared for is maybe a little culture shock upon your return. Though I have not cancelled my account yet, here are some things I think you can expact based on my experiences over time while playing the game.

• Guilds disband from time to time which effectively boots all members from guild. Many guilds have a practice of kicking out any characters who have not logged in for a certain number of months - I have heard things like 1, 2, 3, 6, 12 months. So be prepared to be guildless upon your return.
• Your GM or favorite guild officers might have left your guild. It behooves you to write their names down before you cancel your account. That way when/if you return, you have likely contacts to get back into your old guild - or into their new guild - if you really liked them.
• Your old friends may be gone upon your return. If so, the names of their characters will be removed from your characters' Contacts lists. It probably behooves you to write your best friends' characters' names down before you cancel your account. That way, if they are gone when you return but later return, you can add them again. To do that, you have to check periodically - and to do that, you have to be able to know their exact spelling of those character names.

Hope this little tutorial helps people.