The MMORPG RIFT has announced that it will delete all inactive characters and only gives you 45 days to save them. The fans are not happy about this at all.
Who is affected by the deletion? The developers of RIFT have announced that they will delete all inactive characters in their MMORPG. Characters are considered inactive if they have not been played for 2 years.
The deletion is set to take place on September 11, 2026, and only affects characters on the “Reclaimer Shard”. This is a type of transitional server where no play can occur. Only characters that were on servers that have since been closed end up there.
Most characters on these servers are likely to have been inactive for much longer than 2 years. Characters on the current live servers, however, are safe.
Here you can see something about RIFT:
Players find the reasoning stupid
Why do the characters need to be saved? The developers of RIFT justify the deletion of characters with data protection. This likely stems from the same reason as the issues with PlayStation accounts: the EU data protection regulation.
As the developers state on riftgame.com: “As part of our ongoing commitment to data protection, we will clean our Reclaimer database of characters from accounts that have been inactive for over two years.”
Every citizen has the right to be forgotten, which means that companies are obliged to delete user data when they no longer use the service. However, the MMORPG fans on Reddit are not happy about this at all. They complain:
- Significant-Buy9424: “Sounds like a great idea. There will only be 200 characters left in the database, so they can just run the server on the intern’s phone.”
- Tryukach09: “I thought this was closed about 10 years ago.”
- ChiefStormCrow: “Not that I was planning to play again, but this pretty much guarantees I never will. So, great job? Lol.”
What about RIFT? The MMORPG has not attracted many players in recent years. Although there was a player initiative in 2025 aimed at reviving the MMORPG, it did not lead to any lasting improvement in the user numbers.
The player numbers at their weekly peak are now about the same as they were a year ago and four years ago. While there are times when many players check back in, with 200 players on Steam at peak times, RIFT has now clearly become one of the smaller MMORPGs.
Have you checked in to RIFT again? If so, feel free to let us know in the comments what impression you currently have of the MMORPG. More about the big revival attempt by the players for RIFT can be found here: Players revive 14-year-old MMORPG entirely without the developers, now it shows how well it has worked
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