Delete Server Characters???

[Klauss]

Ok, I've been all over the boards looking at various posts about deletion of characters, but a player in my campaign is having some serious trouble. He has somehow ended up with over 15 duplicate server characters that totally bog down his ability to log in. Is there anyway to remove these server characters?

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

So it turns out that some days Im more challenged than others, I figured it out.

[DarkStar]

Perhaps he was choosing his local character instead of his server character all the time? When you login and pick your local character for the first time, it gets uploaded to the server where it becomes a server character. But client application can't overwrite server characters, so when you do this the second (and third, and fourth and so on) time it creates another copy on the server. I am fairly positive this is what happened.

You should be able to just right click a character and choose an option to remove it? I am not sure if the GM has to do this or if the player can do this himself - just check.

[Griogre]

I agree, he is almost certainly continually choosing his local character. In FG1 he would have been continuously overwriting his server character (which might be the intent of the current player).

Tell him to stop selecting his local character. When the player logs in to the server it shows all the different server characters with his Login ID as well as all local characters with that ID. The local character is usually the first on the list. I would suggest you tell him to delete his local character to stop this from ever happening again.

The trick when someone has this many copies of a character is marking which one to keep so you don't delete the "latest" version. If you are really unlucky he has used several versions so the data that should be on one character his scattered over several characters. Have him combine all character data on one server character. When he has done this, change the character name of his currently opened character to "Keep". Now go into the server characters and delete every other version of that character whose name is not "Keep".

Just remember, if he does not delete the local character he will always have two choices when he logs in. Now that you know the player is "challenged" with selecting the server character, after he logs in just check your list of characters and if there is more than one of his character on the server he selected the local character again. Stop him right then, figure out which of the two server characters is correct (it will normally be the one he isn't logged into), mark it "keep" and tell the player to log out and select the correct character this time. While he is logging out delete the extra character, - repeat this until the player figures out how to select the server version of the character.

[Mellock]

Just remember, if he does not delete the local character he will always have two choices when he logs in.

And the thing is: when you log in, your local character is visible immediately, but the server characters take a while to load and pop up in the box. Sometimes I selected my local character like that on a reflex. Now I just keep a backup of my local ones in a different folder.

[Klauss]

Thanks for the well thought out replies. It was, in fact, a matter of the player continually choosing the local character over and over again. Now that it is cleaned up everything is running much smoother.

Thank you for all of the incredible insight!