For over a decade, players have had the option to retire from Starpirates.net and SpyBattle.com.
This is how players could leave the game but not have their accounts deleted. Players would lose some benefits etc., but remain around as targets for others. So far so good.
The problem was that just about every player who retired, didn’t want to after a while. It seemed inevitable they would ask for their account back a year or two later. So while this was a great idea if the games last ed a few years, it’s been 12 years at this point.
So time to revisit this idea. What was decided, by the DEV team, but in conjunction with the player base was to make a change.
– Retirements are now a year long. So players can retire, but it’s for a year, not lifetime.
– This is grandfathered, so that most retirements are no longer active.
– Any autoretirements are no longer a thing either. For a time players had been autoretired if they did not log in for 4 years.
These changes went live end of Dec, 2019. In the months previous to that, as part of Project Phoenix, some players had been unretired and have come back to the game. These were approved on a case by case basis, and turned out to be great for the community.
If players want to remain retired, they simply need not log in.
If players want to be erased, as as per Europe’s GDPR “right to be forgotten”, legislation, then they can request this of the Admins.