Can I pay cash to restore my wiped character?

Hey, I wrote an email a year or two back, but still no reply. I would like to restore a dear character of mine that has been deleted without any notice from probably a system wipe. It's happened a couple of years back. Sadly even more time has passed since then, so I know chances are slim. Is there a chance I can pay to have it looked at and restored? I would like to play here again. Sorry if this is the wrong place to ask. But I can't figure out where to post this, and there's not been any reply to my email.

Characters deleted in a cleanup can not be restored.

That sucks... Especially since I took just 1 year off and then when I returned everything I had got wiped. Spent a lot of time on achievements and stuff on that one... An email notification whenever a wipe is planned to occur is probably the way to go. I know there's in-game announcements, but how would you know read those if you're not actively playing on the server in the first place?

Only characters that are level 50 or lower and that belong to non-premium accounts are removed. That is hardly "everything". If you spent a lot of time on achievements and stuff, your characters weren't level 50. So either you haven't lost your characters (how are you checking this?) or you have been hacked.

Yes I know, that's the weird thing. I wasn't hacked. After I returned to play (and found my characters were wiped), I spent a long time searching around the forums and other people reported this as well. Their level 80 characters seemingly got wiped without any explanation. The most common explanation was that somehow hackers got in and deleted their character. But you can see if anything like that has occured via the "last logged in" history thing on the armoury. I couldn't see any weirdness there. Only my logins.

I know about the wipes on level 50 and lower characters (I think it used to be level 20 back when I used to play, but still). Wasn't talking about those ones. That's fair.

I was talking about my level 80 non premium account character. Which shouldn't have gotten wiped. But it somehow did. And I can't find a proper explanation about why that happened.

I couldn't even find him on the "restore character" thing either (back when this was all fresh still).

If your characters were in Icecrown, try to see if they are in the barracks https://www.warmane.com/account/barracks

No they weren't sadly. They were on Lordaeron. And I've tried looking everywhere. No mention of them. I would love it if there was a way for a GM to check if they had been manually deleted. That would at least narrow it down to a hacker, and I can finally put this all behind me. I tried to do that via an email, but no reply.

I sure as hell know I wouldn't have personally deleted them.

There are only three possibilities, as has already been covered:

a. You're on the wrong account;
b. The character(s) didn't meet the minimum requirement to be safe from an inactivity clean-up; or
c. Someone used the account and deleted/traded the character away, be it you, someone you shared the account with or someone who stole your credentials.

Characters aren't manually deleted by Staff, not even permanently banned ones, and there's no fourth option for some mechanism that could have removed the character. If you're sure if isn't either of the first two, you already have the answer.

"So either you haven't lost your characters (how are you checking this?) or you have been hacked."

Sorry, didn't reply to this one. My initial check was via going in-game and seeing that my character selection panel was empty. But, I still had a character count while in the server selection in-game menu. I think it showed that I had like 3-4 characters on Lordaeron (while in reality there were 0). This was back in the day, I don't know if this is still the case if I do it now. I'll have to check after work. But I recall, back in the day, when I discovered that my characters were gone, I could still see a number of "ghost" characters when selecting the server. I know that this happens for a day or two after deleting a character. But back then I tried going on the website to see if I could somehow restore them at least, and they were still nowhere to be found. I tried everything.

I would check the account history in more detail to confirm that that account is the one that indeed contained the characters that you are looking for.

Also have you tried looking up your characters on the armory?

The number that shows in the realm list is stored in your client, not in the server.

If you still have your client from when you played the game, you can go to the WTF\Account folder and see the list of accounts that you logged into, and inside those folders, the names of the realms and characters you played.

The character count doesn't come from the server, it comes from local information on the computer.
The count still being there just means they weren't deleted from that specific computer.

Damnit, you're right, I might have gotten hacked actually. Apparently I had logged in from the Netherlands (not possible) on September 3, 2021 at 15:22. And then multiple times from January 5, 2022 at 21:56 to January 14, 2022 at 17:09. But why would they just delete the characters. Doesn't make sense. Wouldn't they try to sell them away or something?

To reply to some of your replies:

I only have this one account. I don't have other accounts. This is definitely the account.

Someone definitely logged in (judging by the account history) on my account, from the Netherlands (could be a VPN, but still, not me).

I don't own the same computer anymore sadly. So I don't have the same installation. It was a bunch of years ago anyway.

Account history doesn't show the characters. The armoury doesn't show the characters. I can't find them anywhere. Unless there is a way to track if a character has been sold off, and then renamed, I cannot find my character. It was called Manchevsky, on Lordaeron, it was a level 80 Mage Gnome. I think it was even a guild master, but I can't recall the name of the guild (I was the only one active on it).

This was during a time of inactivity for me. I had reset the password myself after a while after this event (didn't even know it at the time). And the characters were gone.

One way or another, you already found out the account was accessed by someone else, and then the characters vanished.
Character restoration (including the one paid with Coins) is available for 30 days after deletion, which is long gone.