How does Rockstar expire your online character/save game? (Are they in control?)
Where is my online character (appearance, experience level, inventory, weapons, horses, ...) stored? (I talk about Red Dead Online, but long term experience with GTA Online is probably helpful, too.)
- Is it local? In a save game? (I don’t think so.)
- Is it on Sony PSN servers [I’m on PS4.]? (I don’t think so either.)
- Is it on Rockstar’s servers? (Yes?)
So is it true that I could locally delete all from the game, including save games and meta settings, reinstall it and continue my online experience exactly where I left off? (Without using the save game backup function of PS Plus.)
Is my online character linked to my PSN account only?
How long does Rockstar save your character’s data if you don’t use it? Or how is it expired, if it expires at all? I guess they will do it like they do/did with GTA Online, so your experience with GTA Online is good enough for me. :-)
Solution 1:
Having played LA Noire and GTA5, they both had some major website component. For instance, you could take a picture in GTA5, and then it would show up on your RS profile on their website.
That leads me to think (since GTA5 and RDR2 have probably a very similar online architecture) that most of your character data might be on Rockstar Servers. You could also switch a GTA5 character from XB360/PS3 straight to XB1/PS4/PC when those consoles came out, so that pushes me too in that direction.
Also, I'm pretty sure PSN and XBL only give the matchmaking capabilities and connection. So that reinforces my theory.
So my best guess is data is on RS servers.
After that, do they delete characters? I never heard of RS doing a culling of old characters, and I'm pretty sure the server space it takes is probably so much little it's not gonna be for a while. Hell, I just connected in my Runescape account almost 20 years later and my character still existed.
If you don't want to lose your character, I guess keep an eye out if they say they will desactivate unactive accounts, but at that point, would you really want to pick back up a character you havent played for 5-6 years?