Urgent: "Account is unavailable, because it is being deleted" in live game
Good day,
In preparation for release, to reset all account data, we have deleted player accounts because in the past we discovered that a new PlayFab account will be generated when the game client tries to log in with Steam credentials. This was ideal for testing, or rather, the best workaround for not being able to reset all player data easily.
Now yesterday we did this with a large number of accounts, in preparation for release today. For *some* accounts, we have noticed that they are now getting the error "Account is unavailable, because it is being deleted" when trying to log in. After searching for this error, we found out that the processing can be severely delayed (users reporting up to days), in our case it has taken 5 hours. We were not prepared for this. Would it be possible to have this looked into for our title and speeden up this process?
Currently, the players affected by this would be exactly our loyal players who we want to keep happy. Our title ID is ED9D.
Thank you,
Zhi Kang
Best Answer
As stated elsewhere, "deleting" a player queues that account for deletion of the title-specific components of the account. That queue takes a variable amount of time to complete, depending on how many players have been added to it recently and how much work needs to be done to clear that data. It's not possible to prioritize one title over all others in the queue (in our shared service, that is - in a private cluster, it would be just your titles). We're checking to see if additional compute resources can be applied to the queue in general, and we'll follow up on that as soon as we can, but I strongly suspect that you'll see these accounts cleared by then. The "days" issue was not due to a volume of requests in the queue, but due to a separate issue which prevented processing of some accounts (and which has since been resolved).
Any update on this? Our players have pitchforks and tinder. Evan an ETA would be helpful.
We're checking into the possibility of adding more CPU resources to the deletion queue, but it's going to be a while until the queue clears. Best estimate right now would be sometime tomorrow. The issue is that, again, it's a queue of players to be deleted, across all titles. So when a very large number of players are added to the queue, that backs it up.
Is there a way to unlike the accounts to Steam so that people can at least create a new one? Right now this is locking out a lot of players.
This is frustrating. I've also run into this and am waiting for a single account to be deleted so that I can test something. It seems unreasonable to have to wait for more than a few minutes and it has already been a day for me. Especially when usually it is only a few minutes so that is the expectation when you've already done it before without an issue.
First, deletion of a player account is not simply unlinking it - we have to clear all data securely across multiple sources, so that we're compliant with all data privacy laws.
But as we've said elsewhere (and here), the deletion queue is for all titles. If a title with a million users decides to delete all players, that creates a very large backlog that has to be worked through. For users with a private cluster, that would be only their own titles, but in the shared service, that queue is shared by everyone. We are looking into making some updates to improve this, but if your intent is to re-use the credentials, again, do not use player deletion for this - use the relevant Unlink... API call, so that the credential is immediately available for re-use.
Brendan,
Your replies make sense, but we're encountering this error in a Title still under development and that has only 3 players, and very little data in each player. It's been 15 minutes now, waiting for the player to be deleted. In the past, we've testing this feature and it's almost instant. Is it possible the process has broken or stopped without completion?
Today the same problem happened, I deleted 2 accounts and logged in from the Unity Editor and from my smartphone and gives the same error, how to solve and how long to wait? I understand this happens randomly and we can not influence it? It's sad, because I need to prepare an update. Help us.
