Who do i yell at to get my money back if so? This was great because i could not play for ever and come back and have stuff to do. Everything i had is deleted along with money spent on the game?

And now i have to buy this twice?

You can only blame yourself, because you ignored all info and warning emails which where sent to you.

Everything you had was deleted over 1 year ago and no crying will help you getting it back!

If you want to play again, you have to buy a new gamepass.

No matter how much crying you do it will not help you. It's your fault. Your account is forever gone and beyond recovery.

What happened is you didnt give Kakao conscent to handle over your personal data to Pearl Abyss, which is legal requiremend due to GDPR. There is nothing Kakao could have done without your conscent, since, again according to GDPR, they are not allowed to store personal data for a service that has been discontinued.

Yep, your account is gone.

To be fair I never got an e-mail and I've read a lot of people not getting the e-mail as well. I think there was even a notice about it at some point about e-mails not being sent. I only was able to transfer due to word of mouth on the last month or two.

This is basically what the official statement is about. Unfortunately it doesn't matter that people in NA doesn't give 2 cares about GDPR (and are not legally required to follow it) but it is what it is.

OP I feel you, it's not right that you can lose all your data considering that Pearl Abyss created and owns the game and only took back publishing rights in NA and EU. Contractually it should have been written (originally) that data would belong to PA but I guess it was an oversight. The GDPR I think was implemented in 2016 so they should have thought ahead. On the plus side, the game is free now and they give away costumes as well as value packs etc all the time. It's quite easy to get pearl items on the central market too.

Hopefully you didn't spend a fortune, just remember that all digital goods have a finite shelf life, perhaps more-so than physical copies. MMORPGs come and go quite fast, it's rare that you see long-lasting games like Guild wars 1/2, FF11 / FF14, ESO etc... BDO nearly died at least twice like completely and Tera just recently went under but there are rumors about "Tera 2" floating around with concept images.

Kakao Games Europe Ltd. is a european company and their main server (where all basic account information where stored) was in europe (Amsterdam, NL). So it doesn't matter how people in NA think about it, their infos are stored in the EU, so they fall under the GDPR.

 The GDPR was implemented in 2018.

And no, the game is not free. (The "reach level 50 and get a gamepass" Event is over)

@SeniorGrind,

Dude, dont sweat it. When you come back to BDO and make a season character- you will easily eclipse your old progress.

Whenever GDPR was implemented, it doesn't really matter, they could have had people agree to the change in terms or lose their right to transfer in the future. I don't know about user privacy laws from a european company if they were to send that data back to countries that did not care for GDPR in the first place, maybe it's fine, maybe it isn't. PA's lawyers would have found a loophole probably but maybe it was in their best interest to make people re-buy everything if they were to play again. Everything about that stupid bill is backwards and harmful for the consumer and as you can see, OP just got shafted by it. I'm glad I'm not in the EU but GDPR adoption is pushed onto people here since it's just easier to blanket websites like that. But we also have California which likes to bully everyday people and small businesses so they have their own thing similar to it, which is called CCP (lol irony).

At the end of the day, they probably could have done something about it and been more involved but that costs money so a few e-mails that may or may not reach people is more than enough. The game is free like every other month so OP is free to come whenever that happens or pay the $5 entry fee or whatever it is. It takes like a day to reach level 61 on a season character now and you get a billion plus silver for it and a full set of boss gear and a pen accessory.

Yes, It is really harmful to the consumer (in general) that his data cannot be shared with others without his consent. /s

I'm glad I live in the EU and we have the GDPR!

They sent out lots of emails, had notices on steam, twitch, social media it was blasted all over the place for a while. ....

If you were totally offline it would make sense you missed it .