According to a post on the official Age of Conan forums, Funcom will be deleting characters below level 21 on inactive accounts without subscriptions to prepare for the upcoming server merge. Players who let their subscription run out at least seven months ago must reactivate their accounts now to ensure that their characters are not deleted.

Accounts with valid, running subscriptions will not be affected by this purge of low level characters from the game. Director of Communications Erling Ellingsen confirmed to Massively that this is being done to "free space in the database." You can read Funcom's full announcement after the jump.

As announced in the December Letter from the Game Director we will merge the Age of Conan servers soon. Today we wanted to announce some preparations for the server merge that will include the deletion of characters from levels 1 to 20 on accounts that were inactive (without subscriptions) for 7 months or more.

Qualifications for Character Deletion Process:

• NO characters will be deleted from an account that has a valid, running subscription.
• If an account's subscription ran out 7 or more months ago, and the account is not reactivated until the character deletion process starts, characters below level 21 will be deleted. Characters of level 21 and up remain untouched and are NOT deleted.

Owners of accounts that qualify for the character deletion process mentioned above, will receive an e-mail today to inform them about it. If you have an account that was not active for 7 months or more and therefore qualifies for deletion of characters level 1 to 20, you can re-activate your account now to ensure that your characters progress and names stay intact.

We will release more information on the server merges including a detailed FAQ on commonly asked questions during the process later this week.