How long do EQ characters exist?Follow

Most likely, yes. I don't know of anyone that has had their characters deleted for an extended absence. I think officially, SOE only supports 3 months.

I cancelled my EQ account in Oct 2002 and came back in May of 05 and all of my characters that where above lvl 10 where still there. Even the characters that had server merges.

You will be fine.

Yup, only characters above level 10 were preserved in the server merges so chances are your bazaar mule if you had one is gone.

Characters should still be there if they were above level 10. However, some of your items may not be there. I unsubscribed for 3 months and on some (not all) characters their stacks of 20 items turned into stacks of 1. Pain in the **** since it affected most of my smithing mules and I lost well over 100k worth of smithing supplies but it was better then having them deleted.

The only way is to petition a GM for help.

There is a small chance you'll get your toon back. Most likely you'll get a slap on the wrist and the "THIS IS THE ONLY TIME WE'LL DO THIS" speech.

I've heard of some people getting toons back this way...conversly, I've also heard cases of this request being denied.

Probably depends on which GM you get and what mood he/she is in at the time.