Hey there
As a returning player (played back in 2008) , I was able to reactivate my account and login.
I created a new character and was able to login and play just fine.
But when I try to login with any of my old toons, I run into a timeout error message after about 2 minutes of “logging in character…”.
The old characters will not show a preview of the toon in the overview like the new one does.
Is this a known issue? Is there hope or should I just delete them? It would be very nice for me to just log back into them even if it would be just once for the nostalgia 
Thanks!
Welcome back after so many years 
Due to server merge over the years there are only two servers left : Crom for PVE and Fury for PVP (the latter mostly deserted).
So when your toons were not on one of these servers it could be difficult to restore them.
As for the preview of the toons: The portraits are stored locally on your PC. So when you have a different PC / Windows version installed (which is likely the case after 12 years ) the portraits are gone.
Thank you very much for your reply! Glad to hear that about the portraits, I was already thinking about the chars being broken or something.
Looks like I will have to keep playing my new toon for now anyways.
It’s just very hard to see them in the overview but not be able to play them, also i don’t want to delete them of course!
I still hope the support will able to retrieve them, once somebody has the time to handle my ticket 