[silvarilon]

Our stats bear out that there are a fair number of players that return after >3 months away. Far from all of them return, but a significant amount, maybe more than 10% of players that were active and left for 3 months return.

And one of the big reasons they return is because they can jump back into the old character, see what old friends are still be around, drop a few clues about old plots. They can also create a new character, but most returnees first come back with their established character, even if they then go on to make a new character.

So keeping their characters around helps make it easier for them to return to the game, and that helps you keep an active playerbase.

You'd think so, wouldn't you?
It surprises me how many players will stop playing a plot that they are interested in, for fear of "loosing" due to the plot. I guess there is a certain percentage of players who only enjoy themselves while they feel they are on the winning side, or while they feel they are the key individual.

But yeah, for the most part, if people are involved in a plot, they'll be motivated to keep logging in.

There is a middle ground.
Idle players don't hurt the game any less if their character is deleted, and returning "old guard" characters can help the game. So I don't see any need to delete their characters. As you said, you can't make people play, and players having the fear of their character deleted might encourage them to log in, but it won't encourage them to play.

Characters that hold important positions certainly shouldn't be idle. There needs to be systems in place to avoid those problems. Either they loose the position if they are idle, or other characters have the right to challenge for position (and if they don't respond to the challenge they loose the position...), or someone else can step into an "acting" role, or other players can set up the equivalent.

For example, we have guild leaders, who keep their leadership position no matter how long they're idle - but anyone can create a guild. If the leader of the blacksmiths guild is idle, anyone can start a new blacksmith guild and recruit members from the old guild - now they've got a new guild with an active leader. If the original player returns, he still has his blacksmith guild, and can go about trying to recruit his members back.

So our game has hundreds of inactive guilds - but that's fine, because those guilds don't do anything, and are pretty much invisible to the other players. The number of active guilds stays pretty stable, even as players come and go.

We've also got some specific staff-supported guilds that are part of the gameworld, and you can't just "make a rival" - for example, the Rinaldi noble house is a group of nobles that run the city. You can't just make a rival group of nobles and expect to rule the place. Those groups have regular (once every 3 months or so) votes for who the leader should be. And any member can call for a new vote if the current leader is absent for too long.

The larger problem isn't players that leave for three or more months. It's the players that stay, but don't do anything. A guild leader who logs in regularly enough to be active, but doesn't organize any events or do any roleplay with the members isn't much better than an absent leader - however, the players are less likely to replace the leader while they are still logging in.