should SE delete characters that were never used

[Imoen]

Sorry Titor, you have no way of knowing if that actually would impact anything at all, and like Kosmos I believe it would be minimal at best. Besides the game needing to see if a character name is taken or if a character name is online/offline on a flist/fclist/linkshelllist, I can't think of any other reason it would need to ping a character that is currently inactive, since that is the argument, that they are inactive. I suspect the performance impact would be negligible.

Houses are a completely different problem, since, on many servers there are not enough plots available to serve the population. I wouldn't lump that in with this, since it really doesn't correlate.

I have yet to see a valid reason to delete characters, the only single, somewhat valid complaint I see here is names being taken, and there are better ways of handling that. If, that is truly an issue. (Which I really don't think it is, although I will admit that is more of a personal opinion.)