should SE delete characters that were never used

[Kosmos992k]

It is not about the name taking up space. That character has an inventory, no? That character has a race, character appearance data, achievement data, level data, armory data, likely a lot of other data that would get added into databases as it is created, whether or not it is subsequently used.

I'm an Oracle developer and DBA. There are really not very many ways that this can work. In the most likely scenario (and based on dev/peoducer comments), the database space used by character records is a very small amount of the total database storage requirement. Only characters that are logged in are loaded to an active game server and only characters logged in are continually backed up - which is the only real limitation affected by more characters. But, only if they are logged in.

Oh, and by the way, this database (like any MKORPG) is a transactional monster. Characters not logged in have almost zero impact on the tranactions in the database, and pruning a few thousand characters from a table of perhaps 100,000 character records (remember everything is per world) will literally have no impact on the database performance.

Inactive characters are still held within the character database, but since they are not logged in, they have almost no impact on server capacity or performance. This is such a spurious argument, I really wish you'd find another angle.