I just wanted to chime in on this too. I did the mistake of deleting my main character on XI a very very long time ago. When I came back to it about a year later, they were willing to try but couldn't find it due to which content ID was being used for what (if I remember correctly.) I ended up making a new copy of my main for about little more than half a year because of that, at which point they changed their system apparently and were able to recover it finally. After that fiasco I learned my lesson and do not personally delete any characters of mine no matter the reason. Its actually kind of fun too since on some games I had alts that I didn't touch for years, then came to find an item in their inventory that could no longer be obtained, making it rather valuable on the market of that game.