As a guild leader of a guild in an MMO with 500+ members, I have seen
every one of those scenarios:
-at least a dozen sent me an email stating they were going to be away for awhile on active military duty
-at least 3 were incarcerated
-about a half dozen had an extended hospital stay. Several of our guild members were in their eighties. Really sharp players considering their age.
-I lost count of the number of people who had major computer problems
-several were in a major catastrophe (hurricane/earthquake)
-at least one guy lost his computer in a divorce. That was entertaining seeing the fireworks when he finally got a new computer running, and she was online in the same guild.
-one guy was homeless but he obtained a laptop, logged in after about a year or so from a wi-fi at a local hotspot
-as the guild leader, I myself had my own extreme circumstances, and was unable to log in to any account for over 6 months. What if it had been longer?
That is only the ones that I
know about. That is not including the ones who have died, or the hundreds who went MIA for unknown reasons, over the years.
Do you still think that is .001% percentile minority? Seems to me that 1 in 100,000 is WAY off the mark. Do you think any of those people deserved to have their account deleted? What if they had significant sums of money deposited? Sorry about your extended hospital stay, here's a nice welcoming back present, we've deleted your account.
I am 100% certain that I am not the only person who feels that any urge to deposit a large sum to invest in something big (ie, land area) diminishes infinitely when reading terms like this. Maybe if the time was
lengthened, or deletion was removed altogether (5 years at least) you would probably see higher confidence, and a significantly higher amount of deposits.