I don’t really care about people’s inactive alts taking up names that other people would like. I’m really just concerned about accounts that will never be played again taking up rows in the database. Aggressive DB shepherding as the game grows is important for keeping lag in check without throwing tons and tons of money at hardware.

As the game grows, at some point we’ll be in a position where the “number of people who have played the game in the past, but are now inactive” will dwarf the “number of people who are actively playing the game”. At or before that point, some kind of pruning will be reasonable.

Plus, since eventually some sort of pruning inactive account policy will seem like some combination of necessary/useful, it’s probably better to implement something like this while the game is young and small. Personally I would suggest on February 7, 2009 implementing a policy that if you are inactive for the period of 1 year and neither you nor your (legal) alts have ever owned a BP, your account will be deleted.