[bungiefan]

It's not an indefinite amoutn of time to wait for the campaign again. It's an annual event every May, for North American accounts, and something like June or July for European accounts. Japan has no such program that I've heard of, but they also don't have Buddy Passes.

The "delete old unused, unpaid for account" idea makes a sort of sense, if you're going by the usual efficiency mentality of a Japanese company. Your old character and account information takes up space on the data storage media in their system. Since they run backups, it also takes up space on the backup data media. If they kept every inactive character and account data for everyone who ever played the game and just quit, it would take up a lot of additional space, which means they'd have to spend more money for the media, and more time making backups. If they run statistics and figure out the maximum amount of time that a certain percentage of their ex-customers are likely to come back from, they can decide when to delete unused data. This saves them money on data storage and people monitoring backups, because anyone who's been gone that long is likely to never return regardless of if their character is still there. Many people that quit habitually move on to the next new MMO, or just break the addiction completely. There's not much reason to keep the data if it will most likely never be used again, and they're not being paid to keep it. It's actually pretty wasteful of resources for the western MMO companies to retain all of that data for free for so long.