I know this is going to be pointless, but let’s try anyway.
If you’re not playing, you’re not a player. If you had to stay logged in idling, without interacting with the game in any way, then you wouldn’t be “merely a player”, because you wouldn’t be playing. That behavior generally doesn’t occur these days – except in rare cases when a solo player on an official server wants to force a purge – but the proposed change would incentivize it and we would see it happen more.
TL;DR: You can put whatever spin you want on it and engage in mental gymnastics of all kinds, but if you’re idling without interacting, you’re not playing.