I find I may have to travel for work for an extended period during which regular play may prove impossible. I’d appreciate knowing how long of an idle period would result in the deletion of a Free-to-play character, and how often I’d need to sign in to prevent that happening.
To the best of my knowledge, Funcom has never deleted inactive characters in either TSW or SWL.
There was, prior to the relaunch, a purge of inactive characers’ nicknames in TSW that freed them up for other people to claim. This only applied to characters who had not been logged in within six months prior to the name purge.