I thought I'd seen this suggested before, but I haven't been able to find any topics relating to this suggestion, so I figured I'd post it myself. If there are any other topics, feel free to notify me.

Edit: I misread the news post. The schedule is as follows:
1 month: reminder email
3 months: reminder email
6 months: reminder email
9 months: email warning that player could lose lion name
12 months: emails will stop, however lion name has been lost.
Lioden accounts cannot be deleted.

Anyways, for those who aren't aware or whom may have forgotten, there was a feature just recently added (news post) for inactive accounts to be stripped of their lion's name after 6 months, and inactive accounts deleted after a year's time. While I support this, a concern of mine was that, for those who may leave for long periods of time, they could come back to their lion's name having been taken away, or their account deleted altogether. While I understand this is a rare occurrence in and of itself, I've had this happen to me on other SIM games, and I can talk from personal experience when I say that coming back off of hiatus to a nonexistent account is frustrating at best, especially if you've spent real money on it. So, as a solution, I came up with the idea of a hiatus button. Basically, the button would serve as a marker for your account, informing others that you are inactive but due to return at some point in the future, as well as preventing accounts still in use from getting deleted. The button could be located under details, and appear next to your profile name in your den, either as an icon, color-coded marker similar to the online/offline marker, or the word HIATUS next to the player name.

Now, one of my own issues with adding a hiatus button is the potential abuse of this feature. My concern is that, if someone were to mark their account as "on hiatus", then leave LD for whatever reason, their account would stay forever marked as "on hiatus" and would be immune to inactivity checks and deletion. While this isn't really a big problem (aside from cluttering up the site with inactive accounts and misleading other players about your activity status), whatever name they used for their king is now locked to their account. To me, this is a big problem, since lion names have to be unique. My first suggestion would be to add a feature to override the hiatus button after a significant amount of time (and either free up the lion name or delete the account), when it becomes clear that the owner of the account will not be returning. My second idea is to altogether remove the requirement to have unique king names, since we still have our ID's and player names to discern us.

Anyone else with a better suggestion is free to voice their opinion. If you do/don't support, I'd appreciate it if you left a message as to why, so I can possibly improve upon this idea.

Player Input

No point to a hiatus button - Fledgling (#25392)
I feel like there's no point to a hiatus button if they're going to "override" it and give away your name anyways. Plus, I don't think it's uncommon for people to take unplanned breaks, so this suggestion wouldn't buy them any time anyways.