Few more suggestions.
From a player's perspective all his game characters end up under one master accounts (or several master accounts if one chooses so but this is not relevant). This makes old account sort of obsolete. Why not let people select characters directly from one master account. Of course, there still should be a possibility to somehow group up characters. Just no point doing it in old terms (again, this is from usability point of view, not marketing).
Since Gameforge seems to accept the fact that multiple characters online is the way many people the game, how about to make few improvements on this part? First, proper implementation of "global" AFK status. Second, a possibility to inform all logged characters that one of them got a whisper or other interaction. Of course, this can be implemented by custom addons right now but why not make a uniform solution?