I’ve noted that none of your options corresponds to the suggestion I made, which poses me some problems.
• Option 1 will obviously anger all the players who don’t like to see abandonned builds litter the worlds.
• The “Vault System” idea mentioned with Option 2 and 5 requires, as you pointed out, that the devs start storing more data per character, which indeed makes you wonder “how long should they keep the extra data?”. Depending on the player, that might be A LOT of data. I hear some players have thousands of plots.
Personally, I’d say coming back to a vault filled with my stuff is ‘better’, but it’s not what would prevent me from screaming in anger and leaving the game forever. The blocks would be saved, but not the actual build.
• Option 3 and 4 don’t really help solve the actual issues.
If I really had to choose, I’d rather take Option 5, which seems fair enough, but really if there was no other option.
I don’t like loosing my work, which should make me vote for Option 1, but it negates the whole point of the beacon system, and that’s not something we want.
At one point, you gotta take a clear stance between “I don’t want to see abandonned builds that I would have to clean” and “well, the players who returns to the game needs to have all their things when they come back!”, don’t you think?
But it’s true, with my suggestion, when you come back after your beacon died, you might come back into the game with everything you accomplished gone, IF someone noticed your plots became ruins and felt like an a-hole, he could scavenge or bomb the living sh!t out of your build until the world-regen kicks in because of low prestige value.
But you can also be less pessimistic and hope that some players would be nice and try to contact you through the forum or Discord to warn you, or that they would claim the beacon back for you to save it and through an often suggested beacon trading feature, they would give it back to you once you come back online.
Heck, nobody might even notice your build isn’t protected anymore, and you might come back like “well, phew, everything’s still here!”.
People might also all agree that your ruins are kick-@$$ and that nobody should touch them. People might come and add blocks to the ruins (no machines, just decorative stuff), hide treasure and stuff.
Overall, I’d say my suggestion is a good comprise. With it, many interesting things can happen.