We have just completed a new census run for December 2021. The stats show a remarkably low number of characters. On further inspection, the number of DELETED characters seems extremely high:

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM tblplayers;
34,329,901

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM tblplayers where character_status = "DELETED";
28,142,672

The result is that the census reckons there are only 6,187,229 characters in existance.

We should probably investigate and try to find some examples of characters the database reckons are deleted but actually aren't to enable us to troubleshoot further.