I believe @Boardman21 and @Jerle are discussing whether online characters created later in the game’s beta will be deleted when the game transitions from beta to official release. You’re correct that, in builds currently available to the community, characters are client-side.
As Jerle says, the current plan is that there will be a wipe at release - though it is still quite far away, so it’s not something we have discussed a great deal thus far.
I don’t think it’d be appropriate for people to have a dozen level 100 characters on day one. If there was a lot of requests for, say, existing characters to be retained but reset to level one so that chat commands would show their original (pre-release) creation dates and playtime… we would consider it. I think that would mostly be decided by how much work it would be.
It’s natural for people to grow attached to their characters, so I imagine there’ll be some feedback on the subject as the game approaches release - and we’ll discuss the feedback we get and see where it goes from there. Can’t say much beyond that at this early stage. 
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