A character architecture in which no character has any particular expectation of long-term viability already sets up for less character identification, working directly against what you said you wanted originally.

One might ask the entirely legitimate question of whether those majority of characters deleted happened soon after creation, representing someone basically abandoning the game because they didn't want to deal with the set up, or characters who had been long present in the game and whose players wanted to delete them to move onto a new one (assuming one player per identity, which is in no way more likely than the other alternative), or just in a fit of pique.

You are going to have to define the context of what you imagine more competition would look like, because "more competition" isn't really well defined. "More freedom," likewise – preferably with some examples of things that you would like to do which you are unable to do in some contexts. And lastly, "more consequences", particularly in tabletop role-playing, are going to be hard to get – because the last 20 years of RPG design outside of D&D and immediate derivatives have been all about "more consequences," to the point where Consequences is a legitimate term of art that refers to a specific game mechanic in some systems.

I can say that, by and large, the markets for games have spoken, and direct competition doesn't seem to be what people want for the most part. Those that do have moved into game contexts which support that primarily, largely first-person shooters, where competition is very contextualized. Long-term consequences go very poorly with increased conflict density which as any element of randomness, because the feeling of getting screwed out of your efforts because of nothing that you did is a great way to turn off someone from engaging further with a game. Even the most casual player can determine when randomness overtakes any decision-making that they have a part of in the play of a game.

There has been some experimentation in that field. Escape From Tarkov is definitely a game which has long-term consequences and direct competition, in the fact that you really only earn progression by bringing of equipment out of these first-person shooter environments, competing with other people. Likewise, in a sense, Fortnite, because there you can come away with more resources and unlock blueprints that you can use in the next game. (Playerunknown's Battlegrounds goes almost the exact opposite direction, being very deliberately disconnected in many ways from one round to another, which at least reassures that some people that if they get screwed this round there's a chance they won't get screwed next round.)

So we really need a better set of definitions of what you're actually looking for, because it very well may already exist and you just don't know about it.