One of the (many) things I really appreciated about Guild Wars was the ability to, in effect, "pause" the game to deal with real-life situations that come up.

In GW, assuming you were soloing something, you could stop halfway into a dungeon, go take your wife to the hospital, have the baby, and then get back to playing after you got home -- all without ever getting "logged off", "timed out", or killed by respawns. That feature was a real life-saver for me on a number of occasions. ;)

It'd sure be great if the instances in other games, such as SWTOR, worked the same way.