This might be simplifying things a bit too much but, if we send one player and they play for 5 years then you are making money for 5 years. Surely you don’t have a problem with sharing the profits with the person who sent the player. This should be totally independent of whether we send you any more players, so the question of whether we continue to work with you is relevant.
That said, if I send traffic, they sign up at a decent conversion rate and you pay on time, then there is no reason why I wouldn’t continue to work with you anyway. It’s a two way street and the affiliate is always the first to show their faith in a program by promoting it in the first place.
As a side point, I have never had a problem with payments from your program. You could probably learn from other programs and many could learn from you in relation to he importance of payments.