My server died - and I merged into another server. Now all names (ALL NAMES) are locked. It seems to be a pretty old launch server - everyone reserved names there. I bet most of them didn’t even play classic and 99% of the names are locked with lv1 chars.
Blizzard, please, just free all names on characters below level x who didn’t had an active sub for the last y months. And not just one time, keep this system active and run it every month to clean the database. Fast and easy fix?
Blizzard will never read this. Try making an ingame suggestion.
I seem to remember Blizzard saying they will not free up names in Classic, I’m about 80% sure of that.
I did this to no avail. Here’s what happened:
First of all I opened the customer service window and browsed until I discovered the “my name is taken”-issue – which simply opens an information window that states this information without allowing you to actually open a ticket:
Inactive character names are released when expansions launch for World of Warcraft. Because of this automated process, we don’t manually free up character names. Read our support article for more information.
… and if you clicked on the support article it simply took you to their website and not to any specific information regarding this automated process. So I had to open a ticket appealing for a name change and go from there. I made the following arguments:
In my back and forth with the GMs I was told that GMs in the past could manually free up names but they no longer did this. So I argued that due to the uniqueness of this case, could they not try to manually free up the name if it was available to which they only said “nah the automated system does that, sorry if it is not what you wanted to hear.”
So eventually I just gave up. But since we have this topic, let’s talk about this issue. In one of my messages from the GMs they said this:
In the past, Game Masters would assist with freeing up names, but as you know, we’ve since moved to an automated system. The automated system works by going through and releasing names from characters that have been inactive for a certain period of time, at the beginning of each expansion.
It seems that this character did not meet the criteria for getting the name released previously, but when the script is run again next time, it might be. This will all depend on the current user of the name’s activity at the time. It’s not something we’d bypass, since that wouldn’t be fair to the current name holder.
Their lack of effort with these “server merges” is wholly unfair. I have 60+ days of playtime on my main. I have no clue how many hours the person who holds my name on the destination server has on the character. Maybe it’s just a level 1 character that someone created at launch and who they then never touched. Maybe it’s just an alt that they just haven’t bothered to move (since Hydraxian is kind of a dead server); meaning that the account is active and playing on another server but the character in question is not played and just hogs the name. I have no clue. So is it more fair that the other person gets to keep the name on this character when I had 0 choice in moving from my server?
You, RP, people, should be having rich imagination, right? Just figure out a background story of your characters traveling to another reality and having to use a new name, because if someone recalls you by the old one they will have power to banish you back into neither you escaped from.
TLDR: Just figure out new names.
I like his idea, The infinite dragonflight have been messing with the timeline and you awaken with no recollection of who or what you are, reset your skill tree and find your way in the world …
That’s becasue you didn’t see the big “SUMBIT A SUGGESTION OR BUG” option right at the top of the page, it’s a big picture.
That’s what happens when a realm is closed down. You could have chosen to go to another realm, instead of procrastinating and leaving it to Blizzard.
Maybe, just maybe, the name was taken by an active player when the realm started, or maybe they are playing Retail until Wrath.
You seem to be a bit selfish in trying to take someone else’s name, a name that is not yours, sounds like stealing to me.
You can always re-roll fresh all names available on fresh realms 
they may never log onto those characters again, but as long as the player is still active that name won’t be freed up for you sorry.
sucks but that’s pretty much what happened to all of the players who did see the forums and chose another realm - if they had a cool name on their previous realm they most likely had a forced name change when they landed on the new realm because it was already taken.
That’s true, an active account means you can’t get their names.
And this is objectively bad design and poorly handled – especially considering that we have evidence of how other games have handled similar situations.
The problem was that Blizzard never communicated that their intention was to terminate the servers when they opened free transfers. Those who took free transfers at the beginning didn’t do so because their server was being closed, they did so because they sought greener pastures. It really feels like the decision of terminating the servers came as an afterthought. So with this scenario in mind the free transfers can be seen as a luxury, and perhaps you could argue that tagged names should remain tagged.
But not everyone jumped on the bandwagon. The community on Zandalar Tribe continued to fight until the very end. We didn’t take the ticket to the greener pastures (I think many on ZT viewed the mega-servers as toxic jungles). We were forced off when Blizzard finally made the decision to terminate servers. And for us on Zandalar Tribe – we traded one dead server for another even more dead server, hedging our bets entirely on the server seeing a resurgence in Wrath that will bring its population up.
So yes. “Just make new names”. That’s what many have been forced to do. That doesn’t mean that you cannot criticize Blizzard for the way they handled this.
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