And then never use it.
Smart.
Wayy ahead of you.
I was kind of thinking that, we’ll all have to make a Bukachu on a server somewhere 
Edit to add - https://gyazo.com/206a294ab3a095c55bf003bc742164f0
If you really want unique names just find a 3 yr old to help you.
My latest character is a male gnome with purple/pink hair and a Santa beard called Bughunter…
the whole thing about toons that are left to rot brings up another possible issue though? are these toons taking up space and making servers too crowded? obviously not with amount of players online at once, but with the amount of data that needs to be kept on them. especially as its:
if a player made a toon in vanilla, and never played it again, but have played another toon ever since, that first toon will still exist as the account holder is not inactive.
I HAD A THOUGHT… and feel free to use this blizz…
it may take a bit of juggling, but it would tidy things up. but for the reason that it would take WORK blizz prob wont do it.
make, or use the lowest population server(s) and move all inactive toons there. sort of like a “sleep” room in the old style chat rooms. and give the person a free chance to move that toon back to the server it came from ONLY if the player logs onto it again. you could give an in game warning in the same way we get a splash banner the first time we log into a new patch. and to be classified as “asleep” make it so the toon has not been used in… say 2 years?
That little Bukachu is not in the armory, where have you hidden it… Or did you Photoshop the pic? 
I wonder how big a Bukachu army can be - How frightening would i be to face so many Bukachus? 
bobcatminx … there you go, a name you can use.
Don’t be so uninventive
The release period may be more subtle than suggested. I lapsed after a month of MoP, returned at the end of WoD, lapsed just before Legion, came back a week before BfA. I was solidly subbed from vanilla through to the first month of MoP.
However… characters on my starter servers were at some point flagged for rename. Characters on the two servers I am actually active on remained untouched.
It is entirely possible that I never so much as looked at the character list on 2-3 servers over the entire span MoP->BfA, but at no point was I not subscribed for two entire expansions.
I don’t mind at all that these characters were flagged, since I will never go back to them; just saying that it seems like the name-release might be per-realm per-account, rather than account-wide.
suffer like me. horde on silvermoon, alliance on draenor
I remember making a ticket back in 2012/2014 ish to request for a couple of names to be released and they obliged, could try that.
They don’t do this anymore. ![:sob:](https://d1bg94bbsh66ji.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/sob.png?v=6" ":sob:")
Probably easier to leave it to the rename algorithm. Must save thousands of support queries every year. They’d only have been doing the same last-active time check that we get now anyway.
I didn’t log in with it, I’ll do that now.
Buka… CHUUUUUUUUUUU!!! [electric zapping effects]
So it is no longer possible to acquire a used nick?
They wont free it up via a ticket or chat request. From what I remember if you buy a name change it wont charge you unless the name you want is free. Sometimes it’s hard to check that a name is now free. But they are basically all freed up when the account has been inactive for two expansions.
It occurred to me that my account has over 30 characters over various realms, characters that I will likely never delete, and all of those names locked down unless I’m gone for ~4 years. Which is a shame if you want stupid names like huntalliance and lepergnome.
I’d delete them but you never know when an 80 hunter or 64 warrior on another realm might come in handy (never, probably).
Huntalliance also has history y’know, he’s like a time-capsule back to the days when I clicked and keyboard turned, and used mp5 enchants.
Thank you for your clarification. 
So I have to wait BfA out + one more expansion to get my old nick back which I had before a realm transfer. Oh well…
2 expansions? Low lvl characters should free name in 3 month nonactivity.