I’m looking for a way I can change my character name on classic wrath while also preventing the new name from showing up on another player’s friends list that already has me added as a friend on their character (not Battletag). I’ve been digging online and seen a lot of conflicting information, but I was hoping someone may have experience with this and can confirm any steps that may work.
It sounds like deleting the character, undeleting it, and then performing a name change may work, but I’ve seen a lot of people say that it probably won’t. I’m also concerned with (temporarily) deleting a character I want to keep. Another option I saw was realm transferring, then transferring back. While that may work, it’s a bit more expensive to do than I’d prefer and also has a wait time. Is there another way someone may know of that would work before I attempt and possibly waste a name change?
Thanks
Unfortunately, if someone “friends” you ingame, if you change your name it updates on their list too. Not sure if deleting toons work
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If they added you as a server friend, then there is no getting around it. As for the delete->undelete thing, it’s possible it might work, but it depends on how latent their updating of caching is for things like this. Like maybe it’s stored client side(hard reference to an “encrypted” name so aeon might be 54fwef4wf64wef84489 or something) and if they don’t log back in before you undelete your character, when they do finally log back in, the client might check that hashed id and see your new name. Blizzard might also periodically purge deleted characters from friends lists as well, but I don’t know for sure. I do know that you’ll sometimes see people listed as unknown in your list and occassionally some1414512341 like name probably from name violations and they haven’t logged back in to change their name yet.
You could always run an experiment to see. Just have a friend test it out with you or something.
Moving off and then back onto the server or moving from one faction and then moving back is the only way to remove yourself from other people’s friends list.
Thanks for the responses - that’s similar to what I’ve found online, which makes me think this might not be possible without multiple transfers. I’ll see if I can test the delete/undelete path with someone later today, as even if something went wrong, the character is sadly unplayable anyway.
I was hoping there was a way to get some info from a Blizzard representative on how to do it, but for the few times I’ve submitted a ticket asking for help, they don’t seem to read the message and just post a random copy/paste response for unrelated issues. 
They often send out templated responses at first, just because a vast amount of the tickets submitted either can be solved by the player or falls under the categories of things GMs cannot assist with. But with those templated responses, it should have given you a button to kick the ticket back into the queue, something along the lines of “I still need help.” If you do that, then it goes back for a GM to review.
Sometimes, unfortunately, either the template is way too generalized or the wrong keywords are focused on.
I’m not sure which path you’ve been using for your tickets? But just going by the theme of this thread - try going through the “ongoing harassment” route. Be sure to kick it back if they respond with a template. Sometimes they can help with things if there has been a pattern of abuse or harassment that you’ve had to put up with.
https://us.battle.net/support/en/help/contact/683/ticket
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Last year when the non-verbal in-game harassment started (the reason for needing the name change), I went through the ongoing harassment route, but this time I opened a ticket under ‘not listed’ instead (since no category really seemed to fit a name change). I’ve selected that option 3 times now to reopen the most recent ticket, and the most recent response was a templated acknowledgement for submitting a report for player profanity apparently, which I don’t even understand where that response came from.