Either try a different spelling, use special characters, or come up with an original name.
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This all goes away if the battletag of the account is invisibly appended to the character names in the system.
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You could be right about why its been the practice in the past; however, the game technology is much more sophisticated now (20 years latter), thatâs why Im surprised they still allow only one character name per server.
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itâd be more like 4.
if i want to send mail to Catelan-aerie-peak, and there are 5 of those, how does the system know which one is the ârightâ one?
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Honestly, I wish blizzard would let us use other special characters in our names. They alrdy have plenty of NPC names that include â and , and so on⌠WHy cant we? Its gotten to a point where we need to use ALT codes to generate unique characters to make a name work which kills blizzards stands on âSpecial characters would make it so much harder to use mail or invite people.â Blizz⌠HAVE YOU TRIED TO EXPLAIN WHAT THE ALT CODE IS FOR YOUR NAME SO SOMEONE CAN SEND YOU A WORK ORDER!?
Let us use special characters for our names. so my Elf can actually have an elf like nameâŚ
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Things WoW is missing that other MMOs nailed:
-Short day/night cycles that make the game feel more dynamic.
-First / last names, meaning NOT EVERY SINGLE NAME IS FREAKINâ TAKEN
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This is all i really do, open up the online thesaurus and then go through words that suit the class. A while back a friend was having issues finding a rogue name on a high pop US server, took me a few minutes to find the name Covert for him 
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Who said there was? I just said I personally donât like alt codes 
And tbh there is. We should be allowed to use spaces and dashes.
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The last thing I need is 30 people running around on MG with my same name. Because inevitably, people will mix them up, someone will do something heinous or trolling and the rest of us get a bad rep or constantly reported, when we did nothing wrong.
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This actually happened to me during WOTLK, someone that had some issues with me made a warlock alt that had the same name as me but one special letter than didnât immediately jump out at you, he then used this alt (and the help of his friends) to take control of Wintergrasp raids, heâd spew a heap of anti-alliance stuff and then disband the raid so it was harder for our faction to win.
Out of nowhere iâd start getting abusive whispers, threats of reports, trade trolling, people kicking me from VOA groups etc, it was awful. Eventually the culprit was banned but it took a long time, ultimately i ended up changing names to get away from the bad blood associated with the name (this characterâs old name).
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I donât agree with the fact that between SL/DF they changed the policy after I had been waiting several expansions since legion for someone who left their level 10 alt with my name unplayed after I transferred servers.
Well lo and behold I finally live long enough to get to the xpac needed that they would have released it with their original policy and instead they changed the policy so they will never release it on me after making me wait for years since Legion, and every time I put in a ticket in Legion BFA or SL and they respond by telling me to wait 2 xpacs worth of character activity for the name to be released only for them to change it to 2 xpacs worth of activity âon bnet accountâ.
So now Iâve wasted however many years since Legion waiting per GM ticket only for them to change their policy and hose me out of it wasting all my time, meanwhile the person goes off and plays the new CoD or Arclight rumble on their phone once every 2 years and I canât get my name on the WoW game they abandoned.
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Best option is to just allow a last name alongside hyphens and such things. Options to use the last name as a clan name or other type name is also good. A final option to not show the name except when doing mails and such would also allow full modularity and fun times for everyone while opening up huge swaths of names.
I use a website called onelook. Has a few thesaurus tools but pulls from all sorts of dictionaries. Even old ones like Websterâs 1828. Learned lots of new words on there. Some of the dictionaries it cites are like, rinkydink online ones. But imo if itâs in any public work and fits the bill to be word, Iâll count it.
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I am not sure what change you are talking about. It has always been the ACCOUNT that has to be active, not the character.
If a GM did not make that clear to start with, that seems like a mistake. I suspect they were simply using it interchangeably. We have never had to log in to each and every character we have to keep our names as long as we were playing the account.
That can imagine that was really frustrating to figure out after waiting for so long 
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Iâve lost character names in pre legion expansions for having not logged into them, That USED to be the policy, it was character inactivity. Only expansion I never played was Pandaria. Every other one I played, but lost altâs names because I didnât log into them in a few years.
So when SL going into DF the naming policy became âbnet Account activityâ, I was livid.
Itâs not right that someone can abandon the game and play a totally different franchise once every 2 years in order to keep the name when Iâve lost names in the past for not having logged into them and playing other alts at the time.
It hasnât always been like that, as far as I know. I believe even in Nobullyâs CS thread it was mentioned that it was a change, just not a recent one.
Edit: here it is. Two important lines.
And his previous quote in the thread.
(Sorry I pinged you, Vrak!)
I really donât think so. I am looking at a post on a blue tracker from 2015 complaining that names are account bound and that the person wants it to be 12 months instead of 2 expansions.
Recently it was decided that GMs can no longer unlock names for people and names will instead unlock once an account has been inactive for two expansions.
Problem is that people tend to check back in once every expansion, so most names will -never- be unlocked. Countless names are held by unused level 1 alts who canât be dislodged. Often, as many as a third of all characters who hold a popular name are throwaway alts, and often the owner doesnât even realise that they have the name and that others want it.
I would suggest reducing the required account inactivity to 12 months, down from 2 expansions. If thatâs too severe, it could be made a feature on the website: Enter a name, and if itâs been inactive for 12 months, itâs unlocked for you without requiring a GMâs time.
This is particularly in the case of low levels. If you want to return to your prized main, that is fine, I can get that. But low level alts, less so.
This is a frustration I encountered myself some time ago when I found a name I really wanted, but it was held by such a level 1 alt, and despite my best attempts (made a forum thread, searched in-game and around my friends, even made a ticket) it seems impossible to dislodge the name or even find its actual owner - of course, assuming the owner has not been unsubbed for years! (And gets to keep the name anyway.
)
Blue Reply:
In general names are taken in WoW on a âfirst come, first servedâ basis. We do realise that having the name of your dreams taken by an inactive character can be a pretty disheartening experience, particularly in cases where you may be moving from one realm to another.
World of Warcraft has a lot of different types of players, some choose to just focus on a handful of characters and work to getting them to max level and beyond, while others play a large number of characters across multiple realms but may get hardly any to max level. We have to strike a fine balance in this regard as no playstyle is any less âvalid.â No matter which period of inactivity we choose to go for, it will always be too long for someone, and too short for someone else. Ultimately we landed on our current policy which you can see at:
https://eu.battle.net/support/en/article/requesting-a-name-be-released-for-reuse [Mira edit: dead link]
Having said that, there has been a lot of great feedback in this thread which I will be forwarding on. Thanks for taking the time to constructively share your thoughts about this matter!
I read that as Vrak saying that the policy has been at the account level for a very long time and that nothing has changed⌠The info I found in a quick google search gives us account level at least as far back as 2015.
Maybe the per char thing was way back when it was done manually by the GMs? That is the only way I think that could happen. Once they went to the ârelease the namesâ batch method it was at the account level.
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Itâs been that way for a while, yes. But the article wasnât clarified until later. But we havenât always had Bnet level stuff. So it did change. It hasnât been a forever thing.
I donât disagree. I just think the char name inactivity part was way back when it was manually done by GMs. I think once it went to batch releases it was at the account level.
Trying to find the first name release articleâŚthat would give us the info. We know by 2015 it was account level at least. But first I need to go find out what the cats are doing upstairs that does not sound good!
The only reason I wanted to clarify that part, was because you had mentioned it had always been this way. So I just wanted to point out that the account thing did change long ago, but the article wasnât clarified until later. Thatâs all.