In Retail, if an account is inactive for at least 2 expansion cycles, their names are released back to be used by the playerbase again. However, AFAIK no such policy is in effect for Classic WoW, and at no point has a mass name release ever been done in Classic WoW. Nor have any names ever been released automatically, as I’ve been “camping” a few names for quite a long time now to hopefully obtain them. Considering Classic servers are approaching 5 years old, and many of the servers have become rather large and difficult to acquire new, common names on, I’m curious if Blizzard will ever release names on Classic WoW? Or is their naming policy not in effect for Classic servers? Or is it in effect, and I am simply ignorant?
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There’s no such mechanic. We’re lower class citizens on an older version of the game which they do not care about. But an even better solution would be to simply let /played time determine who keeps a name with conflicts.
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You’re probably right. But if they must enforce megaservers on us, this would be a kind gesture.
Also RIP all the people losing their names in a theoretical Faerlina-Benediction merger.
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Even if this exists. The problem is that we have like 20 wow versions now and no matter what. If someone came back and renewed their sub for lets say hardcore then the timer just resets.
The possibility of someone quitting fully on retail for 4 years (2 expansions in a row) was higher than now with so many wow versions. (Let alone the 6-12 month bundles now people will forget to stop when quitting)
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I’ve opened a ticket about this trying to free up inactive names and got an AI response. I used to open tickets for names all the time back in the day. Even in classic I have characters that are forced name changed even though I haven’t logged into them yet, like someone had the name freed up from me and taken. I don’t know how they pulled that off but I still have the characters on my list I was camping incase I changed servers that got forced renames without ever logging in on them lol. Can’t get ahold of an actual person to help so 
Remember old blizzard? 
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At least that is one feature they left in from the original Classics. In the original versions, you could almost never get an unused name.
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I think releasing names is a really fantastic idea and I hope Blizzard takes notice!