Blizzard to free up abandoned character names ahead of Warlords of Draenor

[Shawn Knight]

Borrowing a page out of Yahoo’s playbook, Blizzard recently announced plans to free up dormant character names in World of Warcraft. Any characters that have not logged into the game since November 13, 2008 will have their names freed up according to a recent blog post on the matter.

Blizzard said the goal of the “great name liberation” is to make sure new and returning players have a large and varied pool of character names to choose from.

The sidelined names will be released as part of the upcoming Warlords of Draenor pre-patch (6.0.2) at which time they’ll be made available to anyone creating a new character or using the paid character name change service.

Those wishing to preserve their character name (and haven’t logged in over the past six years) will need to log into World of Warcraft and enter the game using each character they wish to keep. This must be done before the aforementioned patch goes live. Since there’s currently no release date for the pre-patch, it’d probably be best to go ahead and preserve your name ASAP.

Blizzard notes that while it is possible that no one will claim your recently released name and you might be able to get it again, it’s probably not worth the risk if you really want to keep it moving forward.

Warlords of Draenor, the fifth expansion in the long-running MMORPG, is set to arrive on November 13. 

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https://www.techspot.com/news/58094-blizzard-to-free-up-abandoned-character-names-ahead-of-warlords-of-draenor.html

 

[rub900]

Hmm. I thought by now there would 20 posts about how bad Wow sucks. I like and play Wow btw.

 

[TheDreams]

It's probably going to be bloody chaos when the names are released

 

[Arris]

No! Leave the names on my characters gravestones!

 

[Guest]

They should let you use any name and have a hidden unique key (maybe based off hardware).
In real life we all know there can only be one Alex or Fred or Alice.

 

[cliffordcooley]

That's already being done by use of account name. As long as you can be differentiated from others by account name, there is no need in having limits in character names. That's why some games use character@account ID's.

 

[MilwaukeeMike]

They should let you use any name and have a hidden unique key (maybe based off hardware).
In real life we all know there can only be one Alex or Fred or Alice.

I can see why they don't. It takes away from the uniqueness off your name if everyone has it. For example, if they allowed multiples, there would be a hundred female warriors with the name 'Cleavage' (Cleave is one of the warrior's attacks) and there would be hundred Shaman's named Shamwow. Not to mention... just think of how sick you'd get seeing all the Game of Thrones names running around. Every 4th person would be named Danerys or whatever her name is.

It's good they're releasing the old ones... if I still played WoW, I'd be logging in on Nov 13th to try to snag a couple.

 

[Paul Ivan]

Nice money stealing strategy.

 

[cliffordcooley]

Yes all the MMO's change over time in the attempt to keep a game interesting, for everyone not just new players. You have a choice of whether you want to play, it is not stealing. I myself may have issues with the strategy, but I have not lost a dime I did not want to spend.