As World of Warcraft grows and shrinks and grows and shrinks, players come and players go. Some come back, some don’t and new ones are picked up along the way. This poses a significant problem when it comes to naming your brand new character on one of the many realms Warcraft has to offer. So along with patch 6.2 Blizzard intend to release sidelined character names back into the pool for new players to use. So what does that mean for your characters? Well, any character that has not been logged into since December 7, 2010 will have their names freed up making them available to be used by other people.
So in order to preserve the names you have chosen for your main and alternative characters you simply have to log in with each of the before patch 6.2 goes live. This will ensure that Blizzard sees them as active characters and doesn’t delete their names.
This seems to be a practice that Warcraft players will have to become more accustomed to in the future as it says on the Blizzard launcher news “Going forward, we expect to free inactive names and the release of new expansions. Prior to the reclamation process, we’ll post more information on the time frame this will occur to allow you time to preserve your name.
It is entirely possible that if you miss the deadline you will be able to retake the name you once had, but why leave it to chance, log in with your old characters before June 24 and make sure you keep your name!