I would love to get a link to the official policy on placeholder name and making this an informal post for the 99% of the playerbase who don't know about this.

4 years ago I was playing this game, I mainly played on the mal'ganis server but due to server lag / downtime / never ending queues I ended up making 1 or 2 characters on different servers to play during downtime. I quit out of frustration.

I came back about 2 months ago, spent 120$ on gametime + expansions, played quite happily until last week where I received a mail saying it had been brought to their attention that my character name was not meant to be available and that it had been given a temporary name. I then log in the armory to see that a level 80 character had this name and was quite shocked so I pursued this issue and was told that because the character was level 1 and that I had not logged in this particular character in 4years (see reason above).

I can understand that this could be seen as name reserving, and that a character name wipe could have happen while my account was not active, but the fact that I was never given a warning before action was taken, or that I could not find any official policy about this other than the "we feel that in the spirit in the game" from a GM reply is disturbing.

The truth is not that it is in the spirit in the game, its in the spirit of making cash, since I am sure in the case a new player that did not pay 25$ for the name change this would not even have been looked at and said player would have gotten a "Name not available" from the select a name textbox.

I recently got an e-mail from a former game I used to play, informing me about an upcoming character wipe and that if I wanted to keep my characters name I had to log them in before a certain date and offering me a low fee to reactivate my account. Now that is what I call customer respect.

No matter how exceptional my case is, this whole situation is not fair and this stupid policy need to be changed if it even exists. At least WARN people and give them time to log their character should they care about it if its not a name hoarding account....

I sincerely apologize if you have been inconvenienced as a result of this policy; however, you're always welcome to share you suggestions on our Suggestions Forum. That being said, the requirements surrounding our Inactive Character Name Change policy are quite stringent, and rarely are the qualifications met. While I can appreciate the intention to save a character name in case you may eventually want to play on a realm, your character was logged into a single time for roughly 4 minutes, did not earn a single copper, and was left unaccessed for over 40 months. Our desire was not to punish you or to make money, but rather to provide another player with the opportunity to use a name that was reserved but unused for over three years.

I truly hope you take the time to post your thoughts on the Suggestions Forum, Product; we'd love to hear your thoughts. Best wishes.

I've greatly appreciated the discussion contained within this thread for the most part, but as the discussion appears to be approaching that proverbial ever-so-dangerous ledge, it looks as if it's time to lock it before the misstep can occur. That being said, I hope each of you will participate in any similar threads posted on the Suggestions Forum.