We recently had to rename three characters and it was a pretty awful ordeal of trying to find something that wasn't already taken. We had to eventually resort to misspelled versions of our old names because everything we could think of was being used. And we hate our new names.
I spoke to a SGM (Melodicya) today with the hopes of getting a second rename chance and she told me that it wasn't possible at the present time but the name change of merged characters might be reviewed and the policy changed in the future so these people get a "second chance".
I'd really like to see it so characters that haven't been used on a server for 6 or more months have their names temporarily disabled so people who had their names forcibly changed because of an old character sitting in the data could change back to their original names.
Also, characters who are under level 5 should have their names temporarily disabled in case they are the names of people who merged over.
Perhaps a grace period of one month to allow people the time to change their names back.
Finally, obviously, new character creation on these servers would have to be held over for the same period of time.
Thank you very much.