Quote Originally Posted by The_Last_Dragoon View Post
There is an argument to be made that beyond just the availability of names, the server can become overpopulated with alts and characters under level 10 like Alexander_Dragonfang is describing, which causes the players to be unable to start a character on the same server as their friend's. If a level 10 character no longer exists, you're talking about an hour of game time and trying to say that character is precious to the player. I'm just calling into question how valuable that character could be to a player who plays it for an hour and then leaves the game for half a year.
You're actually not quite right there, there could be 10's of thousands of dormant characters on a server and they will have no impact on whether or not the server allows you to create a new character (except for the use of the same name of course). The only thing that matters in that regard is concurrent active characters. If a server is extremely busy and well populated with active characters, it may be 'locked' but there are times when you can get a character to create on it because you catch it when the server is not especially loaded. Now, the proactive locking is based on the trends in the server load, it's not real time, but servers can lock against character creation if they are extremely busy.

The value of a character is entirely a personal thing for the player that created the character, who are you or I to decide their character that exists has less value than another yet to be created?