I understand what a character name means for some players, if this issue does not get resolved in a satisfactory manner, I believe changing his name is not that bad.

On that note, Bayohne posted a few days about incidents with character transfers, his post was more about characters not being transfered to the proper server, but he did specify that SE would look into each case separately. The person just needs to contact GM support in game, that would require that he succesfully logs in =(. If he plans to do that, I would advise choosing a name that he will be happy in case it doesn't go the way you guys expect.