Borrowing a page out of Yahoo's playbook, Blizzard recently announced plans to free up dormant character names in World of Warcraft. Any characters that have not logged into the game since November 13, 2008 will have their names freed up according to a recent blog post on the matter.
Blizzard said the goal of the "great name liberation" is to make sure new and returning players have a large and varied pool of character names to choose from.
The sidelined names will be released as part of the upcoming Warlords of Draenor pre-patch (6.0.2) at which time they'll be made available to anyone creating a new character or using the paid character name change service.
Those wishing to preserve their character name (and haven't logged in over the past six years) will need to log into World of Warcraft and enter the game using each character they wish to keep. This must be done before the aforementioned patch goes live. Since there's currently no release date for the pre-patch, it'd probably be best to go ahead and preserve your name ASAP.
Blizzard notes that while it is possible that no one will claim your recently released name and you might be able to get it again, it's probably not worth the risk if you really want to keep it moving forward.
Warlords of Draenor, the fifth expansion in the long-running MMORPG, is set to arrive on November 13.