my old dwarf Mudahin had the perfect name. unfortunately, the game got boring :)

I think Blizzard could invent some more ways to plunder peoples' purses. How about a login fee (2 € per login, hey, if you play for 48h in a row, that is CHEAP), an inventory access fee (0,10 €, but you may access it a second time within 60 seconds without any additional fees!) or a revive-your-ghost fee (10 € -- or do you want to stay PERMANENTLY DEAD? No? Weeeelllll....)

I bet all the gold sold on ebay is already simply cheated by the blizzard guys themselves :)

I don't understand why they make a press release about the possibility to change one's name and then charge for it.
If the characters name is the primary key in the database, than I understand that it is quite some trouble to copy the dataset but with another name, change every foreign key pointing to that character and delete the old one.
But if they tell the whole world "Yay, go change your name!", I suppose they have changed the characters PK to an ID, but then it's no work at all to change the name. So they just want to make profit out of it :(

if there is demand, there is supply

:)

Let's all just try to imagine what would happen if this name change would be for free. You'd see many people change their names that won't do this when having to pay 8€ for it. On one side I think it's good to charge for it since this (should) keep the amount of changes low - on the other side: 8€ ??? That's like close to robbery (like Phlexonance already stated).

I'm quite happy with my characters names since I didn't chose some really stupid ones like e.g. "Backsteb", "Shadowdeath" or whatever possible idiotic combinations are out there.

I can't understand this name changing business at all. If I've played for hundreds of hours, I have become this character, to some respect. I wouldn't change the name even if it'd be really silly one. A better idea would be to allow one or two free name changes until you're level 10, that would give you 2 days or so of noticing that you've chosen a name you can't live with, so to speak. But obviously, demand for this "feature" was high, and I agree that the fee is more of a "don't do this if you do not feel a real urge to" approach to keep cheaters and backstabbers from using it too much. (on a side note, I think a guy who is a backstabber won't manage to hide from his own enemies for too long even with the new name change, at least if he doesn't stop acting that way. But if he indeed stops and becomes a nice player: would that be a bad thing?).