Hey all,
We wanted to acknowledge that we've seen this conversation, and the concerns people are expressing here. We hope that we never have to do server merges, and nothing related to server merges and name conflicts is ever an issue for players. That being said, we understand that sometimes in MMORPGs, server merges are necessary to help maintain healthy server populations.
If we need to do server merges in the future, we'll definitely take player feedback into consideration, before moving forward with any plan. If you missed the AMA, we discussed our preliminary plans for server merges. Here's the replay video, with a timestamp to where we discussed this.