Reserved GW1 Names Released Next Week

[Ralfmar]

Ok the use of our reserved names will be next week. My question is will we be able to rename the Toons we made to start playing? Seems only fair they let us change since they were the ones who did not give us the option to use old names even though for 4 years they have been saying we can use reserved names!!!

[Centaur]

Source: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/commun...sed-next-week/:

We know that a lot of you have been waiting for character names that are currently reserved through Guild Wars. As we said earlier this year, we wanted to keep name reservation active until our support team worked through the initial rush of support tickets after launch day. We’ve got good news: That time has arrived and all reserved names will be released next week, November 8th, at 2:00 PM PST (23:00 CET). If you have a character name reserved from Guild Wars and haven’t gotten around to making that character in Guild Wars 2, this is the time to do so. If you’ve been waiting for a reserved name, your wait is almost over!

Thanks to our support team for working so hard to help our community members and bring us to this point.

So Ralfmar, in reply to your question: you already have been able to use reserved names, if you linked the GW1 account that those names are used on, to your GW2 account. The release of the reserved names only means that now you will be able to use the names that someone else had reserved.
And it is highly unlikely that ArenaNet will give you a free option to rename your characters. When those names are released, it's basically a free-for-all, meaning the first person to create a new character with that name, gets it.
So if you want one of those names, you will have to use one of your remaining (free) character slots to create a new character...