Name Release Starts Today!

Today marks the first day of name batches being released for this year's Name Release! This release contains approximately ~38 million names.

This newspost is to give you a breakdown of the upcoming batches and what dates we're aiming to release them. We'll look to put each batch out at 11am UTC every weekday until all batches have been released.

These names are taken from abandoned characters which must have been inactive for at least 2 years AND either been permanently banned, has never been a member or membership was only paid in bonds, which ended at least 5 years ago.

To claim a name, you must now be a RuneScape member, with a skill total of at least 1200. And you can claim a new one via the in-game 'Check Names' function or through ourwebsite.

Below is the full batch list, we'll mark each day when they've been released.

Extra Measures

For this Name Release, we wanted to take learnings from the previous one in 2017. As of now, we've already banned over 11,000 characters we believe are going to be used for name sniping and are in the process of acting against more. The anti-cheat team is going to be paying close attention during the full duration of this name release for bad actors and unusual behaviour that would indicate characters being used for malicious intent.

On the web side, we've made several integral changes to help ensure we can also prevent and take action against any bad actors. We won't be disclosing any specifics here to not give any indication to those with poor intentions, but all teams involved are going to be very reactive in response to any malicious behaviour.

You'll also notice a queuing system both in-game and on the website that gives us the flexibility to increase or decrease wait time depending on traffic and unusual indications to help facilitate any further actions we may take against those acting in bad faith and protect legitimate players. Where any bad actors are detected, we'll reserve the right to release those names again.

Additional Information

Remember:your previous name will be reserved to your character for at least 35 days, or for up to 6 months, depending on how long you had it. You'll lose this reserved name if you change your name again, the name is removed from the game, or the reservation period ends.

If you've changed your name recently, you'll have a 28 day cooldown which can be removed by redeeming aBond. If you have any questions or require some help, visit our Support Centre. The team cannot help with getting players a particular name nor looking up whether a name would be included within a certain batch.

Something to bear in mind for any players creating characters for Hardcore Worlds, these won't be eligible until you've reached the requirements listed above. If your character resets, these won't be eligible unless the character has the required skill total, as described above.

- The RuneScape Team