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World of Warcraft players occasionally encounter frustrating error messages when playing the game. One particularly message WoW players see is “A character with the same name already exists,” when trying to log in, but there’s a way to fix the error.
What does “A character with the same name already exists” in WoW mean?
This issue stems from a bug that happens when a player does not log out of their character correctly. Therefore, WoW thinks the character is still active, even though the player is attempting to log back in. This results in the WoW error message, “A character with the same name already exists”.
Let’s look at a few options for dealing with this error.
Troubleshooting the “A character with that name already exists” error in World of Warcraft
One common workaround is to try logging into a different character first. This allows you to make sure there are not any other issues at play. Additionally, it allows you to confirm if your other character is still in the game world by searching for it. After logging into another character, players should fully log out of the game before attempting to access the original one again. I recommend doing this first.
Another potential solution is to reset the user interface. Corrupted files or add-ons can sometimes cause login issues. Therefore, resetting the UI ensures these elements aren’t contributing to the problem. The process of resetting the UI involves renaming or deleting the WTF, Cache, and Interface folders in the World of Warcraft directory. This restores the UI to its default state. Blizzard offers a more in-depth guide to this on their support page.
In some cases, players simply need to wait for the server to automatically log out the character. World of Warcraft servers typically remove inactive characters after about 30 minutes of inactivity. This means that if the initial attempts to log in are unsuccessful, patience may be the best solution.
World of Warcraft and World of Warcraft Classic are available for PCs.
