They announced the process for reserving your character names from guild wars 1 for guild wars 2 today. Basically if you've logged in since the new year, your character names will be reserved for you, but you have to create characters with those names during the 3-day head start period immediately before release, which means you have to prepurchase the game (or pre-order and do it during the 1 day head start for preorders). After that, any unclaimed names from gw1 will be taken off the reservation list. Also, you can have one word names in gw2.
Just thought you all might want to know if you're interested in playing gw2. From the beta weekend and stress test I've participated in, I think it's worth prepurchasing.
Here's the info directly from them if you want to see.