Who is being forced into anything? Isn't this an entirely optional quest? They can do the Sith Warrior storyline and complete his alliance alert automatically, or use one of literally dozens of other companions available from various PvE quests?

While the conquest points tracking is not instantaneous, it most certainly does not take "a lot of time" to update. 99% of the time, those get updated within 20-30 seconds at most. Here, we have a guild that has been steadily earning points the entire evening yet does not show up on the leaderboard at all, even though guilds with mere 25% of their current score are ranked there. No need to be so dismissive of people reporting possible bugs without knowing whether it's a simple display glitch or something more.

It appears that most posters in this thread take the position that people suggesting name releases are simply too lazy, unimaginative etc. to come up with a new name on their own. Of course there are many cool and awesome names available right now, waiting for someone to pick them. But on the other hand - what aim is being served by permitting inactive players sit on a dormant character name just because they were the first to claim it years ago, forcing latecomers to think of various workarounds (such as diacritics, which I personally cannot stand - not least because almost none of the characters of my language appear to be supported by the game) to create something similar? There are many reasons why someone would want to use a specific name in any online community, ranging from purely personal to matters of convenience. In some cases, the player in question may not even be directly responsible (for example, when someone acquires a particular nickname that is not the current name of any of their characters and decides to create an actual character with that exact name). Talking down to people for advocating for a periodic recycling of inactive character names does you no favours.

Consume a G.A.M.E. reputation item (assuming you don't have a lowbie character as the reputation objective is not available for them).

Interesting guess, but that's unlikely to be the reason since I was just allowed to create a toon with a similar name, starting with those four letters. I understand the inclination to be secretive about such filters and lists (to discourage people from circumventing them or to avoid implying that anything specific *not listed* is OK, among other reasons) but it would be helpful if we got just ever so more detailed feedback about why a chosen name is rejected. For example, whether it's considered vulgar, politically or religiously sensitive, references illicit activities, poses a potential IP/celebrity namesake issue etc. Speaking of inexplicable name rejections, an example from my experience is "Mildred" (alone or in a combination with another name). An existing if somewhat archaic English given name, it is presently considered an "invalid name" by SWTOR, yet apparently was allowed at some point in the past, since at least one of the servers has a toon with that exact name. Is it a slang term I don't know - not being a native English speaker and all - or perhaps a trademark or fictional character IP issue, or something completely different?

It's the "all instances" part that is problematic, because it used to be instance-specific (in fact, a known trick to increase the odds of finding additional secret treasures was to try and dig in the same spot across multiple instances in a row). I don't recall seeing anything in any of the recent patch notes about changing dig site mechanics, therefore I would consider it a bug unless confirmed to be working as intended.

If true this is a bug and should be reported as such. It definitely did not work that way a few months ago when I last did some digging.

Correction - the screenshot posted by UlaVii is from Mek-Sha, not Makeb (I am in the guild that was running the event and was part of the ops group). We observed a very similar occurrence tonight, with four people experiencing sudden disconnects/crashes moments after accepting a summon to Mek-Sha shortly before 1830UTC. The server in question is Darth Malgus.

Hey, I tested this a few times and it appears this happens when you pick an existing name. Seems the "name unavailable, please choose another" message is broken and the character creation process just fails silently. I tried two names whose existence I had confirmed through the legacy block feature and both bugged out as described in the OP, but was able to successfully create two characters with available names.

Latvian here. You are wrong wrt the highlighted - the name of this brand does not include any special characters. It's an existing common noun in our language, though rather obscure among the general (non-maritime) public who would be overwhelmingly likely to think of the cookies when hearing it.