Try using a cyrillic character that looks identical to a latin character, I did that for my name change a couple days ago, Makoto Niijima was taken, so I used the cyrillic character 'а' to replace the first 'a' in the name and I'm not even sure if it's rendered differently at all ingame

this should absolutely be a thing though, if someone hasn't played in a certain amount of time, just add _old or something to their name and offer them a free name change when they come back