Will our Characters Be Deleted When the real Game comes out?

I was wondering if the characters will be deleted when the real game comes out.

their names will be kept. everything else will be gone, ie professions, gear, level, skills, etc.

Basically, they are just keeping a placeholder char with your name on it so you can delete it and recreate it. I remember that I still had some of my chars from the first BWEs on my account last month and they were all the same "default" male character when that wasn't the case when I created them.

-Virt

This has now been added to the official FAQ.