Nevrax has written a document detailing the question of characters having the same name in the upcoming Ryzom Ring.

After we spoke about the architecture change some time ago, you raised the issue of the existence of a same name on several servers. For instance, what would happen if two characters having the same name, one from Leanon and the other from Aniro, met in a Ring scenario?

We thought about a viable solution, to allow you to keep your name, and yet being able to know who's who (in mails, /tell, contact list, System Info window and R² scenario). I explain below what we have in mind.

1. The way to contact someone would slightly change

* By default, when you will /tell someone, the game will assume that you are trying to reach a player from your own server.
To contact Franck from your server, nothing changes; you simply type /tell franck Hello

* If you want to contact someone from another server you would need to add his server's name before his name, or after it in brackets, as follow: /tell shard.playername blablah; or /tell playername(shard) blablah
You are on Aniro. To contact Franck from Leanon, you'd have to type /tell leanon.franck Hello; or /tell franck(leanon) Hello

* In a Ring session, the same rule applies. To contact someone from your server, you would use the /tell the same way as before. But to contact someone from another server you'd need to add his server name:
/tell franck(leanon); /tell arispotle.bob

Note: upper cases have no influence on the command.

You can read the rest here.