If WoW: Forever told you your name was restricted today, there is a decent chance it was wrong. Blizzard community manager Kaivax posted on the official forums on Monday evening that the game’s restricted-name list has a bug that made it “overly restrictive with some names,” and gave one example: it has been rejecting any name containing the letters “c-o-n.” The fix goes in with the next realm restarts in each region, and anyone who got “That name is restricted” on a name they think should be allowed is invited to try again afterward.
The restricted list is separate from the profanity filter. Kaivax describes it as the list the game uses “to check for non-profane names that we wish to restrict, such as major Warcraft lore characters or names that are blocked for technical reasons.” Somewhere in the processing of that list, substrings started matching where they should not have. Players in the forum thread and on the subreddit report the same pattern: “Connie” was blocked, as were names with “gm” in them like “frogmage,” while several people said names with real slurs in them sailed through.
Try again after the next realm restart in your region
Blizzard has not given a time for the restarts, only that the fix ships with the next one in each region. Early Name Reservation runs through November 3 for buyers of the Skyborne Heroic Pack, Skyborne Epic Pack or the Warcraft Forever Collection, so there is time to go back for a name that was wrongly refused, as long as nobody else took it in between. Names are reserved region-wide, so a name claimed on any ruleset is gone on all of them, and each account gets three reservations total across every ruleset. A name that comes back as “taken” rather than “restricted” is a different problem that the fix will not solve.
Kaivax’s post drew 200 replies in its first 90 minutes, and a good share of them were not about the filter. The first reply argued that paying for early reservation was pointless if the system would not let you in at the start, and that “first come, first served” is not a fair description of a window where some paying customers were locked out by technical failures while others got in.
The name bug is Blizzard’s first written statement of a rough reservation day
That anger has a source. Reservations opened in Europe at 18:00 CET and did not work for about two and a half hours, with the launcher showing a delay notice and Blizzard’s customer support account answering one player on X with “No, not at this time. The issue is still being worked on.” EU came up at around 20:32 CET. North America opened at 1:00 pm PDT and spent its first hour with “retrieving server information” failures, disconnect error WOW51900102, greyed-out rulesets and a login queue that reset on every retry, before settling down. The PvP rulesets have since started refusing new Horde characters to keep the factions balanced.
The restricted-name post is the first thing Blizzard has written about any of it on the forums or the news site. It does not mention the login problems, and there is no word yet on whether players who were locked out of the first hours will get anything for it. WoW: Forever launches on November 4 at 3:00 pm PST, and the reserved names, correct or otherwise, are what players will log in with.
