After the World of Warcraft Forever beta ended last week, Blizzard opened up the servers to character creation in order to allow players who bought one of the Skyborne packs to reserve their names. But a lot of people were falsely given a “restricted” message when they tried to reserve their name.
Even after the rough start that Blizzard’s name reservation system had on Tuesday, some players weren’t able to reserve their name, with the character creation screen telling them their name was on the restricted list. Blizzard has since fixed the problem, and told players it was due to a bugged name filter.
Community manager Kaivax took to the WoW Forever forums to explain: “In WoW Forever, we’ve been working on the restricted name list, which is a 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. Today we’ve determined that we have a bug in the process that caused the game to be overly restrictive with some names. For example, it has been incorrectly restricting names containing ‘c-o-n.'”
In the replies to Kaivax’s post, it was made clear that the name filter was a bit overzealous. Player Nursejoy posted: “Major Warcraft lore characters? I understand that but it seems any named NPC is on the list. Example: Generically named NPCs ‘Nurse’ and ‘Officer’ hardly hold major Warcraft lore but names containing ‘nurse’ are restricted. This is a specifically bad example to illustrate impact.” They then went on to list 23 different character names with the word ‘nurse’ that they supposedly tried to reserve, but couldn’t.
According to Kaivax, the fixes should have gone live with the server restart, but some players are still reporting problems reserving their names. However, I’ve been able to go in and reserve the name ‘Concon Concon,’ so the specific combination that Kaivax mentioned does seem to have been fixed at least.
But while this overly strict name filter appears to have been a bug, WoW Forever has been fairly strict on character names. There was a controversy relatively early in the beta about names being reported, and Blizzard had to come out and reassure players that humans were reviewing the reports. I also got a chance to sit down with WoW Forever principal game designer Kris Zierhut to talk about the future of the game, and it seems like the team is laser-focused on making it an even more social version of the MMO.