With the launch of yesterday's new WoW: Forever Beta build, Blizzard announced that players will be losing Beta access for violations of their Code of Conduct for their character naming conventions. Shortly after this announcement, Tom Ellis commented on the bans, noting that everyone who claims they were removed from Beta for naming a character something mundane is not telling the truth, and names like this would instead trigger a forced name change.
Tom EllisAnyone saying they were removed from beta for naming their character “Billy Mcsuckmahballz” is telling little white lies. That character likely just received a forced name change.
Multiple unfortunate humans read through every name that was removed from beta today.
If you’re genuinely confused, remember that it’s our database, we can see every character you’ve created, not just the one you’re playing.
I read the list. No sympathy. Be a better human next time.
This morning, he noted that some of the team spent last night reviewing the entire ban list again and looking over every Reddit and Twitter post, and every one of those posts has omitted one of their inappropriate names. He ends his comment, mentioning that the naming conventions have not changed at any point in WoW, and after 20 years they assumed players would know what was okay. and 0.18% of names earned a ban from WoW: Forever Beta.
Tom EllisWell honestly I should know better than to have waded into that swamp, that’s on me. Since we’re here now I’ll give one more update on this topic before getting back to actually working on launch instead of reading everyone’s hilarious variations of the N word.
A couple of us spent the evening reading through everything again and checked every Reddit post and twitter and so far every one of them who’s posted their three cheeky or just inappropriate names has had a 4th character they have accidentally omitted. We’ve found exactly one person who we genuinely think was going for an RP sounding name and ran head first into the sad fact we have way too many derogatory terms for some people. I’m going to have yet another poor sod read through it again too so we have yet another perspective.
What else have I seen a lot, ok yep, Blizzard is going extra woke or other crap like that. Nope, any name we revoked beta for yesterday would have not been allowed in any variation of WoW at any time in its history and would have earned you a suspension. We just manually ran names through the same system they would have been normally and then out of an abundance of caution read through every one.
No new standards have been set or enforced for Forever’s Beta.
Our naming filter wasn’t ready to rock for dual names but we naively thought after twenty years folks knew what was and wasn’t ok and we’d be fine for a few weeks of beta till it came online. Yeah.
0.18% of names earned an exit from beta. Please pick better names at launch. Everyone else, thanks for checking out our beta, have fun and keep the feedback coming.
