WoW Forever Players Who Paid for Early Jméno Reservations Locked Out by Bug

World of Warcraft: Forever would-be Connors hit a wall this week, as a filter bug blocked their names during early reservations.

The issue emerged as Blizzard opened early reservations on October 27 for players who had paid for the perk. As expected, complaints about queues and disconnects soon flooded its forums, but there was another, more unpredictable error: every username containing the letters “con” was unavailable.

Since names were distributed first come, first served, every failed login mattered, but it seemed that after the beta had spent considerable effort cracking down on offensive names, the filter had become overly sensitive.

Why WoW Forever kept saying “That name is restricted”

A Blizzard community manager acknowledged the problem on the official forums.

The game checks every name against a restricted list designed to prevent players from masquerading as major Warcraft lore characters, along with names blocked for technical reasons. A bug made that list far stricter than intended, and it had been “incorrectly restricting names containing ‘c-o-n’.” So Connor was out, and so were Falcon, Deacon, Constance, and a few others.

Blizzard said the fix would roll out with the next realm restarts in each region. Anyone who had been turned away could then try their name again.

The fix may placate players who simply wanted their usual name back, but plenty of others took issue with how the perk worked in the first place. Early reservation was limited to buyers of the Skyborne Heroic Pack, Skyborne Epic Pack or Warcraft Forever Collection, starting at $29.99. Each account could claim three names, and every two-part name had to be unique across an entire region.

One player said they had skipped a real-life appointment to secure their name and still lost it. Another post, which ended with a refund request, called the whole event “a lottery disguised as a scheduled event.”

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The reservation window remains open until November 3, the day before Forever launches. It caps a month of friction for the game’s community, after players demanded a ban on the streamer when Blizzard only reclaimed his gifted gold.