One of the developers running the World of Warcraft: Forever beta has no patience for the people who think they can get away with naming their characters something inappropriate.

I was surprised at how many awful player names I've seen while playing the beta over the last week. WoW usually has a pretty strict filter that covers a lot of racist or disgusting names and all their permutations. But in the beta, I saw more than usual that felt like they should've been blocked at the character creation screen.

It turns out, this was a mistake on Blizzard's part, according to senior game producer Tom Ellis on X: "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."

Things were not fine from day one of the beta, which required Blizzard to manually run every name through their filter system and then double check them just in case, Ellis said.

A wave of bans went out alongside the beta's first major patch yesterday to revoke access for the worst names and force the iffy ones to be changed. This prompted some of those players to go on social media and Reddit to complain that they were wrongfully punished.

"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," he says.

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