The World of Warcraft Forever beta ended last week, and in the space in between that and its full launch on November 4, Blizzard is offering players the ability to reserve character names ahead of release. There's only one problem: the system looks like it's broken.
Right now, the name reservation system is only supposed to be available in Europe, with North American servers getting a name reservation window starting at 1pm PT/4pm ET today. But the WoW Forever team has issued a message to players in the Battle.net client, saying "World of Warcraft: Forever Name Reservations are delayed while we resolve some final technical issues. Thank you for your patience!"
The way the name reservation system is supposed to work is that, by launching the latest version of WoW Forever, players will be able to pick a ruleset (PvE, PvP, etc,) and then create up to three characters with reserved names. But, for a lot of European players, the blue 'Play' button on the Battle.net launcher is grayed out, meaning they can't even get into the game to try and make a new character.
Just like with any sort of World of Warcraft delay, players have taken to the WoW forums to voice their discontent, in a massive 120-post thread. Player Equinox posted, "There is literally nothing going right the first time something new launches. It's ridiculous how they manage it every time to screw things up." Meanwhile, Katerlina asked, "They did this already for USA right? Or are we the test?" And, no, Blizzard has not launched the feature in the U.S. quite yet.
Some players have found a workaround that gets them in the game, but it doesn't seem to be doing a lot of good right now. Aureliani posted "Go to install folder of forever and just start wow.exe, use email + password, and that at least brings me to the rulesets (that are still greyed out though)."
While it probably won't get you into the game any faster, player Bìsh has some helpful advice, saying, "If the PLAY button its greyed out, that means your launcher was set in another region. I dunno why, but mine was set to Americas. I logged out from Battlenet, I clicked switch accounts to clear the name of the account also, and in the right corner there is a cog where you can put it back to Europe. After I've done that, the PLAY button its not greyed out anymore."
There are only a couple more hours before this feature launches in the U.S., and unless Blizzard figures out the root cause of this issue ahead of time, it's likely that NA players are going to experience delays, too. Either way, hopefully these kinds of issues aren't present when WoW Forever gets its full launch on November 4.
Ahead of WoW Forever's launch, we got a chance to sit down with Blizzard principal game designer Kris Zierhut to talk about the future of the MMO. It sounds like updates will be coming regularly, and we might get a chance to visit some of the continents that got added in expansions, like Northrend and Pandaria.