While the naming policy using to be a lot more detail years ago about what was and wasn’t acceptable, it’s really hard to go into that much detail in today’s day and age of new slang and urban dictionary terms, let alone the vulgar and profanity that some people seem to think is cute. People need to use common sense when it comes to naming their characters. Anything that can be considered inappropriate for a Teen rated game should be avoided.
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Ah, why is it looked down on? How else would’ve I been able to ask for help/input on the situation if I didn’t explain what happened?
Also, why doesn’t context matter? Shouldn’t both parties involved try to reach an understanding or perhaps even common ground?
Yeah no I figured that would potentially be the case. I really didn’t even think it was going to let me put the old name back, I figured that the devs would’ve put in a system to prevent that. But hey, 2 lessons were learned which is a good thing at the end of the day!
And again, thank you everyone – especially Orlyia and Perl. I should’ve said this in my first post, but I do apologize for the trouble - even if it wasn’t major.
Just for clarity, discussing moderation on the forums is against the forum rules.
However, posting about it here on the CS forum is generally allowed as long as the intention is to seek advice and possibly some insight (when possible).
So, to specifically clarify,
… the CS forum is the only place that it’s generally allowed and where Bliz will often comment for advice and/or insight (when possible).
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The forum CoC specifically calls out “Discussing Disciplinary Actions”.
HOWEVER, as with everything in the CoC, it’s at the moderator’s discretion, and the SFAs have always tolerated a sincere query from an affected player as an opportunity to clarify the rules and the situation being discussed. For a while. They won’t abide the thread rurning into a begging session, an argument about the rules or the infraction, or a general fracas.
As with the rest of the Support forum, the thread is acceptable as a way to share information. Once it’s done with that purpose, it’s allowed to peter out or, if it’s degenerating into more than info sharing, the mod generally closes it.
I imagine the rule hammer comes down if the poster keeps opening threads to argue after the moderator has deemed the discussion done and dusted.
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Actually, social sanctions like this are the exception. The staff cannot give too much depth in regards to things like the Hack/Bot/Cheat or RMT sanctions, but they have no problem enlightening players of inappropriate language or toxic behavior they partook in without outright saying the words verbatim. People seem to derive some pleasure in sending people here from the General Discussion forums to spread their woes of never having said a single foul word ever in their lives - only for the SFAs to point out just how wrong they are.
Same goes for naming sanctions, as part of the “social” umbrella of sorts. Even though there are some shades of grey, as it were, these kinds of things tend to be pretty cut and dry if they’re pretty obvious violations.
Because it’s just against the rules. Even if it’s between two consenting adults, Blizzard has rules we agree to follow. Whether it’s something inappropriate in a TRP or naming one’s character StupidMcStupidface or something that isn’t appropriate for the game setting - it’s against the rules that have existed since the game’s inception. It’s not anything new they’ve tossed in. Blizzard has just really started enforcing said rules a lot more aggressively like they should have done since day one.
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General Fracas, reporting for duty. 
This is so the sentence they constructed makes sense. There’s no hidden meaning that if only one person reports, they won’t do anything. One report is all that it takes for a social infraction to be actioned.
As this very thread shows, not only do they enforce the Naming Policy, but players don’t learn their lesson and rename their characters the same thing over and over again. The OP here did choose a different name, but not right away, and Orlyia had to give them a second rename.
Keep reporting.
First off, a company in general has no “mood”. There’s no singular “Blizzard”, in terms of individual moods.
Second off, the “mood” of a GM is irrelevant. A violation is a violation, and for the most part, social infractions are pretty cut and dry. Did you use an obscenity or toxicity, yes or no? If yes, it’s an account action. This whole “I need to GM shop to get one in a good mood” is a fantasy invented by players trying to end around the rules.
Actually, RP servers are one place where they might give some leeway. Occasionally (exception, not the rule), they may encounter a borderline name on an RP realm, and will hold off until they see if it’s a deeper disruption or not.
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Okay, just so I’m absolutely understanding things - I haven’t broken any rules by specifically inquiring about the situation while specifically within this forum?
I think I’ve got just a couple more questions – why exactly aren’t certain names (referring to things such as the name in my OP and the example provided by Leilleath - names that aren’t clearly against the rules to the average person) just auto-blocked from being usable in character creation? Also, why wasn’t I outright prevented from being able to choose the old name again when this whole thing started?
Wouldn’t the former make more sense to prevent more situations like this from even being possible? And wouldn’t the latter prevent this specific situation from even being able to happen at all?
EDIT: Oh and one last thing - a small thing: if I’m ever curious if a name is or isn’t against the rules, should I ask here on this forum?
I’m not a representative of Blizzard, but I feel that what’s happened here so far is within the bounds of moderator discretion to allow.
As long as it stays productive and informative, and not into futile rules-laywering or “muh freedum of speech” or something pitiful and irrelevant like that.
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As long as it doesnt go to far off the rails vrak or orlyia will leave a topic open at there discretio.
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I believe some names are blocked, but there’s no way to come up with a complete list. Pop culture changes. People can come up with infinite respellings, especially with special characters. The worst name I ever reported, I don’t think any filter could have caught it. I’m not even sure AI could have caught it. (I want to ask ChatGPT because I’m curious, but I’m not going to because I don’t want to be on a list.)
Adding a name to the banned list when a player is forced to change seems like a good idea, and you could suggest it, but it’s not a new idea so I expect there’s some technical reason they can’t or it’s lower priority than other changes.
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No need for belief, there is most certainly a pretermined list of disallowed names, but it’s mostly (uncertain as to exclusive, so some interpretive leeway) titles. King, Queen, etc.
Other words indeed just have way too many variances to feasibly have a working filter to that effect.
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Oh I mean some names are definitely and obviously blocked, i.e. slurs or anything remotely close to them.
It’s just that, given how old and how big WoW is, I guess I was expecting these little safeguards a bit more? Would it take more man hours to have a couple people dedicated to adding names to a block list vs. CS having to deal with situations like this (or worse ones) over and over?
Wait wait wait, King and Queen aren’t allowed? Why?
Titles are not permitted.
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Because it would be considered as impersonation of a public figure, like you can’t call your toon a name of political figures or business as in some cases it can be considered divisive as some don’t like certain politicians for what ever reason.
The issue is that people are clever (or think they are). There is a virtually infinite number of ‘clever’ ways to misspell words, so the list of disallowed words would also be infinite, and would require infinite man-hours to compile.
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Reminds me of that recent guy on the EU CS forums who insists calling someone “garbage” is allowed and not meant as an insult, and if it is should be added to the mature language filter lol xd.
That’s a shame, that cuts out a few potential cool names. May I ask why titles (just the titles themselves, not something like “Kingjohn” or “Queenelizabeth” - just “King” or “Baron” or “Queen”) aren’t allowed?
Out of curiosity, is there a public list we can look at to see what specifically isn’t permitted?
But what about the base word itself – again referring to stuff like the name in my OP?
It’s a shame they don’t have some sort of automated system to put reported names on a block list, although I can understand how that could create some serious technical headaches.
You already asked this question which was answered by the post you replied to:
I believe they said somewhere if a similar name comes up often it may be tagged for the global blacklist but until then it doesn’t.
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Using the word ‘garbage’ as an example…
If there are only 3 ASCII alternatives for each letter, there would be 16383 ways to circumvent the filter.
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Ah I see, I missed that. I was caught up in focusing on the titles thing lol.
It’s interesting that it needs to happen often for it to become blocked, but it makes sense.