WoW Forever name reservation is open: a late start in Europe, queues in America, Roleplay-PvP available

Early Name Reservation for WoW Forever, announced by Blizzard on 20 October with the opening times by region, began on Tuesday 27 October 2026. It did not go smoothly. Here is what happened, hour by hour, and what we know about the Roleplay-PvP ruleset.

Europe: two hours and forty minutes late

Reservations were due to open in Europe at 18:00 CET. Instead, many players found the Play button greyed out in the Battle.net launcher (some solved it by switching the launcher region from Americas back to Europe), and those who got into the game found every ruleset greyed out. The launcher then showed a message from Blizzard, quoted by IGN: "World of Warcraft: Forever Name Reservations are delayed while we resolve some final technical issues".

According to Wowhead's live blog, reservations started working in Europe at 12:40 PDT, which is about 20:40 CET. Blizzard did not give a new time in advance and, as of the evening of 27 October, we found no post on the official forums explaining the delay.

North America: on time, with queues

In North America reservations opened as planned at 1:00 p.m. PDT (21:00 CET). Many players reached the login queue and were disconnected when their turn came; IGN also reported a "Character creation timed out" error when confirming a character, which Blizzard was aware of. By 2:30 p.m. PDT (22:30 CET) Wowhead wrote that most disconnections had been solved, while some players still did not see every ruleset.

Roleplay-PvP is there

On 22 October Blizzard had said it was working to make the Roleplay-PvP ruleset selectable from the first day of reservations, and it is. The only official word on it during the evening is a post by Kaivax at 20:02 UTC for Oceanic players connecting to Australian servers: because of a bug, they must create their Roleplay or Roleplay-PvP characters first. If they start with Normal or PvP, the two roleplaying rulesets are no longer available for the next characters. Blizzard says the issue only affects that region and that it is working on a fix.

The rules, unchanged

Nothing changes in the rules of the official article: reservations are open until 3 November to owners of the Skyborne Heroic Pack, the Skyborne Epic Pack or the Warcraft Forever Collection, with up to three characters in total across all rulesets, first come, first served. The rulesets and their differences are in our rulesets guide; the launch is on 4 November at 3:00 p.m. PST, midnight in Central Europe (all dates on the calendar).

What players are reporting

These reports come from the official forums and have not been confirmed by Blizzard:

• errors when creating characters ("Character of this type is Throttled", or "Error creating Character" for the Horde on Roleplay-PvP), which some read as an early faction balance limit;
• a very strict name filter, which rejects names containing short letter sequences;
• a name reserved on one ruleset showing as taken on the others.

We will update this article if Blizzard explains any of them.