Does WoW Classic Season of Discovery have name reservations?

Blizzard Entertainment has historically had a tradition of opening World of Warcraft Classic servers a couple of days early so that fans can reserve their favorite character names. Unfortunately, this will not be the case with WoW Classic Season of Discovery.

Normally, Blizzard opens character creation and name reservations a couple of days ahead of the game’s release. This has been a regular part of all WoW Classic rereleases, and fans love the opportunity to snag their iconic names ahead of everyone else for the small price of buying a subscription ahead of the release. However, it has now been confirmed that players will not get a chance to do this for Season of Discovery.

Can you reserve a name in WoW Classic Season of Discovery?

No, you can’t reserve a name in WoW Classic Season of Discovery.  This was confirmed by senior game producer Josh “Aggrend” Greenfield on Nov. 25 on X (previously known as Twitter). 

“I might regret posting this,” Aggrand wrote. “But in the interest of transparency I think it makes sense to explain why we don’t publish realm names early or do name reservation anymore. I see folks say things like ‘We need names so we can plan’ and really, you want that, but don’t *need* it.”

The main reason why there are no name reservations is because this would reveal realm names, and Blizzard is trying to prevent the formation of mega realms from the very beginning. Normally, this results in long queues for those realms, with other types being underpopulated and eventually dying off. 

What are name reservations in WoW Classic?

Name reservations, as the name suggests, refer to the act of players logging into WoW Classic servers ahead of the game’s release to create characters and reserve their favorite names. 

To reserve a name in the past, you needed to have either a WoW subscription or active game time and the game installed on your device of choice (which should normally be your PC). Then, you needed to log into the game during the name reservation time window, and hope you were fast enough. However, this will not be possible for Season of Discovery after Aggrand’s announcement and it sounds like name reservations might be a thing of the past.