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Names and language settings in WoW: Forever

Last names are mandatory and your full name is unique across your whole region. The language you pick decides who you get grouped with — and the toggle that hides your last name currently does not work the way you would expect.

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Last verified September 21, 2026

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  1. 1

    Prepare a first and a last name — both are required

    Every character has a Main Name and a Secondary Name, described by Blizzard as "similar to having a 'first name' and 'last name'". The last name is not optional.

    So you need two names ready, not one.

    ~5 min
  2. 2

    Understand that it is the pair that must be unique, per region

    Your full name is unique per region. The upside: your first name does not have to be, so plenty of people can be "Grimaxe" as long as the second half differs.

    Whether that lock also spans rulesets — so that a name taken on Normal cannot be reused on PvP — is widely reported but is not stated in Blizzard's own recap. Assume it might, and have an alternate.

    ~3 min
  3. 3

    Do not rely on hiding your last name — in beta it only hides it from you

    There is an in-game toggle to hide your secondary name. Players on Blizzard's own forums report that in the current beta it only hides the name from your own view — everyone else still sees your full name.

    No official reply has confirmed whether that is a bug or the intended behaviour. If your reason for a particular last name is privacy, choose as though everyone will see it, because right now they do.

    ~3 min
  4. 4

    Set your Preferred Online Language — it biases who you meet

    Blizzard's wording is that players "will also be able to choose a language preference and encounter others who share that preference".

    Note what that does and does not say. It biases who you encounter; it is not stated to be a hard filter on grouping, and we have found no source that says otherwise.

    Secondary reporting places the setting under Options → Languages and Social. Blizzard has not named the menu path itself, so look around if it is not there.

    ~3 min
  5. 5

    Check which languages your region actually offers

    For the Americas the reported options are English, Latin American Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese. The lists for Europe, Korea and Taiwan are not published.

    Players have already been asking Blizzard on the forums to add languages that are missing, which suggests the list is narrower than the set of languages people actually play in.

    ~3 min
  6. 6

    Treat the language setting as hard to undo — the rules are not published

    A one-day cooldown on changing this setting circulates widely. We could not find a source for it, including in the forum thread it is usually attributed to, so we will not repeat it as fact.

    What is fair to say: no source describes how or how often the setting can be changed. Pick deliberately rather than experimenting on launch night, and treat anyone quoting a specific cooldown as unsourced until Blizzard documents it.

    ~2 min
https://mrgl.cc/checklists/names-and-language

Sources

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