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There are few better ways to spend a Monday afternoon than browsing a poorly formatted table of obscenities. I've certainly got nothing better to do now that I've taken out the bins. So without further delay, here's an uncensored, not-safe-for-work and mildly fascinating list of some of the character names Blizzard won't allow you to use in Diablo 3. Some of them are... well, some of them are really strange. Speculum and Oprah, anybody?
The list, posted on the Diablo Wiki, appears to be anecdotal, rather than an absolute blacklist of banned Diablo 3 character names, but after some testing it seems that most of the weirder ones check out. Besides the obvious aversion to sex ('Jizzbutt' is out) and swearing, Blizzard have also blocked references to alchohol ('cognac', 'tequila' and simply 'alcohol' are all banned) and religion ('islam', 'jesus', 'catholic', 'atheist' and even 'agnostic' are prohibited). And while in Diablo 3 you may violently explode a man into his constituent limbs in a bloody shower of smeared guts, don't you dare try to name your character 'Fart' or 'Poop'. Think of the children!
All this hand-wringing over character names is a vigilant, if somewhat prudish attempt to maintain control of the game's age-rating, we're sure. But Blizzard's blacklist also extends to protect you from con-artists, with the names 'Blizzard', 'Support' and 'TechSupport' all blocked (though 'Activision', 'Moderator' and 'Admin' are still fair game). Also banned are names of characters that appear in the game, so that rules out characters called 'Deckard' and 'Diablo'. Any name containing those names is blocked too: so that's bad news for anybody called Adrian looking to live vicariously through their barbarian. More blunt is the largely unhelpful blocking of all names containing 'gay'. Sorry Queen of Disco Gloria Gaynor and Irish television host Gay Byrne.
There's an excellent post on Reddit listing players' failed attempts to name their wizards things like 'Oprah', 'Hitler' and 'Uranus', with such choice quotes as "They wouldn't allow BONERJAMZ, but they did allow AWWYEAHBONER".
Quite!
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