WildStar PSA – Password Length

I finally figured out why I couldn’t log into WildStar. This little saga has been taking place over the weeks and months since the game went free.

Originally there was the fact that I’d completely forgotten that I’d setup the Google authenticator, so it kept rejecting me for leaving out that code. That took a while to figure out. (Admittedly I wasn’t looking very hard for the solution.)

Next I had to reset my password, because I’d forgotten it. Possibly I’d reset it somewhere during the time I was figuring out the authenticator problem. Of course it wouldn’t let me set it to the password I wanted to use because it doesn’t let you use any of your previous passwords, so I had to make up a new one. This time I made a pretty long one and typed it into the web page and everything was fine.

Except when I went to WildStar to log in. I typed in my name and password and it said sorry, that’s the wrong password. I went back to the web page and logged in with the exact same password and it worked fine.

I went through several rounds of this. Surely I was doing something wrong. Then one day I happened to notice that while I was typing in a new password on the web page, it didn’t accept the final character. The password box had a maximum length on it. So I was actually entering one less character than what I thought I was.

The game itself doesn’t have any such length restriction on the password box, so I was typing in the full password there, and of course it didn’t match the truncated one, and of course it rejected it.

So let this be a lesson to any WildStar players out there: Apparently the Carbine web pages have password length restrictions, but the game doesn’t.

P.S. Once I got into the game I had no idea what to do, so I logged out again. :)