World of Warcraft
Anyone who has always been upset about insults, slurs or other verbal attacks in the chat in the online role-playing game World of Warcraft should now have a special reason to be happy. The developer studio Blizzard Entertainment has built in a filter that is supposed to block swear words.According to a current report by Wowhead.com magazine, such a filter was recently in the wake of an unspecified update to the live Server came - at least in general terms. It seems that this filter currently only recognizes a single racist expression and blocks the corresponding message in the in-game chat. In addition, it currently seems to be possible to bypass the filter by using the chat in the Battle.net client. Even the detour via another Blizzard game - for example from Diablo 3 to World of Warcraft - (buy now € 14.99) has not yet been covered by the system.
There is also an official announcement or confirmation of the chat -Filters from Blizzard Entertainment is pending, there are many indications that it is a "secret" test by the developers. If this goes to the satisfaction of the team, it can be assumed that the functionality or the number of blocked words and expressions will be increased.
How do you feel about this topic? Is such a filter long overdue? Have you already had experience with insults and other verbal attacks in World of Warcraft? Let us know in the comments!
Source: Wowhead.com
World Of Warcraft has begun censoring slurs in-game
World Of Warcraft will now block messages containing 'reserved words', arriving as part of a small moderation update discovered by Wowhead.
For years, WoW has censored certain words by obfuscation as part of a mature language filter. But now, it appears the game will block messages from being sent entirely if they contain so-called 'reserved words'. For now, this covers one racial slur, though I expect to see that category expanded in future.
Wowhead notes that, for now, the filter only applies to messages sent within WoW. Battle.net currently lets you chat to people playing WoW from the third-party BNet messenger—and while these messages will show up in their WoW chat box, they aren't currently subject to the same filters.
Some Wowhead commenters suggest that this may be tied to text-to-speech support arriving in an accessibility update currently available on the 9.1 test realm. That feature would let players choose to have chat channels spoken out loud. It's easy to see why Blizzard might want to take a firmer stance on hate speech when in-game chat can be spoken out loud.
But as anyone who's dipped into WoW's public channels, the community can be rather 'creative' in coming up with hateful speech that dodges existing filters. Blizzard has yet to formally announce either the new accessibility tools or the chat filters, it'll pay to see if their arrival is joined by increased moderation efforts.