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Why do MMOs provide a profanity filter?
TheScavenger
Member EpicPosts: 3,321
It makes no sense. Most MMOs have one, and most MMOs will ban you if you use profanity. So...why have one at all? Why not force the profanity filter to be on all the time. If someone doesn't want to see profanity...you know...they can just turn the filter on. But people turn it off and complain that you use profanity and then you get banned...
Now, I'm not one to use profanity all the time. But before I unsubbed, my raid wiped at a WoW raid (think it was Lich King, and we were at end, and a few people left)...I said "f* this is stupid."...just the f word. Some dude said "reported, thanks for teaching my daughter profanity" (not word for word, but along same lines)
...
So...why do MMOs even provide a profanity filter, if they still ban you for it?
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Comments
its fucking stupid.
most profanity filters are on by default.
you have to actively turn the filter off... only to then complain that people are using the exact words you decided you wanted to see.
i wish mods had some balls in games and went "stfu and turn your filter on"
now if someone uses the filter and some asshat is typing so that it circumnavigates the filter like "fu ck er" then i can understand warnings and bans.
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I wish the devs had guts as well. IF you can filter on offensive language you can automate bans against those who violate the rules.
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What he said ^
That's why i leave my filter on.
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Folks, like I said earlier in the thread, profanity filters have NOTHING to do with profanity. They exist as evidence in favor of the game company should they be the target of an FTC enforcement. The FTC only enforces COPPA rules on game developers with money.
Yeha i have never found or seen a ban of any kind that resulted from merely using profanity by itself. Though i have seen people try and say that they were banned for using profanity, while in truth it was their rampant, and deliberate use of profianity that was directed at offending others (yes even people that have their filter off can be offended by people like this.) that got them banned (or even another issue that was unrelated to it, but happened at the same time.). I have seen many people use racial or gender based slurs which got them banned, only to turn around and say they were banned for profantity.
I also find it funny that people honestly think it is okay that since you have a filter it is okay to intwine into every post profanity between every words though. I am fine with seeing profanity, but not the kind of trully abusive kind of profanity usage where you see people using profanity in for the sake of it or even trully over baringly stuffing profianity into a post. If you have more profanity than you have actual non-profanity words, or even at a ratio of 1 non-profanity to 3 profanity words than in many ways i see it as a bannable or atleast suspenable offence.
To profane or not to profane, that is the question. What is profanity? Where did it come from? Why is it in one generation the word ass means a donkey and next it means the part of the body that sits upon said donkey? Is it truly an act of rudeness to use certain words? Or is it the emotion behind that word that counts. I'm an old fashion guy. I must say I do find it offensive to hear small children cuss. It seems to me a loss of innocence and a willingness to cause others discomfort. But we all loose our innocence eventually and intent to harm can be coated in stylish words of haunting praise.
I wouldn't worry about it, OP. They're only words and you never meant his daughter any harm. Perhaps it's himself he was mad at. Just leave and forget it. It's not important.
If you account is banned then the game moderators are not all that bright.
Some games have filters that are excessively aggressive. The filter in Guild Wars, for example, will filter the word "reputation", some NPC text, and even at least one mob name. For a while, the official forum for an SOE game that I played filtered the words "black" and "white", supposedly to combat racism.
Or to go farther than that, Wizard 101 used a whitelist filter, which had about a thousand or so words that were allowed, and everything else was filtered.
There are also people who use profanity very excessively. Even with a filter, seeing **** in the middle of a sentence often makes it obvious exactly what word was filtered. Unless a filter gives you the option to not display filtered messages at all (which opens its own can of worms if someone is trying to communicate with you), it doesn't really block profanity entirely.
There are also people who go out of their way to evade a filter, such as intentionally misspelling words that would otherwise be filtered.
I don't think that people should be banned or even reprimanded for occasionally using a word that gets filtered by whoever has the filter on, unless a game is taking extreme measures to be kid-friendly (e.g., Wizard 101). I also don't think that private chat channels such as guild chat should be moderated unless the guild is offended. (If a guild chooses to allow profanity in guild chat and makes that clear to anyone who wants to join, anyone who joins anyway has no right to be offended upon learning that the warning was accurate.)
But going out of your way to evade the filter and put profanity in front of people who are trying to avoid it should merit a (temporary) ban, as should lengthy profanity-laden tirades in public chat. If you go out of your way to try to offend people, then you have no right to blame others if you succeed.
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To answer the question in the title more directly, a good profanity filter gives people who don't want to see profanity in your game ways to see less of it. It's better to prevent an offense than to debate after the fact whether we ought to punish the offenders.