Champions Online's Overzealous Profanity Filter
This has made the blog rounds a couple of times by now, but apparently Cryptic recently released a new profanity filter to Champions Online with its sensitivity meter cranked a bit too high. Caught in the cross-fire of the attempt at filtering out player swear words, unfortunately NPC text ended up on the barred list as well, causing much giggling as players spun creative explanations for what naughty words the quest-givers were really filtering out.
Initially reported on over at Elder Game, unfortunately what was a pretty goofy glitch ended up being seen as proof of CO's "death throes" to Eric Heimburg.
Sure, it's a silly bug, but I personally think it's more than a little reactionary to declare this as evidence that CO is dying. The game certainly has some issues to be taken care of, but I echo Massively's sentiment that I would have preferred the author stick to examining the funny aspects of the problem instead of painting the team at Cryptic with a particularly incriminating brush. I tend to find profanity filters more than a little ridiculous even when they work as intended, but then again I don't have any children and I'm an adult myself, so I suspect I'm not the intended audience for the tool. Nevertheless, I think this glitch shouldn't be pushed to hyperbole and portrayed as a failure by Cryptic to test things adequately.
mixvio
Posted to Miscellany on 22 October 2009
· Comments (5)
Other stuff like this: champions online, chat filter, cryptic, profanity
Wow, that's brilliant, "put a" is a bad word in spanish with an extra space to trick profanity filters, puta.
Heck, this is how Blizzard operates all the time - just cram stuff in and kick it out without testing. They often lose fixes due to regression (since apparently they have no source control system), and ridiculous bugs that nobody should have missed show up not just on the PTR, but live. And I don't think anyone's going to say that WoW's dying. It's just SOP for MMOs since the customers are apparently willing to put up with it.
Yu-Gi-Oh! Online is MUCH worse. You can't even say "Tribute" which is a common term in the card game without them censoring it because it has 'but' in it.
I just turn the profanity filter off.
You think this is bad? Free Realms filter is totally out of control! You cant even say "question" or "understand" which can cause quite a few problems, epically since the target audience is so young they probably don't understand what is going on or don't have the vocabulary to say what they want to say in a different way. Sometimes it just seems like it is filtering at random or will filter if your message is too long, weather is just someone making one word really long (yeeeeeeaaahhhhhhh) or just a long message.