Foul-mouthed Azerothians beware. The latest WoW moderation update has introduced a filter for particular curse words that goes a little further than the scrambling or censorship features we’re used to. In short, instead of working around a naughty word, players will instead find their whole message blocked. Great news if you’re not keen on having your adventures besmirched by a bout of hate speech.
The as-yet unannounced moderation update was discovered and reported by wowhead. The so-called ‘reserved words’ are thus far limited to just one racial slur, which we needn’t specify here. Interestingly, however, the filter so far applies only to the WoW game client. Meaning that messaging the word in question through Battle.net or Diablo to a WoW player will not trigger the filter. But we wouldn’t be surprised to see this rectified later down the line.
Image: wowhead.com
Some speculate that the move coincides with the imminent roll-out of the new text-to-speech feature - a step towards greater accessibility in Blizzard titles. When you consider that this means chat text will be read aloud, the update probably doesn’t come as much of a surprise.
Of course, whether or not this will significantly curtail the creative methods that potty-mouthed gamers will employ to get their message across is another story. While there will likely be an increased level of hands-on moderation as both the text-to-speech and ‘reserved words’ are rolled out officially, it remains to be seen how much of an impact the WoW moderation update will make.
But in lighter news - there’s now just five days for WoW players to push for the Charity Pet Programme’s $1m target. We’re not sure how close we are to the arrival of Daisy the Sloth, but we can only hope that the last few days of this worthy cause will soon bring some sloth-based happiness to us all.
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