The ***** Rule, Again...

[BlueTycoon]

Surprisingly you can't say my name in game. Go on and try to say Tycoon. It blocks the 'c00n' part...and you also can't type 'button'...it gets anoying when people try to say my name and it gets blocked. Please fix this.


Post any other words you have found out that have been blocked.

[Djerus]

You also*can't say "title" or "assume."

[KeeperNS]

Yes, and when a person's name or a part of it is filtered, you can't whisper to them, so I tried but couldn't whisper you, BlueTy. It was sad.

[Isshou]

Can't say class... there's a number of things wrong with the filter

[Splat_Phastkyl]

You can't say the word that is 'skunk' but you remove the 'sk' and replace it with a 'p'.


I have no clue what is wrong with this word, but it's so awful and terrible that it's even censored here.

[Moogie]

I am an outspoken opposition of chat filters as a form of ingame censorship of words. What follows is a rant describing my opinions and reasons for my dislike of them as I frequently find them implemented in online games (not just in Fiesta, but most definitely including it). Enjoy. ;P





It always suprises me (though, by now, I suppose it shouldn't be suprising at all) that developers fail to code <u>working</u> chat filters in online games, even after all these years...


Why can't they simply take into account spaces? Why, I ask you?? It's not hard, at all, to ignore the "a$$" in "assistant" or "class", or the "t!t" from "title" or the sentence "isn't it". The filter should be filtering " �a$$" and "a$$ ", with the spaces, allowing it to distinguish the word on its own rather than as part of other, innocent words; yet not allowing the word to be filtered when spaces appear between the characters, so that two words in sequence don't cause half a sentence to be muted with asterix.


It works great on this forum like that; why can't you do it ingame too?


The system could even be more complicated and take into account non-alpha characters such as punctuation marks, dashes and underscores in place of spaces, as an extra devious measure against those who might attempt to work around the filter by typing garbage characters in between the alphanumericals. But still, this is such a relatively simple thing to do, and if you are that desperate for such stringent chat censorship, it should not be an unreasonable expectation of your programmers to code such depth into one of the game's core systems. After all, if you think censorship is that important, you'd better show it through a decent level of implementation, or chuck it on the back-burner where it belongs.


Of course, there is the backwards way of doing it - creating 'safe' lists of words that do not get filtered when the offending letter combination creeps up within said words - but you can't possibly hope to include every instance of a combination of letters within every word of the English language. That's just creating two seperate problems, and is simply an unecessarily awkward, and cackhanded, measure requiring more work than it's worth.


Sure, you will always end up with people tricking the system to bypass the filter. But guess what - that's what everyone already does now, and it should be up to the GMs to monitor chat activity and deal with offenders - that's their job, after all. The only difference being the extra annoyance with the filter, in its current state, censoring perfectly harmless words (and player names!!) and causing disruption to the ease of ingame communication. In the end, by being thusly overzealous in censorship, you harm the very audience you wish to protect, when there are far better options available to you already.


I once played a game with such a horrendously snappy chat filter that it caused me to swear so much more during my play time, out of sheer frustration. Filters block 'bad words', but in the process create anger and frustration when they behave poorly and cause havok with regular chat.


And you know what's the worst kind of filter system? One that allows character names to be created with 'forbidden' letter combinations, yet filters the name out when someone tries to type it in the game! You are utterly destroying communication for those people, who cannot change their name, and may indeed have absolutely nothing wrong about their name, besides an ill-fated combination of letters. Is that their problem? No, certainly not, yet it is just another example of regular players punished by developers who put such minimal effort into, what should be, a very important and well-developed feature.


The choice is clear-cut, in my mind. Freedom of speech, with GM-enforced rules of decency and conduct; or a chat filter that was not coded by a 5 year old - one capable of intelligent filtering - one that takes more than ten minutes to throw together by a monkey chained to a keyboard.


To this day, I have not seen that level of required effort put out by any MMO developer into the creation of a proper, intelligent chat filtering system. Perhaps I just havn't looked hard enough... who knows, maybe decent filters do exist somewhere, but by golly, I wish they existed in fun games like this right here. That would just make me happy as a bunny. ;)


But, perhaps the greatest solution of all is, naturally, the simplest of all: an option in the game settings. On or Off. Everyone decides for themselves... problem utterly solved.

[Addiction]

^very nice post ^^ read all of it o.O took a while though, but very good points you got there =]

[Kylisandra]

Agreed. We need the option to turn off chat filtering.

[MorphineSoldier]

I don't really think it needs to be an option at this point. The filter just doesn't need to be there.


I think at this point it is broken beyond repair when we can't say words that are essential to the game.


And really, if a kid is smart enough to be on an online game, there isn't ANYTHING he hasn't heard before.

[Wall13]

Very well said Moogie, I completely, and whole-heartedly agree with you. I have seen a decent chat filter before though, that was on Star Wars Galaxies...the reason why it was decent? The nice /filter option you had to turn the annoyance off.

[Kezzerdrix]

As many of you all know, there are other language versions of Fiesta. In these other languages, different characters are used that are not phonetic (that is, made up of letters that directly represent sounds).


They use more complex symbols which can reasonably be filtered out in the manner that is causing problems in English. We are very aware of this issue and are working on resolving it.


Thank you for your patience and understanding!


-Kezz

[Moogie]

As always, I'm glad to hear the developers are actively working towards improving the game.

[Amane34567]

You can't say "clam" either.


Look at that! The forums censor it too! Clam = cl@m...

[Djerus]

After the patch, you still can't say "class."

[Funtrix]

Currently, after today's patch, if the word ends with one that's included in our filter, it gets filtered.


If you're using a word that starts with one that's included in our filter, it does not get filtered.


For example, cl<u>@ss</u> gets filtered, but <u>@ss</u>ume does not.


We're still trying to fix this issue, as kezz explained.

[Moogie]

The important thing is, it's getting better, which is commendable. :]

[PeacemakerOni]

Most online games when starting out have horrible chat filters. Personally I've kinda gotten used to it, as usually it is fixed by the time the game is released.


Another idea which would be nice if implemented is if you allowed the players to descide if they want the chat filter on or off. Yes, there are younger kids who play that shouldn't have to see those words. But personally, I'm in college and don't mind at all.

[Mega69]

i agree with you peacemaker im 23 and out of school so it dosent bother me at all

[Kaiza]

Some words got fixed already like assistent, class and some other already but not all ^^

[BlueTycoon]

All im asking is for the next patch or update they make that people can say my name because no1 can whisper me!! >.> it gets annoting =[