Mats and insults in online games?

Question

Game development

Since I am the developer of an online project, I would like to know your opinion on the topic of verbal violations. My understanding is that swearing players should be kept away from the rest of the population. It's just not very clear where the boundary of violations passes.
Moment number 1. A person simply writes a four-letter word that begins with the letter C and ends with A. At the same time, he considers it literary, or denoting a feminine dog.
Moment number 2. A person writes mats with a reduction, or the addition of asterisks (well, and other special characters). For example, words starting with B and ending in Db are simply written with the first 3 letters, or the aforementioned 4-letter word is written with an asterisk in the middle.
Moment number 3. A person insults others with phrases like WELL YOU ARE A NOOB, YOU PLAY LIKE A GIRL and the like.
Q: How strict should censorship be in a game? What do you think is considered a violation and what is not?

Answer 1

IMHO the best censor is to make a paid subscription ~ $30, thus leaving only the audience that is really interested in playing, and not go to swear at others =)

Answer 2

Very often, such a thing as antimate blocks completely harmless messages. I don't like it very much.
I would just add a "Report profanity" button.

Answer 3

The question is, do you need to block it?
In my opinion, WarGaming has the most competent approach. The person himself in the settings decides whether to enable anti-matter or not.
Well, the implementation is elementary. Base of variations and filter before sending.

Answer 4

I had an interesting period in my life when I performed the functions of an administrator and a game master and a webmaster, and so on, a master on one national freeshard server for the game Lineage 2. For a long time and hard, there was a fight against truants, because even with all their desire, they were not able to write mate competently. In the end, a manual tool was made that filtered the public chat logs by a cool regular expression covering almost the entire range and variations of obscene vocabulary, displayed it all in a beautiful grid, and I, as an administrator, already looked at whether it was a real mate and made a decision on punishment, clicking on checkboxes and getting statistics. Punishment took place in a semi-automatic mode - once a day or two, minutes of a chat ban were accrued to a person, in direct proportion to the number of times a person was “lit up”, but the amount of a ban accrued each time increased exponentially. This greatly demotivated schoolchildren, but not enough to get used to this punishment, and we added karma to punishments, according to the same principle. Karma in L2 is a measure of a player's aggressiveness, a player with non-zero karma can be merged with impunity by another player. Equipment may drop from a player with karma when draining. There are two ways to get rid of karma - the first is killing mobs and earning experience. The second is suicide with loss of experience. Here, everyone decided for himself - whether to substitute for the “bullet” of a clanmate, or to swing, risking equipment. However, regardless of the choice, they atoned for their talkativeness in silence - no one canceled the chat ban :) or swing, risking equipment. However, regardless of the choice, they atoned for their talkativeness in silence - no one canceled the chat ban :) or swing, risking equipment. However, regardless of the choice, they atoned for their talkativeness in silence - no one canceled the chat ban :)
What am I talking about - make the player work out the offense and he is unlikely to repeat it. How to raise a dog.

Answer 5

At one time I was fond of Quake 3 game. They kept their servers, etc. depends on the context. Still, in games, people amuse their CSF, and such phrases about noobs are probably acceptable. Although a direct insult (including a dog) is unacceptable in my opinion.
For a direct insult, we kicked. But, for example, two clans can converge in "hand-to-hand combat", "kill the arrow" and do not be shy in expressions. But these are elements of the game. Everything depends on the context.

Answer 6

1. censorship is bad in any way
2. you need to evaluate the audience for the game. If this is a child's game, then children must be educated on the one hand and aggression must be controlled on the other hand. Then a hard anti-matte and not only a filter is needed, but coupled with the motivation to behave culturally. If this is adrenaline hardcore, then it is impossible without mats, but at the same time, children and muslin young ladies do not belong there.
3. it is necessary to give the opportunity to communicate in your circle. The general chat is a stream of spam and scam, but already the intra-clan chat is “their own”, including their own culture - someone needs and can swear in order to speak more precisely, but for someone it’s not comme il faut. It is clear that public channels need filters, although most likely anti-spam ones, and some general free communities too, but private channels should be free at least optionally.

Answer 7

Put an anti-mate filter on chats and some kind of chat ban if the filter often works on the player. In any case, it will not be possible to completely eliminate insults, you can always write in such a way that a person understands you, but a robot does not.

Answer 8

I think the Blizzards did it right - there is a bot. And in addition to the bot, it is possible to report insults and other violations to the support service. Although I would add to the settings whether to use the bot or not, maybe I have nerves of steel and I don’t care if everyone around swears?

Answer 9

Only ban violators if you are losing players or getting complaints from it.
Otherwise, moderation is unnecessary and unacceptable.

Answer 10

You can arrange repression in a playful way.
For example, for each matyuk, the player's rating goes down. Or temporarily reduced combat parameters. This, of course, should not be hidden from the players. It seems to me that for a player the prospect of lowering the level (strength) is no less depressing than the possibility of a short-term ban.

Answer 11

IMHO - implicit dictionary filtering (as in WoT - the author sees uncensored, but other players see all the words from the dictionary as asterisks) plus sanctions for user complaints, but only for notorious hooligans - flood / shield storms, ASCII pornography, targeted long-term bullying and insults from one player to another, etc. In the general case, the society itself should regulate the presence of swearing in the chat - where society does not accept it, it rarely appears. In other cases, artificial restrictions will only increase the heat of passion and drama.

Answer 12

I would just add a "Report profanity" button.

I would show this button next to the message right in the chat if there is a suspicion of a mate. Here you can also add a 'complain about spam' button, etc., the fact is that if the algorithm does not ban, but only offers to do this, then this frees up your hands during its development / training and allows you to make it better.

Answer 13

Is it an open world where anyone can meet anyone? Or do the players form closed groups? If the latter, then let the group decide for itself whether checkmate is acceptable for it or not.

Answer 14

What's the problem, put a button to complain, when you click on it, the last 2-3 lines of the offender from the chat will be saved. Then run the anti-mate script, if there is an obvious checkmate, then immediately score a point, and let all the rest (in which the anti-mate did not see anything wrong) let through human moderation.

Answer 15

Blizzard believes that insults (not just swearing, but insulting a specific person, usually with swearing) should be in the game, because fewer people leave because of them than they would “leave” if such a cattle was banned.
They know better (from the financial side), but I don’t like this position.