Microsoft is converged. If you didn’t know it before, you should know it now. They’re all-in on ruining franchises like Gears of War to court the LGBT crowd even though they don’t play or care about the franchise, and they’ve turned Halo into a racial identity battleground, all while openly proclaiming that they do not support free speech. Well, that last part was made very evident with a hotfix for Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition that included a profanity filter back in February, which not only censors common words but censors the entire sentences when typed out and you can’t even turn it off.
There are various threads complaining about the feature, but so far Microsoft, Forgotten Empires, Tantalus Media, nor Wicked Witch have yet to give gamers the option of disabling it.
One of the top threads on the Age of Empires forums comes from dededoritos, a Spanish player who lamented how the language filter is implemented for a global audience but only considers English words for censoring, which has led to a lot of problems for those who don’t speak English to communicate with other players. This results in a lot of words in Dutch, German, Spanish or Portuguese to end up being filtered, which then results in the entire sentence being filtered when it displays in the game.
Back in early February, Dededoritos wrote…
“[…] The first problem is that it comes by default, and you can’t toggle/deactivate it on the settings.
“Second is that it doesn’t censors the filtered “curse word” only, it censors the whole message. This simply messes up so much with communication in game. If you simply write a ‘WTF’ at your message you have to figure out what happened and reformulate your phrasing to actually say something. It’s so clunky.
“Also, the filter itself is kinda odd. It censor out messages with harmless words such as “ez” or “negro” (for us latinos, at least). By no means these words alone are swearings.
“Finally, the messaging seems to be laggier overall. The delay in between sending the message and the message showing up at the chat box is very noticeable and annoying. I don’t know if this has something to do with the language filtering, but I have a strong guess that it does.
“I personally dislike the filter a lot, even more giving that you can’t disable it. This is not what we asked for when demanding for punishment for people that spread hate speech or other kinds of slurs on the game chat and lobby titles.”
Some people rightfully called out that Liberal Progressives are to blame, and they are. However, given that so many forums are converged these days, there were also those who chastised and reproached those who even dared bring up the regressive ideology as the root of the problem, even though anyone who even bothers to pay attention to the escalation of censorship of all media knows that SJWs are the problem!
Centrists™ had a hard time defending the filter, but a few did attempt to downplay the issue, saying that if people can’t communicate without swearing then they shouldn’t be communicating at all. The Centrists™ were rightfully put in their place when others explained that the filter extended to common words in other languages even though they weren’t swearing, with PilotSpider3216 explaining…
“Yeah I got censored for writing “wp u too” which the filter saw as “puto” Also I was ttalking something about bombard cannons (BBC) to my allies when that got censored rofl. I mean, ok, it was funny so far, but can you please make it optional? It does not seem sound to impose it on everybody. I understand some guys get offended over mere words on the Internet and that is fine, they can use the filter if there is an option to enable it, but making it mandatory for everybody is plain blunt.” [sic]
Centrists™ were further blown out when it was revealed that even the AI chat was getting censored for using words that got caught in the filter.
The Steam forums are a lot more straightforward about it, and railed on how aggressive the censorship is, with mister_right writing…
“they even filter out “ez”. When you type ez, all you can see **********”
Most people on the Steam forums have a lick of common sense and aren’t trying too hard to justify or make excuses for the filter, with Noor simply writing…
“Should just make it optional. Dont want to see swear words? Enable the filter. It’s a no brainer to me…“ [sic]
So why isn’t it optional?
The developers won’t say.
They did address the issue in passing during update 35584 that rolled out on February 27th, 2020. Further down the patch notes they simply stated…
“As many players have noted, a new profanity filter was implemented in the last hotfix to help protect against disruptive and toxic language in the game. This is a system that we are actively monitoring, tweaking, and planning for additional adjustments in the future.”
The thing is, Microsoft never explained WHY this feature needed to be implemented and with no option to turn it off.
Some Centrists™ tried making the excuse that it was to maintain a proper age-rating of ‘T’ for Teen, but ESRB-rated games already make it known that online interactions aren’t rated. So why start now?
That’s not to mention that “GG”, “EZ”, and various other slang or profane words are completely acceptable in Teen rated games, which completely destroys the argument of Centrists™ claiming that the filter needed to be in place to maintain the Teen rating.
Of course, everyone who has been paying attention to the Culture War knows exactly why Microsoft implemented it and how they’re trying to control language and communication through social engineering. Unfortunately the vast majority of people would rather keep their blinders on and keep justifying censorship in order to protect the Social Justice Warriors behind the scenes who are pulling the strings.
(Thanks for the news tip Mikhail)