****, we didn’t mean for that to happen. This has been the response from Call of Duty Black Ops 7 developers Activision to folks spotting that you couldn’t type the name of fellow shooter Arc Raiders into the chat of the game’s beta without it being censored. Yep, you could reportedly get away with Arc or Raiders, but stick the two together, and it was off to the starred-out naughty corner.
Naturally, folks wondered why this was a thing, especially since you could chat about more obvious Black Ops 7 competitor Battlefield 6 to your heart’s content without facing any star-based repercussions.
Well, as reported by Penguin Choir Gamer, a text filter error was to blame according to Activision. Insider Gaming report having been offered more specifics regarding the nature of the error, with Activision saying it was down the word ‘Arc’ being listed as an alternative for a naughty word, and pairing it with ‘Raiders’ caused the moderation system to flag up an inappropriate phrase.
It seems strange that if ‘Arc’ was the root of the issue, you’d only be pinged upon adding the seemingly innocuous ‘Raiders’, but hey, text filters can be weird sometimes. A quick stealth patch has since been issued and it’s now possible to type out Arc Raiders’ name. It’s also worth noting that the EA had to resolve a similar Arc Raiders name censorship issue with their app earlier this year, so it very much looks like this is just a standard text moderation quirk.
At least Arc Raiders devs Embark Studios have been able to have a bit of fun with the free publicity they’ve gotten out of the misbehaving filters.
Even if this had been down to shooter publishers cheekily blocking out competitors’ names from their games’ chats, that’d probably rank relatively low on the outrage scale for me. An inconvenience perhaps if you’re talking to mates and comparing two shooters while playing, but there’s plenty of third-party chatting software that’d seem a more practical forum for such discussions anyway. Or maybe I just need to get better so I can comfortably type out ‘I see your point esteemed colleague, but I feel the recoil of [insert game]’s guns is exactly three per cent more satisfying’ in between headshots.
You could also discuss the ups and downs of ***** *** *, *********** *, and *** ******* in the RPS comments section instead. The former’s beta has just been extended to run until October 9th, if you weren’t already aware.
