March 03, 2011

Chat Filter Filterer

Too Much Filter Is No Fun

AQW is a family friendly game, which means we try and keep it reasonably clean. It's part of the reason that we restrict chat to people 13 and up (that's a law, actually) and part of the reason we put a profanity filter into open chat.

Recently, we've been doing some work on the chat engine and it's had some mixed results. Cursing in the game has dropped off dramatically but some of you have noticed that you can't say certain very common phrases because they contain curse words in them. Of course some people will always try and find a way around a chat filter, no matter how good it is and at SOME point we're doing more harm than good limiting you guys to what you can and can't say.

One player even compared AQW to being at school. Yikes.

We never intended to make chatting no fun and if we wanted to limit you to canned chat then we never would have written the open chat engine in the first place. Changes needed to be made, and fast.

I'm happy to announce that I have just left a meeting with Artix and Minimal and Min has come up with a pretty excellent solution for the chat issue. Pretty soon you should see your chat returning to normal, without stopping you from saying things like "put it", "an alt", "reputation", "its hitting me" and other common phrases while still keeping AQW's E-10 ESRB rating!

As I mentioned before, nothing is perfect and some people will always come up with creative ways around the chat filter, and that's when you need to just report that person for abusive language then add them to your ignore list.

It's a little late in the week to get the chat changes in by tomorrow's release but we should have no problems getting them in by NEXT Friday's release.

Thanks for your patience, sorry about taping your mouths shut and see you tomorrow at Nythera's Wedding!