Profanity Filter -> Optional

Maybe it doesn’t met your high standards.

Why do you always twist things around? You are the one with high expectations on others.

You flat out ignore our explanation and then tell us that you don’t understand how it bothers us.

We have said many times that it triggers too many words, common phrases and even unit names. When there is already barely time to talk, any miscommunication bc of the filter is a huge inconvenience. Other than that it breaks immersion since we are supposed to be medieval warlords, which should be allowed to curse. This is still a game and people should be allowed to be free and have fun, I don’t see what any government has to do with this.

Your behavior is highly toxic since you are ignoring and minimizing others opinions and experiences. It is clear from your writings that you are a hypercasual that is really far removed from how competitive people experience this game. 5 minutes on twitch could put you in the right mindset.

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Glad to see this clown is still rambling on about needing the profanity filter. That quote is one of the best I’ve seen in a long time LOL. I don’t even read his posts anymore not going to waste the time.

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Yeah it used to be fun but it’s quickly becoming more evident we are dealing with some type mental health issues and now I feel sorry. Making your daughters (which I doubt are real at this point) play a game whose main objective is to kill/conquer a different race but wanting a profanity filter or refusing to hunt is just not a sane logic. This, paired with the never-ending obsession to talk about himself and his personal life problems (nobody cares!) with some creeping sense of pride.

@PacificWheel208 thank you for decisively shutting down his arguments as well as putting up with him (which most of us cba to do anymore). You are well spoken and right on the spot. I wish I could contribute to the discussion but my posts have been getting deleted & I got warned as well, I feel no longer safe to speak my mind on this subject due to staff retaliation.

@Psychcaptain thank you for single-handedly keeping this & the other topic alive and on the eye of the community so they receive more support. Even though you had a very different intent, I still feel obligated to thank you.

Have a great weekend all!

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You’re right. What baffles me the most is they made this huge overhead by censoring everything and anything, in a game where people rarely hold conversations because everyone’s so focused on gameplay. It’s hard to casually talk with people via voice chat in discord or something let alone spend time typing out messages. If you had to pick between two extremes of having everything censored or nothing at all - i’m sure 99% of the community would rather nothing be censored. And they should’ve kept it this way until they made a smart enough system or a toggle option for this.

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I am playing the most recent version of the game, and ever since the profanity filter has been active, it seems to be extra strong for me. What happens is this:

  • when there is a word in a sentence me or someone writes, that is found bad, the entire sentence is **** starred for me. Not just that word, but the entire sentence. I have heard from friends this sometimes even happens when there is not even a single word starred for them, in that sentence. It is a HORRIBLE to experience to say the least.

  • some players names are completely *** starred out. Like the player HomoSapiens (or so I heard from someone who did not have his name starred, because I could not see it, obviously). But this has happened multiple times, one other a player had ‘■■■■■■■’ in his name. EDIT: I just notice ‘■■■■■■■’ is also banned here. I am trying to type bas-tard. In case that is profane too: an out of wedlock child, is that about right? Dear lord…

I am really fed up about this. No one asked for this filter (I was shown a poll on this forum which said 95% of people felt no need for such a filter). If you do make it, for heaven’s sake, please, TEST IT! This is now just completely breaking immersion for me. I can’t even get over proper strats with an ally, because half the time the entire sentence is STARRED just because he wrote the word ‘japs’ in it. Japs. Hello, SpiritOfTheLaw, #gojaps! Or onager, we all know what that was like.

Another frustrating aspect after the introduction of this filter, is that there now is a noticable time delay between sending a message, and reading it ingame. There’s a delay of about 0,5 to 1 seconds, which actually is a lot.

Please, please, please give the option to disable this yesterday rather than tomorrow. And even then, make it so that it actually contributes something.

*edited

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Stop with false statements

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Ia time to get woke go broke.

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Agreed. Let adults play the game like adults and enable a passworded filter if you don’t want some kid playing it online and seeing bad words.
Also. How many kids play this game online? I doubt there are many.

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Indeed. There’s a common phrase in marketing: “know your customer” which doesn’t seem to be applied here. Just because they want kids to play this game, does not mean kids are interested to play this. Slightly improved graphics doesn’t change what this game truly is: a vintage isometric-2D game. Removing blood and adding a profanity filter may allow for a more inclusive ESRB rating and may increase sales a bit - but at what expense?

I fear that the new filter may be a sales-team driven decision where developers don’t even get to vote. Hence why in spite of the overwhelimg dislike, no developers have stepped up to speak. This is unfortunately how most modern gaming companies are run nowdays, the sales people are in charge and they have no clue what the community wants, with changes like these they increase sales a bit so they are “doing it right” but long term they are killing the game. Going in this direction will be the demise of AoE.

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Microsoft already sunk their ship with me. I’ll never buy another one of their games ever again after this stunt. Not that I bought any of their games previously other than this one. I hope AOE4 is a total fail if they have clowns making decisions like this profanity filter behind the scenes.

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In addition to my previous statement, I can now confirm that some sentences that are written in chat - and shown as only starred characters - do not contain ANY foul words at all. Ie: someone sees the full complete sentense without starred words, yet all I see is this:

**** ******* *** **** ***** ********* **** ******* *** ******* (that’s all stars)

As another example, this was one of the messages a teammate wrote, and turned out as only stars for me: “Man, title says no noobs, a guy who has one single game, and its a loss, joins”

A proper response would be appreciated here people.

So… pretty please, with sugar on top: clean the ******* filter!

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“Nice deal” is censored as well
Honestly this is getting very weird. It’s probably detecting the word “iced”, and uh…PLEASE.

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Another player who’s name is censored is:

felix.

Like, on what planet should that be found foul language???

Ladies and gentleman of FE, can you do everyone a favor and remove the filter ASAP? Preferably indefinately, optionally until you have tested it thoroughly and made it togglable?

Shouldn’t be that hard, just show this topic to who ever is in charge.

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I don’t want to fully enter the discussion but here’s an example of how paranoic (and weird) the censorbot is:

The game censored “Jesus Christ” when I was in a lobby. Why on earth would you censor that?

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“title is arena” - the word “title” is censored as well, this thing needs to go as soon as possible because is extremly bad, i waste my time in a game to tell my teammate something and it gets censored for no reason at all, it ruins all the fun, please for the love of god, make it go away

I don’t know what is the reason behind this at all in the first place, i mean i get the idea but the game wasnt “TOXIC” to begin with, I’ve played it for a couple of months now and i’ve seen only maybe 2 people that actually said something bad in the chat, this was not necesary, Ok, censor some bad words, thats fine but when u have a system that sees normal and common words that cause no harm in any language as bad ones then u have a problem. I mean, there are bigger titles out there than got no such thing in place and there are more kids playing that game than aoe2 De for sure and no one is complaining lol
In the world we live in right now is pretty much impossible for kids to be “Safe” anywhere on the internet, this should be the responsability of the parents, maybe dont buy the game if u think it is harmful for them or try to control when and what he’s doing whenever is possible, the fact that companies do this kind of things is useless and is a punch in the gut for almost the whole community

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Psychcaptain, the majority of people playing this game are adults, not children, despite your opinion, and as an adult, I don’t like outside entities telling me what I can and can’t type in the chat, for a game I paid for. People absolutely should have the option of turning off the filter if they want to. If I’m playing with my friends online, we should be able to say whatever we want to each other, point blank. I can’t believe that’s somehow not OK to you. If you want the option to have it censored that’s fine, but don’t impose your preferences and morals on me or others. The fact that you bring parenting into this process as if that matters is laughable. How you choose to parent your children and your ability or inability to control what they do is your concern, not anyone else’s. If you can’t control whether they turn off the profanity filter or not maybe you shouldn’t allow them to play this game.

Age of Empires is not a children’s game. Period. It’s fine if kids play but in ANY online game, you’re going to have people swearing or using inappropriate language. If you want to avoid that, they can play against the AI and not have any issues.

And, the fact that their profanity filter just doesn’t work that well is the big problem. It censors the entire message, AI commands and chat is censored, and random letter combinations from separate words can trigger the censorship which is just poor design on their part. I can’t comprehend why you are so compelled to defend this at every turn.

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I totally hate that filter and the delay it causes.

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You’re trying to grasp at some of the shortest straws I’ve ever seen dude, I’m Swedish and still knew that by “freedom of speech” he means “the ability to express oneself freely” and isn’t in any way related to the country the rest of the world is laughing at.

I can’t even chat in my own language with people from my own country without being censored by these silly American thought processes of “someone please think of the children”

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So, I’ve seen a player enter my lobby with his username being just a series of *****.
He told me that it was censored, new profanity filter hard at work.
Guy was chill, no issues, but the thing is, you can abuse that. I tend to remember player in between custom games, and know which ones I don’t want to play with (mostly trashtalkers or high level players in low level lobbies). But if your name is censored, then this simple method of prevention is lost.
Maybe I’m wrong there, but I think this will lead to more abuse with this added layer of anonymity.

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That is a good point. Surely the devs didn’t intend that players could choose a name that would get censored so that they could be anonymous.

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