One of the only fond memories I have of being a community manager is that I got to post the greatest patch note in the history of everything:
- Enemy names including the word "assassin" should no longer display as "******in"
I know nothing about coding, but it is insane to me that someone managed to make a language filter so aggressive that it went after mob names. And this wasn't some hobby project by a first time developer. This was a large team of veterans, making a very expensive game. But I guess it was also a game where, at launch, literally any entity that somehow went out of bounds was moved to coordinates 0.0.0, resulting in a localized vortex of chaos and madness.
Part of the issue is that people love to try and get around censor lists constantly. Think of every variant of a swear (fuck, fucker, fucking, exc), replacement letters (fvck), adding characters (fuuck, f uck, exc), and "alternate" swears (frack from Battlestar Galactica is one example). So the naive way is to simply remove special characters and spaces, then search the string for any set of letters on the banned list, then remove or replace those letters as the program is set. It's (relatively) simple to do, but has many issues.
It's one area AI probably is going to be (and maybe already is) really useful to improve things, since the simple censor lists contently both miss swears and block non-swears. A properly trained AI model can read the context around a potential swear and determine if it actually is a swear or not, including learning as the users try and get around the filters.
Anyway, that's the last I'll post on this, since this is a bit off topic.
