You sit on the upper echelon of moral high ground among those who play online multiplayer first person shooters.
Or is she sitting in a completely different echelon of misguided 'morals'?
Are we talking about the same teen rating that does such a fine job censoring death in movies to a level that it not longer appears to be a bad thing? Were only lowly henchmen are killed and usually when people die they just lay down on the ground motionless and where the death of people has no effect on anyone, because the deceased people don't seem to have a person in the world that seems to be affected by their loss.
IMO the teen rating is the greatest hyprocrisy in todays media and a good example how much people have disconneted from realtiy.
That's no suprise it comes from the country that let's kids shoot guns but screams bloody murder when someone mentions the word sex.
Better teach the kids how to kill someone without thinking about the consequences then educating them about love and how to create a life.
I'd rather be killed by a bullet than die in a tank or a mech, hit by an anti-tank weapon, that once it burned itself through the hull incinerates everything on the inside making the last breath you take boil your lungs while you still try to scream but your vocal cords have already been burned away.
You should think about telling your kid what happens to a crew in a tank or mech when they get hit when you are complaining about some playernames.
Violence is ok as long as the gore is obscured by a fiery explosion? Do you fantasize about pilots burning alive inside an inescapable hull made of exotic materials? What a sick thought process!
Ignorance is bliss: "All i see is metal ¯\_(?)_/¯"
people like myself who enjoy PC games
I love that i don't know if this means personal computer or politically correct, lol
But I'm also asking about it from a business model perspective. There are quite a few people like myself who enjoy PC games, and we regularly recommend to each other new games that we have found. Even Hollywood is now realizing that G and PG movies can make a LOT of money, often more so than their rated R counterparts. I guess I don't understand the harm in creating a naming convention that would not cause such offense as to make someone not want to play the game. They already have some of the tamest violence/language of any FPS on the market. Why not just go the rest of the way? They could easily become the number one "family-oriented" FPS game without losing their Veterans. Especially in a day and age where Steam is giving us HUNDREDS of other games to choose from, and this game is apparently struggling, you'd think that they'd do whatever they could to get more recommendations.
And how many new active player names, really, are we talking about monitoring right now? Have you checked the population of the US servers recently? Now that I know how to check how many games are actually going on, I'm frankly shocked how FEW people are actively playing this game. So if the player base is actively shrinking, then I'd think that even one new customer, and a paying one at that, would be highly cherished.
It's pretty easy to do, really. Every new player is assigned a generic name when they start (i.e. Pilot 247), while they wait for moderator approval for their selected name. Sheesh, with all the hassle we put new players through just to get into this forum (5 moderator approved posts, limited to one per day), you'd think the game itself could spare someone for this simple task.
But I'm clearly in the minority here, so I'll shut up now. Just wanted to make that additional point about their "marketing" strategy. Thanks again.
First, i want to note that i'm a playful person who is perpetually in a quantum state of taking everything seriously and taking nothing seriously; so i'm sorry if i joke about this too much and it seems rude, but the simple truth is that you are an extremist in your beliefs here. Hawken - an online first person shooter - has no voice chat, default chat censorship, and from what i understand, some semblance of autonomous user-name prohibition. To consider this game could be made more kid-friendly is...a stretch.
Second, i want to commend you on your lack of, as ATX22 put it, 'net-nannying' despite your very clear [self-proclaimed] 'prude-ishness' on the matter at hand. It's really, really refreshing to hear a strong opposing opinion come off so professionally and without massive emotional appeal.
No, no. You should not shut up just because you're in the minority (in fact, i would gladly fight by your side for you to say things i disagree with here, which incidentally is the exact reason my opinions oppose yours; i believe in utmost freedom of speech)- it just may be the case that you have to accept something you disagree with, dropping it. Most reasons why have already been explained; summed up:
- Wide appeal: It's hard to believe Hawken in its current state isn't already the most [inadvertently] ideal compromise between freedom of speech and censorship in all of online first person shooters. I've been told attempting to use certain [inappropriate] names in game will result in your name being defaulted with the option to try a new name. Aside from that speculation, Hawken has no voice chat (inadvertent censorship of the worst of the worst), default censorship of certain inappropriate words including misspelled words (citation needed), and a simple 'mute' function. Honestly, if they tried any harder to censor, i think we'd risk losing the fence-sitting people of extremist opinion who are on the opposite spectrum, the same way we're currently risking losing people of your extremist opinion.
- Logistics: I could write a program to invalidate words or phrases in chat or as user-names that uses a dictionary of inappropriate words, coupled with one of inappropriate phrases, all of which accounting for every possible composition using meaningless characters (spaces or underscores) or numbers / combinations of characters which may be interpreted as letters ('^' as the letter 'A', '3' as the letter 'E', etc.); but look where we ended up for potatoes sake! Where do we draw the line of 'inappropriate words'? 'inappropriate phrases'? And we've introduced a plethora of edge cases where a combination of harmless numbers and characters is recognized as inappropriate by the system when it wouldn't normally be in the human eye- and we spent money and human hours on the project. What about just user-names, using human time parsing every single one for human-readable inappropriate names? Same problems with the question of 'What is inappropriate?', no problems with false-positives, new problems with time management (is it really worth it?).
So, can anything really be done to appease you? Well, yes, i actually do believe there are some options- options which could actually make the game better for both ends of the opinion-spectrum. But it's just a matter of what they're willing to do. My solution? Add a function that hides user-names by changing them to 'FuzzyBunny1', 'FuzzyBunny2', etc. as easy as the 'mute' function (allowing people like me to enjoy horrendously offensive names still).
...Until 'fuzzy bunny' becomes a colloquialism for 'f@ggt' or 'fvckr'. 
That last line up there is why, by the way, all of censorship is utterly hopeless/futile, but that's getting too opinionated, heh.
Honestly, words are empty sounds against your eardrums. I think your son would be hurt a lot more by nice words in the wrong order from a meaningful source than the 'worst' words that exist in a meaningless context.
Which is worse?:
You: "I don't love my son because he never succeeds."
Random internet child: "f*** you you f****** piece of s*** f***** c***"
Edited by CoshCaust, 16 February 2016 - 02:22 PM.