Notice: This article talks about the censorship of offensive words in Age of Wushu. Actual profanity and their correct spelling will be used to help convey the educational message and some people may be offended as a result of reading this article.
The chat filter (often shortened to filter) is a filtering system in Age of Wushu that prevents players from posting profanity and links by replacing them with asterisks (*). The filter can't be turned off.
Link filter[]
The link filter is a type of chat filter that censors the entire chat message containing any of the following:
- www
- .com
- .net
- http
The link filter is not case-sensitive. For example, the message "AWWw, it's a kittycat" is completely censored.
Word filter[]
The word filter is a type of chat filter that only censors the offensive portion of a chat message. The word filter is case-sensitive and includes:
- Profanity, such as shit and fuck.
- Sexually explicit words, such as penis and breasts. Many words of a sexual nature are left uncensored, such as vagina.
- Misspelled and leetspeak variations of most filtered words, such as fcuk and bu77wipe.
- snail (the Chinese company that developed Age of Wushu) and gm (game master).
Controversy[]
Some of the words caught by the filter have been controversial. For example, common English words like horse, horrible, and short are partially censored due to hor (a misspelling of whore) being on the filter list. Additionally, many of the words are used by the NPCs in the game.
The word filter is often criticized by the players for its lack of purpose and the fact that the filter works based on the assumption that certain words are being used in an offensive manner even if the rest of the conversation remains totally clean.
Bypassing the filter[]
Filter bypassing techniques being used in the World Chat.
Since the game offers no option to turn off the filter, many players avoid getting their speech censored by using capitalisation. For example, while the word assrammer is censored, Assrammer isn't.