Guild Wars 2 Developer Starts Suspending Players for Offensive Names and Chat

Guild Wars 2, the new multiplayer experience from ArenaNet, has just been released all over the world and now the studio has started suspending players who gave offensive names to their characters or who use violent language on the game’s chat channels.

ArenaNet has worked hard on Guild Wars 2 for quite some time and the result of this labor has finally been released earlier this week, or over the weekend, for those who pre-ordered the online game.

Now, the developer has started policing the online game, in order to make sure that the multiplayer environment is as safe as possible.

The first step has been to suspend players who used offensive names on their characters or who employed hate speech in the public chat channels.

“To keep Guild Wars 2 a pleasant place to be, we take action against racist names, hate speech, and other unacceptable behavior. We have suspended some accounts involved in the use of offensive character names or inappropriate chat. The number of account blocks is miniscule: less than .001% of our total player base,” ArenaNet told fans on Reddit.

“When an account is blocked for a chat offense, the account is given a three-day suspension. When an account is blocked for an offensive name, the player is required to rename the character name and, in most cases, the account is also given a three-day suspension.”

According to the developer, all suspensions are double-checked and, while errors may still appear, it warns players to stop complaining about their punishment when they know they did something wrong.

“In a few posts on Reddit and on fan forums, players have claimed they were suspended for using a harmless-sounding character name, when in fact they were suspended for a different and truly offensive character name on their account. Others claimed that they were not told why they were suspended, but the game does give a message that states the reason for the suspension. In every case we have double-checked, the action taken on the account was appropriate.”

ArenaNet’s attitude is quite impressive but, given the huge number of people who got Guild Wars 2 at its launch, you can expect some offensive content to still appear in the game.