Platform, device version and operating system:
All
Screenshot or image:
What you were expecting to happen, and what actually happened:
Show team from team code in chat. However, the weapon’s number is banned, apparently. So team isn’t displayed
How often does this happen? When did it begin happening?
Totally 100% reproducible
Steps to make it happen again
I believe the weapon number is 1488. Use it, and you get asterisks.
This is what happens when people come on the forum to report things they should just ignore.
for clarification on why:
1488, along with other variations, is a secret code used by neo-Nazis and other white supremacists to identify and signal their ideology
Cheers, Gary.
No, this is what happens when a filter gets implemented without thinking of where that number could pop up without linking to Nazi ideology.
My teammate can’t share a team. I can’t copy and paste the team. That’s a feature in chat. Thus a bug.
It’s also a weapon in the game. The Ring of Crystal Fire, specifically. So. There’s that.
It’s not a bug per se - and no one is saying it should stay that way. You just got an explanation of why this happens. We’re all with you, and this has already been reported.
The devs are already aware so hopefully this will get changed soon.
Like I said, the implementation doesn’t make sense if it censors things that don’t need to be censored, like team codes.
Or troop names… Twinkle Berry versus Cockatrice, I’m looking at you.
Dear Devs, if you don’t want to mess with the automatic chat censor, don’t release troops whose parts of names are censored!
Is that definition supposed to be an excuse for sloppy design and/or excuse for keeping troop names and weapons’ numbers censored? Come on. It explains the reason it happens, doesn’t justify ignoring and not fixing the issue despite being asked to do so multiple times.
you can say cockatrice in game, you have been able to for a long time now.
Twinkle Berry wasn’t a Troop the last time I edited the censor outside of “1488” if I recall correctly.
We do not edit the bad word list often because we have to take the game chat offline to do it.
Fixing that one is on my list though.
Just remember, from the outside things often look simpler than they are.
For example here’s 2 examples of entries on the bad words list:
([f|F][\W][u|U][\W][c|C][\W][k|K][\W])
(^|[^a-zA-Z0-9#_-])1[ \/]*4[ \/]*8[ \/]*8
These are two 4 letter words, it looks worse when you get longer words.
Just to get ahead of the next criticism, I know this looks unnecessarily complicated now right?
But this is what the chat software knows how to read and we didn’t write the chat software. We are game developers, not chatroom developers. We don’t re-invent the wheel unless it makes sense. There’s better uses for our time such as fixing gameplay bugs, introducing new content and features.
If it were super simple these mistakes wouldn’t happen. I get you don’t have a lot of faith but not everything is as it always seems from an outside perspective.
We also test any additions to the censor on our test server, however, it’s not simple to think of every possible variation all the time. Sometimes one will be missed and in that case we just fix it and move on.
Most of the team have degrees and have been working in the industry for over a decade including at huge AAA studios like EA Games and Blizzard. Yeah we’re still human and make dumb mistakes sometimes but generally bugs come up because of super weird intricate interactions, not something a highschool level programmer could avoid.
It looks like standard regular expressions. The part about matching forward slashes feels weird, maybe something different was intended there.
Actually, you are trying to re-invent the wheel. Attempting to ban a number is a Bad Idea, especially when the game itself needs to post those numbers into the game chat. It’s not going to work out. Like, for the regular expression above players could just write -1488- or #1488 or *1*4*8*8* or whatever other exception you would need to add to allow the game to continue posting those numbers.
Personally, I’d just stick to filtering words, it’s less of an excercise in futility. I’m sure there’s a pile of other numbers with special meanings attached that you’ll get asked to ban once you travel down that road.
We’ve also been told that the translators are native speakers: the programming, translations, and design speak for themselves.
No one ever said they were good at their native language, though. We just didn’t think about that, did we? 
Kafka, thank you so much for your reply. It means a lot to me someone is listening.
I do have a suggestion: early in the development process of a troop or weapon, someone should take a moment to type that into the game chat to ensure it’s fine. That would have saved Twinkleberry, or Cockatrice, or 1488, or whatever is coming down the line from being a topic for bug debate. Or something ridiculously hard to fix.
Nobody’s asking you to. Your programmers have managed to work with incoming text and inject new messages - even graphical ones.
I don’t care if the chat filter came with the chat software or if you wrote your own. Manipulating existing messages is almost certainly easier than injecting new messages.
Yes, writing a dedicated regexp for every word you want to censor IS needlessly complicated.
You guys just don’t spend the necessary time thinking about issues and the implications of the solutions you come up with.
Which, in the long run, only causes you more work and more importantly, more tedious and more complicated work.
If you believe your time is ‘better spent elsewhere’, then get it right in the first place, so you don’t have to come back to the same thing over and over again and make it worse with every iteration.
Let’s write the game in Adobe AIR and get cross-platform for free! Oh, wait, that was a dead-end. No matter! Let’s rewrite the game in Unity! That took a while! Let’s update Unity until all our bugs magically disappear! Why are there more bugs than before?! Let’s add a core game mechanic that requires touch input! Oh wait, you want this to work on desktops too, oopsie UwU.
Why bother testing the new UI on anything but your own phone when you can just spend the extra hours in the office on a Saturday, because that’s fun, right?
Why bother with spellcheckers?
Paraphrasing Salty and Kafka: They’re not perfect and won’t always save you. There’s no point.
Seat belts aren’t perfect either and won’t always save you. Why even wear one? Take the time to understand the implications.
You strike down every bit of criticism. Everyone that isn’t working at IP2 is always wrong about everything. You refuse every well-meant bit of advice. You reject every suggestion without giving it any thought. You literally ignore 99% of all feedback and I’m certain what little reaches the devs is too diluted and vague at that point to still address the core of the issue.
That leaves no room for anyone or anything to improve. Ivory tower.
We don’t care if all of you end up bazillionaires. Just make a decent game in the process and accept and start taking criticism seriously and work on the ample feedback you get.
Understand that ‘the customer is always right’ does not translate to ‘demean yourself’. It just means you need to take feedback and criticism seriously, even if you can’t, not even in the slightest, understand why somebody could possibly take issue with something.
Exactly the opposite of this (pretty dismissive):
Ivory tower. Try working with player feedback instead, even if you don’t ‘get’ it. Might just change the game’s trajectory. Or not. Won’t make it worse in any case.
More feedback for the feedback bin!
So not awesome.
What do you mean?
That I care as much about their oppinion about me as IP2 cares about their game, their community and their entire team?
I’m majoring in computer engineering so I get it. Regex is also a pain in the proverbial to learn and deal with. I agree that from a player perspective, game-breaking bugs deserve priority. However, it would be nice to be able to say “Twinkle Berry” or share a team with the Ring of Crystal Fire.
Happy to keep this thread open as long as the community guidelines are followed, if not I will have to close it. Thanks.
Please bear in mind my post was in response to criticisms in an attempt to provide more transparency, not as a general response to the original bug report.
As already mentioned, if we can fix it so team sharing isn’t broken then we will.
If we can’t we will remove it from the censor.
In general our stance is not to allow any very clear references to supporting Hitler or Nazis in our game though and we’re not apologetic about that regardless of any feedback we receive to the contrary. I shouldn’t need to explain that.
